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Xenakis biography, Xenakis discography
Metastasis, also Metastaseis ("dialectic transformations"), is an orchestral work for 61 musicians by Iannis Xenakis.The work was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen Festival with Hans Rosbaud conducting.Metastasis was inspired by the combination of an Einsteinian view of time and Xenakis' memory of the sounds of warfare, and structured on mathematical ideas by Le Corbusier.Music usually consists of a set of sounds ordered in time; music played backwards is hardly recognizable.Xenakis wished to reconcile the linear perception of music with a relativistic view of time.In warfare, as Xenakis knew it through his musical ear, no individual bullet being fired could be distinguished among the cacophony, but taken as a whole the sound of "gunfire" was clearly identifiable.The particular sequence of shots was unimportant: the individual guns could have fired in a completely different pattern from the way they actually did, but the sound produced would still have been the same.The work requires an orchestra of 61 players (12 winds, 3 percussionists playing 7 instruments, 46 strings) with no two performers playing the same part.As Newtonian views of time show it flowing linearly, Einsteinian views show it as a function of matter and energy; change one of those quantities and time too is changed.Xenakis attempted to make this distinction in his music.This idea of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Sequence was also a favorite of Xenakis in his architectural works; the Convent de La Tourette was built on this principle.Xenakis, an accomplished architect, saw the chief difference between music and architecture as that while space is viewable from all directions, music can only be experienced from one.The preliminary sketch for Metastasis was in graphic notation looking more like a blueprint than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with pitch on one axis and time on the other.In fact, this design ended up being the basis for the Philips Pavilion, which had no flat surfaces but rather the hyperbolic paraboloids of his musical masses and swells.Xenakis notated every event in traditional notation, leaving nothing to the performers' discretion alone.Xenakis' Metastasis and Pithoprakta by George Balanchine; the work was premiered on January 18, 1968 by the New York City Ballet with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell.References
Xenakis, Iannis: Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (Harmonologia Series No.Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001.Los Angeles Philharmonic piece detail, Metastasis.This page was last modified on 29 April 2008, at 03:53.All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.He was seriously wounded as a Greek resistance fighter,
and went on to training in mathematics and architecture prior to
music.Later,
he completed a formal music degree under
Messiaen at the Sorbonne.Although equations and formalistic ideas form an important
component of Xenakis' musical style, they do not overwhelm it.Xenakis' music takes on a more instinctive quality.To some degree, it is the use of mathematical processes which
allows Xenakis to discover patterns and communicable musical ideas
out of a totally unrestricted musical vocabulary.The
latter is an important aspect of Xenakis' work, and perhaps the
main reason for its broad reception: He is not limited by instrumental
combinations, by tempered scales, by scales at all or by simultaneity.There
is an abundance of rhythmic energy, quickly changing harmonies,
and usually a strongly visceral quality.The following list will not survey recordings of Xenakis' music
in any comprehensive way, but will hopefully provide a worthwhile
overview nonetheless.The individual citations will also include
reference to related recordings.Xenakis' output is generally very difficult to classify, especially
as he does not use instrumental combinations consistently.Much
of his music is for varying mixed chamber ensembles, and requires
different instrumentation (or voices) for each piece.The above set provides a valuable overview of Xenakis' oeuvre
in its ability to concentrate on specific instrumental combinations
(or solos).It also shows the varied style his works adopted over
the years, even when confined to specific forces.It remains,
perhaps, the one indispensable Xenakis issue, played with great
professionalism and precision.What the above set does not do, however, is provide much of a
glimpse of the vast array of sonorities which Xenakis' mixed chamber
and orchestral works contain.There is no clear divide between
chamber and orchestral music in Xenakis' oeuvre, as he uses and
combines forces freely.Part of another series:
Xenakis Complete Vol.It also leans more toward
conveying the raw energy of Xenakis' music rather than the almost
mathematical precision of the former.There are, of course, many other general
compilations.The above recording does not feature the same density of ideas
as the others, but provides a welcome opportunity to hear Xenakis'
