What could be the dream devoid of images and inhabited only by sounds? Is there room for a sound alphabet of our daily lives? Conjugated sound images, telescoped in memory. Memories, episodes of sounds attracted repelling like electrons at the whim of my imagination. Eric Mulard.

The piece "Geigenspiele" only uses violin sounds. The treatment follows the classical methods used in the studio with the analog synthesizer and peripheral instruments.

"The Unveiling" was originally scored for an art-video which chronicled the work-process of local artist, David Fronne, in his studio environment as he prepared a piece of artwork for exhibition. It was premiered, April 1987, at his art exhibition. This was re-worked and the revised music was completed in October, 1987. There are 3 movements for this digital ensemble: I. Impressions - roto-toms, vibraphone and marimba in question and answer over synth-bass pedal (the artists' studio). Leading to a violin solo depicting the centering of the artist's attention. The movement ends with the "horn-like" statement of the main theme. II. The Draft - alternating violin and "horn" variations. Interrupted by a short string development. Depicts the artist's various drafts of an idea. III. The Unveiling - begins with digital flutes over glissando vibraphone leading to a reworking of the main theme (pizzicato) and delivering us to the climatic return of 1st movement themes and ending with "horn-like" finality symbolizing the unveiling.

The composition was based on frequencies calculated on a computer, which are intentionally beyond the system of tempered tuning. From these frequencies, simple sound objects of various character were formed on a synthesizer. By mixing them, a number of more complex sound objects were formed. A choice from this series of objects and a montage of them resulted in the final form of composition consisting of ten parts connected with one another. I made the composition under the guidance of Mr. Rudolf Růžička.

The prelude combines electronic 'droplets' with points of sound from the piano to evoke a kind of glitter which floats above shifting and swooping gestures. Meanwhile, the instruments compete for who plays the note D most beautifully. The main body of the piece is driven by an urgent pulsing beat and the ensemble superimposes a sometimes imitative, sometimes contradictory interplay. The energy increases with a percussive assault which finally detonates leaving a kind of musical debris in the form of a looping jazz-like sequence. After a short respite the pulsing re-emerges and builds to a loud climax. Mystery and Revelation was commissioned by the New Chamber Players with funds from Northern Arts and choreographed by Trish Winter for Tandem Dance.

Papalotl (from the Nahuatl word butterfly), started off as a revision of my previous work for piano and tape Luz Caterpillard. As the work evolved, I realised the piece was taking a completely different path from the one originally intended, and the result was an entirely new piece. My Papalotl is a toccata like, a tour de force for both pianist and its counterpart on tape. As in some of my previous works, the concerns are primarilly rhytmic and demand an extreme coordination between the two parts. Specially, Papalotl deals with continous metric modulation throughout its entirety by means of rhytmic patterns that are continously shifted to prevent resolution and thrust the movement in a constant forward direction. The sound sources are mainly "inside piano" sounds which were prerecorded and sampled on the Pairlight CMI. The textures were also acheived by means of similar rhythmic processes applied to the layering and attacks of the source sounds, and resampled as new objects. The piece was first performed by Shelag Sutherland in April 1987.

"Sound recycling" would be the perfect term for Gerald Trimmel's composition cycle called "Palimpsest". When Trimmel performed his first "Palimpsest" in 1985, he did not consider this work as a final result. The following compositions were characterized by various procedures of sound accumulations and structural rearrangements. A lot of acoustic ready mades and complex structured sound elements were inserted, which first covered up and by and by extinguished the older ones. So the shrinking and dissolving fragments and the "young" and powerful soundscapes appear as antagonists of something like "aesthetics of dissapearance." The composition principle is based on the Palimpsest-technique (from the greek "palimpsestos"), which was used until the Middle Ages: manuscript pages or books, that have been written on, were scraped off, and used again. Additional Composer on "Palimpsest": Peter Böhm

Aquaforms is a one-movement composition for computer-generated tape which explores various timbres that give the effect of light refraction under water. Atmospheric depth and pressure of the water environment is accomplished by movable reverberation and filtering with a variable band pass filter whose center frequency is at least 2 octaves above the fundmental frequency. Under water flute instruments are constructed by the process of spectrally warping synthesized flute tones. The musical structure of the work is based on trichordal relationships which employ procedures of transposition, inversion, complement mapping, similarity relations and multiplicative transformations.

