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Malédictions d'une furie

Opera-monodrama for voice, bass and contrabass flutes, cello, percussion, and live electronics

This work investigates the possibility of an intricate and continuous relation between live and processed sound in a dramatic context. It seeks to use live transformation of voice and instruments to help articulate a dramatic-poetic idea, and to derive a musical structure that allows a five-minute theatre piece to become an extended musical work. The field of live electronics has developed rapidly in recent years and this has enabled types of immediate transformation of sound with sufficiently low latency to have a degree of “fusion” with the live sound – notably real-time spectral transformations. Existing vocal works with electronics (e.g, Manoury’s En echo and Viñao’s Baghdad Monologue) tend to rely heavily on soundfiles, whereas Malédictions builds on my earlier work in developing an aesthetic of ‘liveness’ which depends not on soundfiles or score following but, almost exclusively, on real-time and immediate transformation of the voice and instruments. (This approach is outlined theoretically in my article ‘Theses on Liveness’ (Organised Sound, 12(1): 59–66.) Tardieu’s text lends itself well to this treatment, presenting as it does a figure who vacillates between human fragility and divine ferocity. This duality is reflected in the types of transformation applied to the voice (spectral manipulation to produce an “uncanny” non-human quality in certain passages, gentle sustaining and suspension in others). All instruments are treated individually, including two channels of percussion; this yields the possibility of a rich variety of interconnected transformations, including spectral manipulation and a type of selective sustaining, using an approach based on a modified version of J.-F. Charles’ matrix-based spectral processing (Charles (2008), A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter. Computer Music Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3: 87–102) and various forms of granulation, filtered by the live sound, all responding to multi-dimensional feature tracking of the voice and instruments.