development unfold over a larger span of time.French composer of Greek parentage.Xenakis was born at Braila, Romania.He studied with Honegger, Milhaud, and Messiaen.His ideas have exercised considerable influence on other composers.Works Theatre music The Bacchae (1993).Windungen (1976), Tetras for string quartet (1983), Thallein for 14 players (1984), Palimpsest for piano and ensemble (1982), Jalons for 15 players (1986), Akea piano quartet (1986), Waarg for 13 players (1988), Okho for 3 players (1989), Epicycle for cello and 12 players (1989), Akanthos for soprano and ensemble (1977).This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.Iannis Xenakis, borrowed from his contemporaneous musical compositions.Joseph Clarke is a writer and architect living in Manhattan.Amongst these, Iannis Xenakis would begin to compose his first mature works.In assessing how Xenakis came to use aesthetics grounded in abstract mathematics one must examine his early life prior to mature music composition.From an early age it seems Xenakis had been mapping out his intelligence and capabilities as though for his benefit alone.He also took up studying harmony and counterpoint with Aristotle Kondourov "who impressed upon Xenakis the necessity of absolute rigour and discipline in the pursuit of composition."Therefore the assimilation of interests that shaped his aesthetic principles in music, namely those of mathematics, physics, astronomy and ancient literature6 can be traced back to his early years of education, and his highly disciplined approach to formalizing music can also be traced back to his first formal music lessons with Kondourov in these years.It would take Xenakis another seven years to finally graduate with his diploma of engineering.During these years, Xenakis would mostly involve himself as a Communist resistance fighter against the Germans, who had occupied Greece, and he was frequently involved in mass resistance demonstrations, often finding himself in prison as a result.At the end of those seven years, in November 1947, Xenakis illegally fled to Paris where his diploma of engineering landed him work with the famous French architect Le Corbusier.It was the first time I had ever met a man with such spiritual force, such a constant questioning of things normally taken for granted.This was a most important revelation because quite suddenly, instead of boring myself with mere calculations, I discovered points of common interest with music, which remained, in spite of all, my sole aim.Evidently, Le Corbusier and the influence of architectural work gave Xenakis impetus to apply a visual approach to music by applying the technical facilities inherent in architectural design to the same plateau as music design.At that point, Xenakis was becoming disillusioned by other teachers of composition, namely Milhaud and Honegger, who assessed Xenakis' compositions with complete stubbornness.Not until he approached Messiaen after an analysis class did Xenakis finally attain a clear directed response of the path in which he should take.But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said...No, you are almost thirty, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics.Take advantage of these things.Although Messiaen and Le Corbusier acted as final catalysts in assuring Xenakis' mature compositional style to be born, the impact of the war definitely marked itself on him, as it did with all composers at that time.As Elisabet Sahtouris wrote, in her 1998 article "The Biology of Globalization," "some of the greatest catastrophes in our planet's life history have spawned the greatest creativity" 12; this would hold true as a result of the highly experimental compositional climate that came about in Europe during the 1950's.The Second World War definitely impressed itself on European composers of this period.Several composers, among them Stockhausen, Berio, Xenakis, report detailed accounts of aural phenomena which have remained with them twenty years after the experience.Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people.Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first.It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity.Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs.The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail.The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death.In Formalized Music, Xenakis labels this music 'Free Stochastic Music' where the movements of microscopic parts (in orchestration a 'microscopic part' is represented by a single instrument) are subservient to the macroscopic whole which governs the microscopic parts through deterministic tendencies.Peter Hoffmann, on the other hand, labels this music 'Macroscopic Stochastic Music' which illustrates this point more clearly than Xenakis' label.This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mould of time, which itself follows aleatory and stochastic laws.However, the formal methods for ordering the sonic state of 'noise' between Xenakis and his European contemporaries were highly different.Where a trend amongst European composers was taking serialism to its most extreme manifestation in a total serialization of a number of the musical elements, this was attacked by Xenakis in his 1954 article "The Crisis of Serial Music."This article, however, was not so much an attack on serial music as much as it was a boost for his own compositional aesthetics.As he wrote in Formalized Music, "this article served as a bridge to my introduction of mathematics in music."As much as his rejection of serialism as unsuitable for his compositional objectives, Xenakis also rejected the John Cagean manifestation of chance music as he remarked in an interview, "for myself this