| Composition Year | 2002 |
|---|
| Work Title | La naissance du son (In Memoriam Iannis Xenakis) |
|---|---|
| Alternative. Title | |
| Composer | Pape, Gerard |
| I-Catalogue NumberI-Cat. No. | IGP 75 |
| Year/Date of CompositionY/D of Comp. | 2002 |
| First Performance. | 2002 |
| Dedication | In Memoriam Iannis Xenakis |
| Average DurationAvg. Duration | 8 minutes |
| Composer Time PeriodComp. Period | Modern |
| Piece Style | Modern |
| Instrumentation | cello |
The title of this piece in French means the "birth of sound." It is dedicated "In Memoriam Iannis Xenakis". In this work, sound is born from rhythm and time. The piece starts with gradually accelerating pulsations of un-pitched noise. Only over the whole work are the other aspects of sound introduced: timbre, intensity, pitch. The birth of sound requires time. In this piece, time, or tempo, is speeding up and slowing down all the way through. There is no constant tempo, meter, or measure length. Sometimes a very rapid rhythm is happening in a very short duration. This is physically when rhythm starts to turn into continuous sound.
As the piece goes on, the durations of the measures are getting longer and longer as time (tempo) is slowing down. There is one measure, for example, that lasts one minute towards the end. Paradoxically, even though time is slowing down, the density of rhythmic activity is no less. It is as though we are putting a microscope on the inner life of the sound and we are hearing in slow motion rhythms that are normally too fast to hear. For example, in the last section of the piece, we hear slowly oscillating micro-tonal pitch/intensity patterns (micro-detuned double stops in sixteenths of tones with variable accentuations) that represent what timbres, or waveforms, really are: rhythmical oscillations of extremely rapid micro-intensity variations that we hear as continuous sound that has a resultant timbre / intensity, with sometimes a steady pitch, as well. Thus, time links rhythm together with pitch, timbre and intensity, which together make up sound. Pulsations inside the sound create cycles of rhythm. Rhythmic cycles of pitch, intensity and timbre, as a function of time, allows sound to be born. "La Naissance du Son" was commissioned by the Texas Eye and Ear Festival and premiered in that festival in Austin, Texas in September 2002 by Rohan de Saram within a Pape monographic concert played by the Arditti String Quartet.
