MUSICAL WORKS

WANG Chi / 王驰

2015

Ophelia / 奥菲丽娅 / Ao fei li ya

Birth Y: 1985 Birth C: CHINA Gender: Female

Media Specification: Electroacoustic Music

Duration: 9:00

Media: CD

Prog. notes: Ophelia is a real-time interactive electronic music composition for Wacom Intuos5 Touch Small Pen Tablet, custom software created in Max, and Kyma. The sonic texture of the composition is based on recordings of Marie-Caroline Pons’s voice reciting the poem Ophelia by Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s personification of nature and Ophelia’s inner emotional world especially moved me. To provide a concentrated focus to my music, I decided to use one line of Rimbaud’s poem (“Ses grands voiles bercés mollement par les eaux”) as the primary, but not exclusive, sound source. For me, the single line of text reflected the essence and soul of the poem — an essentialness that I wished to have embedded in my musical formulation. To present this basic material within the framework of the composition I relied extensively on Kyma’s TAU algorithm to expressively shape pitch and rhythmic material as well as effectively employ musical dynamics, spectral inflections, and spatial placement. In my musical manifestation of the poem, I chose to use the Wacom Tablet as a “cinematic stage” for my metaphoric and theatrical working out of the inner drama contained in the poem, and the “Wacom Pen” and the “human finger” as the primary characters in this drama.

Editor: Liao Lin-Ni, MB

Phono: CD Beijing Musicacoustica, 2015