(2007) live electronics solo [indefinite duration]
Premiered at Festival “L’Espace du Son”, Bruxelles, October 20th 2007
Commissioned by Musiques et Recherches, Bruxelles
The piece rises out from an invitation I received from Musiques & Recherches to contribute to Bernard Parmegiani 80th birthday celebration within the festival “L’Espace du Son” in Bruxelles. It is part of a larger suite of pieces written by several composers on the same occasion.
Rather than proposing an already done piece, I preferred to write a new one, as a true and direct homage to the great French composer.
Not so respectful is probably the choice I have done to use a piece from his De Natura Sonorum (1975) as raw material. The idea was to consider Parmegiani’s music as a natural state, concréte, to be treated in order to make things.
I decided to work on Accidents/Harmoniques not only for its spectral richness, but for a free association – a word game – on its title that came in my mind:
“blast (Accidenti, in Italian) Rameau, who established his tonal system over natural Harmonics so curbing all the XX Century musical experiences that moved away from it!”
Accidenti agli armonici! is a real time recording of a performance I made with a CSound patch that allows a 100 oscillators resynthesis of a Phase Vocoder analysis of Accidents/Harmoniques. The performance parameters are: time stretching, spectral envelope, spectral stretching and shifting, single amplitude envelopes. So it can be considered one of the several possible musical explorations of the Parmegiani’s work spectral space over which by accident natural harmonics come out, dammit!I foresee an interactive version with a mime controlling the parameters.