This is VERY PRELIMINARY HTML documentation for a realization of Philippe Manoury's Illud Etiam , for piano and live electronics. This realization is the original one with some slight modifications for portability. It is part of the PD Repertory Project.
This piece for soprano and live electronics evokes the ancestral figure of the witch as she took shape in the medieval European imagination. The primary text is part of a dictum to bishops in 906 that they cleanse their parishes of witches: "multitudes of demon women, disciples of the goddess Diana, that ride the night skies on the backs of great beasts". Into this curse-like proclamation, Manoury weaves sonnet fragments attributed to Louise Labbé: "O beautiful brown eyes, O eyes averted, O hot sighs, O tears spread ... I live, I die. I drown, I burn. I shiver with cold and perish with heat. Life to me is too soft and too hard. My terrible troubles mingle with joy." Illud Etiam was written for Juliana Snapper, who premiered it in October 2012.
This piece uses two techniques that were novel at the time: the '3F" technique for specifying spectral frequency sets (explanation and demonstration patch here, and phase bashing for vocal synthesis, described in this paper.
Illud Etiam was originally implemented using antescofo as a sequencer, but in this version, in order to avoid non-open-source software dependencies, the antescofo script was massaged slightly so that it can be interpreted using standard Pd objects.