Aperçu partitionNotice
The title (“from elsewhere”, in Latin) refers to the sampled sounds, most of which are foreign to the European orchestra. Sampling technology was used in conjunction with the sequencer and score editor, for a new approach to writing. As in my other works, particularly those based on sound models, the writing is totally precise and determined, and takes place at the end of the compositional process rather than at its source. But the great possibilities for improvisation and retouching offered by sequencers redistribute the relationship between idea and writing in a new way. The Midi keyboard is a tool that allows the idea to be inscribed without delay or prior coding. The composer is thus immediately in the presence of a first draft of his thought, and can then treat it as a kind of external model to be reworked and rewritten at will. The model in the sense of a found structure and the model in the sense of a dynamic schema tend to merge. Physis and Hylé, nature as a productive force and nature as a structured product, work together within the imagination.
Comment
Today, I find the conclusion of my notice quite optimistic. It was written in the enthusiasm aroused by the new tools available to a composer to renew his relationship with writing. But no tool is as decisive as I seemed to suggest, unless one resigns in the face of its illusory proposals. So I should have stuck to the work’s own character and expression, rather than overestimating the importance of the means intended to support them.
Exoticism died after the Second World War and decolonization. These events replaced the traditional tourist vision with a dialogue of cultures, which today’s globalization unfortunately threatens to reduce to a soliloquy. For Aliunde, what has “come from elsewhere” is not, as in Phénix, musical genotypes, but above all timbres. An Indian tabla is played by a European. But a Javanese gender, Japanese or Greek bells, and hybrids of Iranian santur and African balafon, are just some of the sounds I’ve had to domesticate on a sampler and its Midi keyboard, unable to bring them to life by acoustic means, either because the instruments or performers are lacking, or because the hybrids created have no material reality.
The soprano vocalizes, without any text as support. Her affinity with the clarinet is further underlined. The Accroche Note ensemble was formed in Strasbourg by Armand Angster and Françoise Kubler in 1981, when I had just taken over as head of the university’s music department. Aliunde marks the beginning of a collaboration with this ensemble that has been faithfully pursued ever since. For the creation, the group was completed by percussionist Jean-Michel Collet and keyboardist Martine Joste.
Instrumentation
1 cl. (also b-clar.), S, 1 perc. (incl. Indian tablas), 1 sampler (with or without sequencer)First performance
07/04/88 London, Almeida Festival (Accroche-Note)
