Philippe Manoury's Jupiter , for flute and live electronics, was realized at IRCAM and first performed by Pierre-Andre Valade in April 1987. The piece was inspired by the flutist Laurence Beauregard, who had developed a flute with fifteen switches on its keys to aid a computer in tracking its pitch quickly. (Beauregard did not live to see his invention used on stage.) Barry Vercoe invented a score following program to accompany Beauregard's flute. The combination of a flute pitch detector, with a piece of software allowing live electronic processing and synthesis to be controlled by an event stream from a live instrument, seems to have been Manoury's main inspiration in writing Jupiter . The directors of IRCAM probably saw Jupiter as an exploratory piece that would open up possibilities for other composers hoping to write interactive pieces, not least Pierre Boulez, who had searched for many years for a way to add an electronic component to his Explosante/Fixe . (He was to wait a few years more, but eventually got his wish.)
An excellent description of the piece, including its implementation, can be found in Andrew May, "Philippe Manoury's Jupiter ", in Mary Simone, ed., Analytical Methods Of Electroacoustic Music , Routledge, pp. 145-185.
Credits. This realization is derived from the original IRCAM one (see the file, MAINTENANCE.txt in the patch tarball for its history). The original realization is by Miller Puckette, Philippe Manoury, and Cort Lippe; there are later contributions by Tom Mays and Les Stuck. The original copyright probably belongs to Manoury.
Performance instructions
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(See also the general performance instructions .)