Overture (in
memoriam T.A.T.) for quadraphonic
tape (1997)
Genre: Acousmatic Music
Duration: 10:30
This piece was composed (like
its sister piece T.A.T.
[a man’s life]) to the memory of my viola professor Tomás
Alejandro Tichauer, who died in December 1994 at the age of 50 because of a
heart attack.
Because the viola was almost
a part of him, I chose the note ”c” (basic tone of the viola) to
organize the whole pitch-system that rules the whole work. This was thought as
there were for this pitch two different overtones series: one positive (the
real overtones), representing the presence of life and one negative or abstract
(the inversion of the overtone series), which we normally don’t realize
as such, representing the absence of life (his not being there any more).
Numerical
connotations in relationship with his name and his birthday serve to organize
algorithmically the rhythms and also the pitches.
The materials used
come from different sources but are all based on the note ”c”.
There are concrete sounds, for example: 2 pizzicatti and one ”sul
ponticello” sound from the viola, 1 clarinet C and the first C major
chord of the Overture from Wagner’s ”die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg”. On the other side there are synthesized sounds, most of
them treated with granular synthesis. The ”C major chord” was
transposed using a Phase Vocoder about 8 times up and 8 times down, following
the order of the harmonics of the note C, in the positive (higher) and the
negative (lower) way mentioned above. The equipment used for this piece
(produced at the ICEM at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen - Germany) was Protools
4.0, Csound, Audiosculpt and Soundhack. Some passages were algorithmic composed
using Commonmusic (Lisp).
The piece has been edited in
the public domain commercially twice on CD, as shown below:
2003
CD:
’ kontinuum…bruchlos- DeGeM CD 7’, edited 2003 by Cybele (Germany) and DeGeM (Germany). CD n°: 960.207
– 2003 / LC 3738, DDD. Code: 8 09548 00832 and 4 040961 000837.
2001
CD:
’EX MACHINA – Volume 6 – the nineties’, edited 2001 by Cybele (Germany) and the Folkwang Hochschule Essen (Germany). CD
n°: 960.106 – 2001 / LC 3738, DDD. Code: 4 040961 000707. Volume 6
also is available in a box (deluxe Edition) with Volumes 4 & 5 under the
same numbers.