Tragoidia 1) A dramatic or literary work depicting a protagonist engaged in a morally significal struggle ending in ruin or profound disappointment. 2) 2) Any dramatic, disastrous event. Komoidia : We now and now enter the region of a big guy who eats pies and does not lie in the sun but always tells the truth without shades. With his mephitic breath he sings for night watchmen who intrepidly become character traits as they watch him introduce the players. There are buzzards, there are children, there are musics, always accompanied by their mother who works at the borderline for the mentally accelerated. A magical disarray fills all space with its space, where Haydn melodies metamorphize into exotic modes as Dionysus rejoices in Bacchanalian rumpus. All is well.

This short piece begins by launching a number of musical ideas, almost at once, at the listener. These elements (single short notes separated in time; soft sustained tones or chords; rapid flourishes whose contours are more readily perceived than the individual pitches that make them up; aggressive crash-like and ratchet-like gestures) are not so much "themes" which "develop" as sound-objects which continually reappear in varied guises and are juxtaposed/superimposed in different ways. As the work evolves, an initial impression of complexity and tension, produced by the near-simultaneous presentation of several elements, sorts itself out and resolves toward simplicity of texture. Textural polarities established in the piece are reinforced by choice of timbre. The middle section, for example, focuses on a few simple, obviously "electronic" timbres; this both complements its static, hocketing texture, and throws the surrounding sections (whose timbres sometimes approach the complexity of acoustic instruments) into relief. The title was chosen to suggest an intended quality of the composition: a sense of goal-directed motion, of "projecting or impelling forward." Projectile was composed in spring/summer 1987 and premiered at New England Conservatory in October 1987. It was included on a compact disk recording released at the 1989 International Computer Music …

Recording of Alain Louvier's Qu'est devenu ce bel œil?.

The original monophonic version of my Aeolian harp was built in 1972 and in 1980 temporarily another stereophonic version was added. The name of the instrument has its origins in the sonic qualities of the traditional instrument, but my version does not use strings and it vibrates thanks to the human breath and not thanks to the wind. It was only in 1985/1986 that I finally built a completely new quadraphonic form of the instrument that I first played in short collective improvisations before exhibiting it for three months at the 1986 Crafts Council exhibition. Composition develops some elements and new techniques that I tried first in my piece sole "multimorphosis" written this year.

Studio of realization : - studio EGREM Havana (Cuba) - studio ICAIC Havana (Cuba) The work is dedicated to peace and Desarmament for development. A liturgical piece in the primitive language of the nature.

In "Hy", music for magnetic tape, I have worked on different levels of research. Some of them concern with a syntax organisation that can be valid not only in this composition; in this sense the first and more important task has been to create grammar and syntax rules based on the principle of "auditive image" and not on the formalization of parameters of sound such as pitch, loudness or, neither, timbre. In this case we have to do with categories of compositional work whose fundamentals are from psychoacoustics, from psychology of time and rhythm (and space) and from psychology of form. This way to approach musical composition needs a real contact with the acoustic material you are working with, and, in order to handle it, high precision instruments; real-time digital sound systems, such the one used for "Hy", make it possible. The same kind of approach can be used with real acoustic instruments, with appropriate exploration of unusual ways of sound production as done in "Hy" with the trumpet. All this, I think, can be described as a new and deep importance due to and faith in the creative moment of listening. "Hy" can be reassumed as a progressive "afasia" …

Piece for horn and tape, written at the request of the Musical Research Group of the National Institute of Audiovisual Communication. The general form is articulated around pure or colored silences; nascent sounds fragile, then kept and worked; towards the line, the movement and the dynamic energy ... The horn is treated in its different aspects, very contrasted ... The tape was made at the Center's studio in Metz, the heights and durations being programmed with use of microphones intervals (assistant directors: François Pinot and Jean-Marc Weber). The composer thanks especially André Cazalet for the valuable advice he gave him on the possibilities of his instrument.

The text heard in this piece is the last insert in the journals of the Swiss artist Felix Bosonnet (1943-1985), written shortly before his suicide. It was written in three parts, the third left unfinished. The music simply places the text in a sound setting. The sounds in the first two parts are derived from cowbells recorded in the Swiss Alps. In the third part, one of the sources is a small crystal glass. The piece was composed at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music on a DEC PDP-11/44 computer, using Music 11 and the C programming language. "From the Journals of Felix Bosonnet" received an honorary mention at the 16th International Electroacoustic Music Competition and is recorded on the 1989 International Computer Music Conference compact disc. The reader is Christoph Gaugler. I. I cannot claim I know no-one, but nobody knows me. On the other hand, it would seem to me pretentious to describe myself as a man of great trials. Measured by the suffering of this world, my sorrows are only slight, my needs painful, my wants feasible and unimportant. Often, at night, I go to the train station, the old-fashioned gateway to the world, where lots …

"Mourir un peu" (“Dying a little bit”) gave birth to two reduced versions, one of which, "Route 1," continued in three movements and was revised in 1987. As a result, the overall structure, which is very elaborate in terms of relative durations, is somewhat modified. But the piece, brought back to this triptych, is nonetheless an autonomous formal unit. "Where we speak, of course, of departure, of the journey, of the farewell ‘To leave is to die a little,’ but also of escape, of pleasure, of initiatory journeys, of the imagined space, the ‘little death’ and the ‘great trip’. The sea, an inexhaustible and plural symbol, is stubbornly present; the wave proposes its energetic law the whole and the element: ebb/flow, growth/decay, apparitions/disappearances.”

