Composing The Sound Electric

South Street Seaport’s Spiegeltent might be more readily associated with after-hours burlesque, but tonight it welcomes experimentation of a different sort when French composer Philippe Manoury, known for works such as “En Echo,” which weaves electronic music with text based on Vladimir Nabokov’s character Lolita, presents a commissioned world premiere at the venue.The performance, which features three works including “En Echo,” the commissioned “Cruel Spirals,” which sets poems by Jerome Rothenberg to the singing of soprano Tony Arnold, and “Last,” will be the first presentation ofMr. Manoury’s work in New York since a concert at New York University in 2005.It was the third work on the program, “Last,” which melds contrasting rhythms and textures of bass clarinet and marimba, that first led the International Contemporary Ensemble, which commissioned “Cruel Spirals,” to Mr. Manoury. “Our bass clarinetist and marimba player discovered his duet, and it became an ensemble favorite, a sort of ICE standard,” ICE’s flautist and co-founder, Claire Chase, said. “We got in touch with him, then asked if he’d consider a commission. We’d imagined something along the lines of four instruments,” she explained. “To our delight and surprise, he wrote back that he’d like to write us a big piece.” “Cruel Spirals” unfolds over 20 minutes. Ms. Chase enthused about its “colors, the theatricality, the orchestration, and the way Manoury uses the strings.”On the phone from Paris, the composer told The New York Sun that he’d been looking for an opportunity to work with poet Mr. Rothenberg. “I’m teaching at the University of California, San Diego, and he’s retired from there, and at dinners he sometimes reads for friends,” Mr. Manoury said of his encounters with Mr. Rothenberg’s work. “I’m interested in the way he performs his own texts with very rhythmic patterns.”Mr. Manoury chose nine poems from the prolific poet’s output, including five highly condensed poems from “Fourteen Stations,” written to accompany Arie Galle’s drawings from aerial photos of the Nazi extermination camps.Mr. Manoury called the new work “dramatic and dark,” and its pairing with “En Echo” will prove an intriguing comparison in content and effect. Written in collaboration with both poet Emmanuel Hocquard and programming expert Miller Puckette, “En Echo” contains “seven movements of a young woman speaking of her sexual relations with somebody, but nobody knows who,” Mr. Manoury explained. Accompanied in passages by the electronics — which Mr. Manoury will play during tonight’s concert — the soprano’s voice is tinged and galvanized by the computer program. These exposed moments provide an air of solitude that’s alive with mysterious sensation, then accented in the lengthy central section by muted mechanical interjections that resonate like shutter lenses or shears.“The computer is automatically following the voice,” Mr. Manoury explained. “It functions as what we call a ‘score-follower.’ The singer sings in tempo, or with an acceleration, and the computer synchronizes to make synthetic sounds that are deduced from alterations in the voice — not precalculated, but produced in real time. If the voice modifies the vowels, for example, it modifies the electronics.” Messrs. Manoury and Puckette have worked since the latter moved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and joined Mr. Manoury at the famous studios at IRCAM (l’Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), which Pierre Boulez founded in Paris. “All of our research has been based on interactivity between acoustic instruments and electronic music. He is a very important mathematician and researcher,” Mr. Manoury said, before adding one more detail: “He also has very good taste in music.”

Composing The Sound Electric

Composing The Sound Electric

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