Anthèmes II is a landmark work of live electronics by Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), composed in 1997 for violin and electronics. Developed at IRCAM in Paris, the piece pushed the technological boundaries of its time through the extensive use of live-electronic processing, two samplers, and octophonic spatialisation. Performances originally required a complex setup involving two computers, a hardware sampler, and a dedicated hardware reverb unit.
Because I was unable to gain access to the original performance patches—and because I planned to realize the piece using wave field synthesis—I decided to recreate the electronic setup from scratch. My goal was to consolidate the entire electronic part onto a single laptop. The major obstacle was that, at the time, I had no experience programming in Max/MSP. I therefore took on the challenge of learning the software in parallel with working on the piece. It felt like learning to drive in a Ferrari: daunting, demanding, and exhilarating all at once. In the end, it took me the better part of two years to develop the patches, a demanding process that ultimately paid off.
In collaboration with violinist Jonathan Misch, I presented the work in several live performances, resulting in the following recording. The video is a 360° video with embedded spatial sound, therefore it should be listened to with headphones.
fritsch music 