Lawrence Harvey: L'image Du Feu Dans L'eau

Abstract

This work was composed in Paris and Melbourne in 1996, and is for two or four channel tape. Version B of this work is scored for percussion quartet and four channel tape. Both versions are made entirely from sounds generated on the UPIC: Unite Polyagogique Informatique de CEMAMu, conceived by Iannis Xenakis. This real-time synthesis and composition environment is characterised by a transparent relationship between micro and macro structuring elements and the graphic input system used to create images for transformation into sound. Jagged surface textures and high pitched streams of sound are an essential feature of this work. The macro structure follows a descent toward the middle of the piece into a fluttering texture to rise again out of a granular storm and the final ascending streams and clouds of sound. While certain events and textures have a distinctly environmental reference, the work has no other intended associations. Source material for L'image... was predominantly short percussion samples later transformed in the UPIC. These transformations took the form of sub-audio modulations of the original waveforms, massing of waveforms into granular textures, and transpositions of the waveforms into frequency extremes where they emerge and vanish from streams of noise textures. Both versions of L'image... were composed after a period of disillusionment with music and in an environment where the exploration of ideas in sound is considered a meaningful practice. They are a response to a personal rediscovering of musical composition.