ABSTRACT
Philippe Manoury’s Jupiter for flute and computer broke new ground in using real-time pitch tracking and score following to correlate computer-generated sound with a live performer. Many novel approaches to real-time computer music were developed in the course of creating the work. Jupiter explores these resources, but more importantly, builds them into a work of orchestral scope. Its half-hour span develops a deeply interconnected network of musical relationships between flute and computer. The computer acts as conductor, musicians, and instruments in an invisible and disembodied but highly responsive digital orchestra, whose instruments and interactions with the flutist are carefully orchestrated. The conceptual distance between the flute line and the computer’s sounds varies tremendously: sometimes the computer is very close to the flute in timbre, gesture, and temporal behavior; at other times it is very distant. Often different simultaneous layers within the computer part operate at different distances from the flute.
