"It was necessary to adapt a language to the sounds produced by these instruments, a language that would glide over them, evoking through sung phonemes, regardless of their immediate comprehensibility, the same atmospheres that the instruments evoked. The most suitable language for us seemed to be Genoese, with its diphthongs, its hiatuses, its wealth of truncated nouns and adjectives that can be shortened or lengthened almost like the cry of a seagull."