MUSICAL WORKS

BATTIER Marc

1993

Toca

Birth Y: 1947 Birth C: FRANCE Gender: Male

Dest: Concert

Media Specification: Mixed music

Commission: Xebec Hall, Kobe (Japan), for the International Modern Music Festival

First perf.: International Modern Music Festival, Xebec Hall, Kobe (Japan), 16 Septembre 1993

Duration: 09:16

Perf. Country: JAPAN

Instruments: Marimba, stereo tape

Setup: Studio Ars Nova, Nogent-sur-Marne, France

Publisher: Score (composer), SACEM

Prog. notes: Back in 1970, I was driving in the northern mountains of Romania, in a region so remote that tradition had at that time remained quite untouched by our industrial world. The sound of wooden bells coming from a nearby monastery have since this time remained in my memory. It was indeed an ancient rhythm that must have come from Central Asia through the silk road. Very few witnesses of this period have remained. This was one.
Toca 2 is based on this wonderful sound overheard, one evening, in a Romanian monastery. The wooden bells were followed by church bells, and it is all this that I wanted to render in this piece.
The electronic sequences have all been realized using an original software designed at the GAIV (Group of Computer Art of Vincennes) in Paris. The program, called Phonogramme, converts images and scanned pictures into sound files, using a pixel to pitch and duration correspondance. It was the first time time that this program was used in a composition.
The original sound of the wooden bell from Romania was analyzed by the program and turned into a visual representation : an image. All the drawings have been made after having analyzed the pitch content of the Romanian wooden bell, so that the pitches used in the electronic sequences are in fact derived from the spectrum of that natural sound. I then further processed the images and turned them back into sounds using another program, Metasynth.
Finally, the sequences were processed and mixed in the composer’s studio, Studio Ars Nova, using the Altiverb reverberation software.