Belongs to a series of pieces for solo instrument and tape where I tried to explore the interaction between the soloist and its pre-recorded material processed at the studio together with pure electronic material which kind expands the instrumental environment. The samples were recorded by Oriol Rossinyol who premiered the piece. This Secuencia is dedicated to Lluis Callejo (1930-1987), one of the founding members of Phonos, composer and researcher who developed a lot of studio hardware, from mixers to his aleatoric generator "Stockos IV" and the first unit to produce computer music in Spain, with a Rockwell microprocessor implemented by two of his students at the Polytechnic University under his guidance, he was the head of Phonos research department

Rounds the Corners of Purgatory was completed in August 1987 at the Electroacoustic Music Studio of the Tel-Aviv Academy of Music, Israel. Various pipes provide the source for most sounds. Pipes were played using percussion beaters, a cello bow, blowing air through them and splashing them in water. Some pipes have a long sustaining sounds, rather like a vibraphone. Other sounds were derived from a 10-foot long pole, using 2 microphones: one laid inside its far end and the other recording the composer as he was playing. Sounds recorded from within the pipe were filtered by its natural resonance, a sound that could be mistaken for a vocoder type modulation. The phase difference between the two microphones provides a rather unique and somewhat crispy sound quality. Processing techniques are a combination of both analog and digital and resemble traditional i.e. "musique concrète". Analog tape techniques include the familiar splicing, open and closed loops, tape delay, varying speed, sound multiplication, etc. The Moog Synthesizer and a DG analog ring modulator were used for spatial control. The ring-modulation was always in the sub-audio range so as not to distort the recorded sound. Some sounds were sampled and processed digitally using the Synclavier …

It is a kind of anamnesis of the collective sound, as if our memory was, for a moment at the bottom quite short, submerged by the flow of all the layers, the layers of the sound. If one adopts a descriptive character it is first of all a remanence of the "big band", the noise like only existing matter, with which one is tempted to make forms, to stamp. It is also the state of chaos where these coarse masses clash, it is the prehistory of the sound, the prehistory of my music: Homo erectus. Then there are the noises as part of our rituals, the noises that inhabit us, or almost, and those that we perceive as foreign bodies. It amounts to juxtaposing hostile objects, a sweet mixture of the two states of noise: the natural, safe-haven, to which one refers essentially and the artificial that one looks with suspicion: Homo sapiens. These two periods are a little like the image of the path traveled to measure what is left behind. There remains the third period, the one to come, which is more important because it is still new, about to exist, of which we are just beginning to …

I dedicated this piece to my American friends as an expression of thanks for their hospitality during my wonderful stay in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. The work consists of a few short musical images conveying a carefree atmosphere. Contained in it is a quotation from Chopin's Polonaise as well as a phrase alluding to Polish folk music - a reference to those inhabitants of the Valley who are descendants of Polish immigrants. It was not my intention to compose program music. The piece is rather a musical impression, a joke, inspired by the landscape and the enjoyable time I have had with my American friends.

The tape with electronic sound was realized in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw. The Lanier Trio (USA): Carry Lewis - Piano, Dorothy Lewis - Cello, William Pruecil - Violin

"Duoklav for Pianist and Computer" was composed as 'live computer music' for one performer in the form of a computer program and a time schedule. In this piece, the computer serves not as a calculator of electronic sounds or as a compositional tool, but functions as a second performer and plays the piano along with the musician. In contrast to live electronic music with a tape-recorder, the performer can retain style of execution to a great extent, and improvise. The undetermined responses of the computer allows the progress and sounds of the piece to develop with a great deal of flexibility. I have thereby endeavored to give the musician the greatest possible freedom to express his/her creativity within the bounds determined by my composition. Basically, the computer plays the second piano independently of the first, as in other compositions for two pianos. The pianist is then continuously informed by a monitor, of the progress of the second piano, and can, if desired, intervene in the development of the piece (volume, tempo, etc.).

Jazz Lecture Series presentation by Dan Morgenstern on February 17, 1987 at 2:00PM at the UNT College of Music. Includes lecture by Dan Morgenstern.