Notice
Unlike the vast majority of electroacoustic works, this one makes an alliance with acoustic sounds, but in a different way to the so-called mixed works of which I gave one of the first examples in 1960 with Volumes, and which I have never given up practising. In those works, acoustic instrumentalists worked together with loudspeakers broadcasting montages of synthetic or collected sounds. L’accent du Midi uses the same means in a different way. Its sonorities are derived from acoustic sources that come from classical instruments as well as from sound bodies foreign to our orchestras, or from pure synthesis. All are brought together under the Midi (Musical Instruments Digital Interface) standard in a sequencer. Sampling allows many acoustic sounds to be finely simulated, as well as exploring, beyond their limits, registers and tempi impracticable for orchestras. The instrumental approach, long avoided by many studio composers in order to devote themselves solely to exploring the new world of synthetic sounds, finally appeared to me to be capable of combining the flexibility of instrumental playing with the innovation of sonorities hitherto inaccessible to the tessitura or heterogeneity of traditional instrumental materials. The emphasis imparted to the sound results is admittedly often different from that of the ‘real’ instruments, i.e. the more or less recognisable models from which many of them are derived, but the ‘southern’ province they inhabit is nonetheless part of the country.
