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Fixed sounds
Comment
As throughout the 1980s, I was exploring the possibility of combining the advantages of instrumental writing, which is more flexible, more human and more diversified, with those of electroacoustic sonorities, which have greatly enriched the composer’s palette. In this perspective, the sampler remains the main tool, enabling him to create his own lutherie and entrust its use to a living keyboardist. I was less inclined to use synthesizers, with their more stereotyped sounds. However, some of them, like the one I used in Iter memor and in this work, have features that bring them closer to samplers, when they resynthesize timbres of acoustic origin. The idea of a fantasized Africa, like that of Raymond Roussel, fitted in quite well with this keyboard, which, among other things, made it possible to exploit percussive sounds in a virtuoso way. Pierre Barrat’s staging wisely underscored the utopia of these motionless travelers, who traverse nothing but mental landscapes.
LA TRAVERSÉE DE L’AFRIQUE(Opus 54)
June 198522'10Performances
Notice
La traversée de l’Afrique (Crossing Africa), a music score for a performance by the Atelier lyrique du Rhin, based on a text by Eugène Savitzkaïa, was entirely realized on a Kurzweil 250 synthesizer, taking us on a journey through an imaginary Africa, step by step. As Jean Genet put it: “By the way, what color are Negroes? Neither serious nor light-hearted, the work also eludes the categories of instrumental and electroacoustic, while participating in both.
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Comment
As throughout the 1980s, I was exploring the possibility of combining the advantages of instrumental writing, which is more flexible, more human and more diversified, with those of electroacoustic sonorities, which have greatly enriched the composer’s palette. In this perspective, the sampler remains the main tool, enabling him to create his own lutherie and entrust its use to a living keyboardist. I was less inclined to use synthesizers, with their more stereotyped sounds. However, some of them, like the one I used in Iter memor and in this work, have features that bring them closer to samplers, when they resynthesize timbres of acoustic origin. The idea of a fantasized Africa, like that of Raymond Roussel, fitted in quite well with this keyboard, which, among other things, made it possible to exploit percussive sounds in a virtuoso way. Pierre Barrat’s staging wisely underscored the utopia of these motionless travelers, who traverse nothing but mental landscapes.
Instrumentation
Fixed soundsFirst performance
08/28/85 Buenos-Aires, Teatro Colón
