The French composer Éliane Radigue, a virtuoso of the ARP 2500 synthesizer, passed away this year in February. This was startling and sad news to me, since I’d become infatuated with her music. In February I presented my work on her music at the Texas Society for Music Theory’s annual meeting in 2026, held in Denton from February 27 to 28.

In short: Radigue’s Triptych (1978, 2009) is a work made up of slowly-modulated drones, which Radigue uses to highlight the blurred boundaries between parameters like timbre, rhythm, and pitch. Radigue’s focus, which isn’t aimed at these constructed parameters but rather at their boundaries, was a useful focus for two reasons. First, it underscores how phenomena like rhythm and pitch are constructed by the listener (this is a well-worn idea in the literature on timbre; it’s acknowledged for other parameters but rarely explored in depth outside cognitive and experimental work). Second, it shares core similarities with the somatic approach to trauma, which is an umbrella term for therapeutic frameworks that link a person’s organization of physical stimuli with their previous experience of traumatic events.

One important note is that I don’t claim to have special knowledge of trauma Éliane Radigue may have experienced, and I do not create a hermeneutic interpretation of her Triptych. Instead, I point out how her music is instructive for a music listener or analyst who wants to become sensitive to how sensory experience is constructed (especially when it’s organized by what we call musical parameters), and to develop an ear that’s sensitive to the frayed edges between those parameters.

The abstract is below. If you’re interested in reading the poster, please contact me!

What does a trauma-informed music theory sound like? Trauma-informed approaches have become influential for musicologists (Cizmic, Rogers et al. 2024). I argue that somatic conceptualizations of trauma can inform music theorists as well, especially when the borders between musical parameters are blurred. I use a trauma-informed approach to explicate an experience of drone-based music by Éliane Radigue, an experimental composer who set out to describe consciousness and sensation through a spiritual lens in her works. Radigue created her Triptych (2009) by manipulating analogue synthesizers through magnetic tape recording. The blurred boundaries of pitch, rhythm, and timbre in Triptych echo the virtuous cycle of “upregulated” interoceptive development as it appears in somatic approaches to trauma (Price et al. 2018). Interoception refers to the ability to detect physical or emotional stimuli within one’s own body. I argue that Radigue’s work echoes processes of interoception described in somatic literature on trauma. I bolster this argument with evidence of Radigue’s engagement with the Tibetan philosophies of the senses outlined by Milarepa. Form, in Radigue’s work, emerges from the individual listener’s labeling of sonic parameters. In this way, each part of her Triptych has as many forms as it has listeners, each with their own histories of trauma, healing, and perception.