'Il Nome' for soprano and computer-generated and processed sounds. (Original composition);

Il Nome for soprano and tape was composed in 1987. The text, Il nome di Maria Fresu is by the Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto. Maria Fresu was one of 84 people killed in the August 2, 1980 bombing of the train station in Bologna, Italy (attributed to the neo-fascist group Avanguardia Nazionale). She was blown up beyond any identification. The names of those killed by this bombing form a memorial on a wall of the reconstructed train station. Along with the Zanzotto poem the text for Il Nome includes a short passage from the libretto of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.; Il Nome was composed for the soprano Judith Bettina whose voice is also the basis for much of the tape part. All of the vocal sounds on the tape were derived from recordings of Ms. Bettina's voice. Recordings of breaking glass, a single note played on a violin and a tom-tom were also used, as well as some purely synthetic material. Various techniques were used to process, mix, synthesize and record the sound materials for the tape part, such as the elongation of very short sound samples, making them up to 20 times longer without changing the original pitch. The sounds for the tape part of Il Nome were stored on hard disk and were accessed, processed and mixed with a series of high level programs in SAIL and PLA. Some material was synthesized and the entire tape part was reverberated using the System Concepts Digital Synthesizer (the Samson Box). Il Nome was composed, realized and recorded at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University in California.