(1992) flute and live computer [CD Edipan PAN 3051] [9’ 46”]
Premiered at Festival Spaziomusica, Cagliari, December 1992
Flute: Riccardo Ghiani
Sound projection: Roberto Doati
Commissioned by Spaziomusica
This work, commissioned by Spaziomusica Ricerca (Cagliari, 1992) and written for Riccardo Ghiani, is conceptually divided into three parts.
First part has a primordial character. Through the use of playing techniques which give rise to noisy sounds (slaps, jet whistles, roaring, tongue rams), I tried to outline the basic components of the “flute machine” (instrument + player): the pipe, the blowing, the breath, etc. Here the computer is used to modify, while not altering the original sound nature, the flute sounds through temporal stretching/compression and pitch transposition.
Flute and synthetic sounds follow, in the second part, a “cultural” trajectory. First the flute produces microtonal sequences, then timbral trills on larger melodic intervals and finally multiphonic sounds on single sustained tones. The synthetic sounds become timbrally more and more complex, pointing out, above all, the prosodic differences with the acoustic instrument.
New “natures” (a cross fertilization between acoustic and electronic worlds) are travelling in the third and last part (open form?). Through a simulation of Live Electronics (all the computer sounds in the third part are deep transformations ofthe tones played by the flute on stage), the work reaches a no-development stage. Each new cross-sound is presented isolated, so the listener can appreciate its inner formal richness.
In the year of America’s “discovery” celebrations, the woman of the title (“Woman who covers her ears to shut out the noise of the thunder”) is an Indian woman who protects herself from what she believes to be a storm coming. But it is the unmerciful advance of the “white gods” scanned by the thunder of their guns.