Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection

Diego Luzuriaga, Viento en el Viento, 1994
(Ecuador)



Recording time: 16 min 43 s.
Instruments: For two flutes, percussion and live electronics.
Recorded at: IRCAM. Paris, France.
Remarks: Ensemble Intercontemporain. Recorde live at Grande Salle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, on December 2 of 1994.

Other resources available:
- About Diego Luzuriaga
- Compositions by Diego Luzuriaga

About this composition:

Viento en el Viento, for 2 flutes, percussion, and live electronics (1994)

The piece was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the IRCAM, and was entirely realized at the IRCAM during the moths of July and August 1994. The title ("wind in the wind") is a quotation from a poem I wrote in July 93 when I was at the Bellagio Center (a magnificent villa over the lake Como, Italy) as an artist-in-residence. The poem tries to convey a feeling I had during a stormy afternoon about being completely transparent, being both a part of and the whole universe.

I see this piece as a large empty space being sculpted by wind.

The sampoña, long panpipes from the Andes, served me as a source of sounds, spaces, and poetic images. Being a "breathy" instrument, it carried me into the fascination I always had for wind with all its sounds and spaces. In the piece, in a certain way, the percussion and flutes interact with the sampoña just as "wind in the wind".

Leslie Stuck, who developed the electronic part of the piece, summarizes the technical part:
"The electronic sounds used in Mr. Luzuriaga's piece are entirely based on recordings of the Andean sampoña (performed by Miguel Llave and the composer himself). Certain sounds were then transposed or time-stretched using the IRCAM software "SVP". Others were analyzed using a harmonic synthesis model with the program "ADDITIVE". Using the IRCAM workstation, these results were then used in a resynthesis MAX patch (designed by Serge Le Mouton) which controls 40 dynamic filters, whose parameters (pitch and amplitude) follow the first 40 harmonics of the analyzed sound. Each one of the filters is controlled by a MIDI keyboard on-stage. Each harmonic varies in pith over time, which produces whistle-like micromelodies. By making the filters very narrow and allowing only the individual peaks to be heard, the result can be bell-like."

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