- Title
- Responsory
- Year
- 1992
- Instrumentation
- for solo male voice and interactive live electronics
- Notes
- For voice and two Yamaha SPX-1000 digital effects units, based on the medieval Christmas antiphon "Viderunt omnes." The effects sustain and mutate the colors of the solo voice to create a dangling and reflective resonance, at times anticipating Renaissance polyphony. The initial note of many phrases is frozen as a gradually decaying drone that contextualizes the successive pitches in almost tonal fashion. Individual partials are rarified and metamorphosed, suspended in an anti-temporal mélange. The sampling process permits the audience to visualize the plainchant neumes along with the soloist. (adapted from Christopher Lowry)
- Reviews
- " ...modified the singing so as to produce multiple voices in motet-like counterpoint, harmony, varied textures, different timbres and registers and a changing sense of acoustical space, from cathedral to intimate room. ...provocative and had a spiritual quality."
—Robert Commaanday, San Francisco Chronicle
" ...a wonderful piece... "
—Richard Taruskin
" ...a fine, beautiful, sensual, tightly organized organism."
—Charles Dodge
" ...you don't destroy the
chant you open a new way to
hearing it."
—Thomas Kessler
" ...yields a capacious array of timbres that sound at once austere and luxuriant, remote and immediate. ...the power of his music lies in its ability to ennoble the intellect through a sensuous love of sound and transform technology into an expression of the human spirit."
—Katherine Bergeron
