Beatriz Ferreyra

An Argentine trailblazer in electro-acoustic music, Beatriz Ferreyra crafts intricate, inventive pieces that reshape everyday and organic sounds into eerie yet recognizable auditory environments. Throughout the 1960s she contributed to the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) alongside its founder Pierre Schaeffer while also delivering lectures at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. In subsequent years she has supplied scores for cinema, broadcast, and therapeutic applications, and she regularly presents new commissions at live events and festivals. Tape formed the core of her practice until she adopted digital tools in the closing years of the 1990s. Wider attention arrived when GRM Works, assembling works that reach back to the late 1960s, appeared in 2015; further releases have followed, among them the sixteen-channel Senderos de luz y sombras from 2023 and career-spanning anthologies such as Echos + (2020) and UFO Forest + (2023).

Ferreyra entered the world in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1937. She first studied piano under Celia Bronstein in Buenos Aires, later receiving instruction from Nadia Boulanger in Paris and collaborating with Earle Brown and György Ligeti. In 1963 she entered the research division of the Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise and became a central figure at GRM; there, together with Guy Reibel, she helped realize Pierre Schaeffer’s Solfège De L’Objet Sonore (1967) and served as an instructor. After departing the organization in 1970 she partnered with Bernard Baschet on his structures sonores and prepared an electro-acoustic soundtrack for Fiorella Mariani’s 1973 film Homo Sapiens. Throughout that decade she continued writing for music-therapy contexts and advanced her educational initiatives. Dartmouth College in New Hampshire hosted her first electronic-music residency in 1976, with a return visit in 1988. She maintained an active schedule of entries for competitions and festival commissions. Mnémosyne Musique Média issued a self-titled disc of pieces spanning 1972–1997 in 1998. Toward the close of the decade she organized a series of musique concrète concerts at the Centre d’études et de recherches Pierre Schaeffer in Montbelliard, France. The 2003 collection La Rivière Des Oiseaux gathered additional commissions, while a 2012 INA-GRM compact disc presented newer works created for both that institution and IMEB.

Named an honorary member of CIME/IMC UNESCO in 2014, Ferreyra saw four pieces—two dating from the 1960s and two from the present century—released on vinyl by Recollection GRM/Editions Mego under the title GRM Works in 2015. Nahash, a work commissioned by former INA-GRM artistic director Christian Zanési and realized with Christine Groult, appeared on trAce Label. She has remained productive, granting numerous interviews that revisit her compositional life. Two favorably received albums, Huellas Entreveradas on Persistence of Sound and Echos + on Room40, surfaced in 2020. A split LP shared with Natasha Barrett followed in 2021, and Room40 subsequently brought out Canto+. The ambitious sixteen-channel Senderos de luz y sombras, composed for GRM between 2016 and 2020, reached the public in 2023; later the same year Room40 issued UFO Forest +, which gathers both tape and computer pieces.