At first, Antiphonae was conceived as a vocal piece for two alternating choirs. The computer production presented here made it possible to go beyond the original concept and yielded a composition that I myself find it difficult to classify. All the sounds are synthetic. They have been obtained by means of the CHANT software on a VAX computer at the EMS Studio in Stockholm. In fact, only the first two minutes, which constitute the material of the entire composition, were produced in Stockholm. The rest is a kind of variations produced through digital transformation of that material at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw. The key to this work is decomposition, leading from actual sounds through increasingly transformed ones to purely “electronic” language, but in such a way that the vocal provenance of the original remains distinctly recognisable throughout the work. The first performance took place on 23 August 1989 at the Techno-Musical Biennale at Kōriyama, Japan.

Włodzimierz Kotoński