SOPIANA

Notice

SOPIANA, for flute, piano and tape, was composed for Pierre-Yves ARTAUD, who premiered it, with Rita SIN, at the PECS summer school in Hungary in 1980. The title is derived from the ancient Roman name of the town.
Like NALUAN, from which it takes some of the recorded elements, this work illustrates the composer’s personal approach to abolishing the distinction between noise and musical sounds, between nature and culture. Not only are the bird sounds meticulously transcribed, so that the instrumentalists can synchronise with them, but they are physically present in the loudspeakers, with their virtuosity, their silences, their inexhaustible gushing. A Malaysian shama performs long, complex solos, single-handedly taking on melody and punctuation, while the icterine warbler and the marsh warbler juggle with immutable sound objects, endlessly combining numbers, timbres, registers and tempi.
The virtuosity demanded of the performers is commensurate with that of the models, and in particular mobilises all the modern techniques of the flute: circular breathing, multisound, and glissandi.