attitude is an abuse of language and is an abrogation of a composer's function."John Cage first applied the fundamental philosophical principle of chance to music, that is, "to remove from music any reference to tradition or any trace of subjectivity."Finally I said the purpose of this purposeless music would be achieved if people learned to listen; that when they listened they might discover that they preferred the sounds of everyday life to the ones they would presently hear in the musical program; that that was alright as far as I was concerned.When an interviewer asked Xenakis why he avoids using fortuitous sounds in his compositions, Xenakis promptly answered, "we all have fortuitous sounds in our daily lives.They are completely banal and boring.The assumption that removing certain constraints from a performing situation frees the player and audience from learned responses and habits was rejected by Xenakis who asserted that on the contrary the player was likely to fall back on his habitual conditioned behaviour or merely oppose it in the most superficial way under pressure of performance.To equate chance with the suspension of responsibility by the composer in the name of freedom was illusory.It was nothing new to encounter chance in a different way from John Cage amongst European composers in this period.Contemporaries like Boulez and Stockhausen also explored chance differently from Cage in this decade, "where the performer is placed in a position to make spontaneous or rehearsed decisions about the ordering of the music."Xenakis' fundamental approach to chance, however, differed in that it applied reason and order to 'controlling' chance the most progressively it possibly could with the knowledge available at that time in the field of science and mathematics.Therefore Xenakis' eagerness to embrace chance and chaos and try to understand what role these concepts play in our world led to what role they could play in the creation of his music.In his 1954 article "Les Metastaseis," Xenakis describes this concept: "the sonorities of the orchestra are building materials, like brick, stone and wood...Le Corbusier's influence and architectural work was prominently realized in "Metastaseis" as the original plotting of the massed glissandi were done on the same graph paper that was used for plotting building structures.He later used plotting of string glissandi in "Metastaseis" as the curvature for the walls in the Philips Pavilion (constructed for the 1958 Brussels World Fair).The massed moving formations of string glissandi and 'brass in total disorder', as Xenakis describes, that occur in "Metastaseis" and later in "Pithoprakta" relate to the kinetic theory of gases.This theory states that "the temperature of a gas derives from the independent movement of its molecules."Xenakis drew an analogy between the movement of a gas molecule through space and that of a string instrument through its pitch range.The result is a music in which separate 'voices' cannot be determined, but the shape of the sound mass they generate is clear.While in "Metastaseis" Xenakis applied the kinetic theory of gases to organize musical materials, the materials themselves, such as pitch, were acquired via a dodecaphonic row set with time (at the opening) ordered by the Fibonacci series (both common sources for organization amongst European composers at the time), which is why some critics argue that "Pithoprakta" is Xenakis' first truly mature musical composition in a style that acquires all its musical elements through mathematical theories and principles.Xenakis would still apply other theories and principles in creating the music, such as the theory of gases and Poisson's law of sparse events, which dictates the sparse textures late in the work, but the importance of Probability theory was, according to Christopher Butchers, of vast importance in the blending of science and art.Butchers wrote that "Xenakis is, to my knowledge, the first in any artistic field both to invoke the notion of chance and to use it in a way which is acceptable rigorously to modern logic."Therefore, the style of 'stochastic music' that Xenakis created amidst a wilderness of other experimental trends was to stand out as his own unique entity.Second World War or the song of cicadas in a summer field, Xenakis applied mathematical theories and principles in assembling the makeup of this music that grounded its sonic principle as textural sound composition.Aesthetically, theories such as the kinetic theory of gases and Probability theory became two major standpoints in organizing the musical materials in his first two works "Metastaseis" and "Pithoprakta."Iannis Xenakis, "Xenakis on Xenakis," Perspectives of New Music, vol.Xenakis, "Xenakis on Xenakis," Perspectives of New Music, p.What counted above all was the row I had with Honegger.The students would bring their works, and he would critique them in front of everyone.And the madder he got, the madder I got.Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), p.Peter Hoffmann, "Iannis Xenakis," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol.Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, p.Century Music, (New York: Norton, 1991), p.Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, p.Wei Choong, Iannis Xenakis and Elliott Carter: A Detailed Examination and Comparative Study of Their Early Output and Creativity, (Brisbane: Griffith University, 1996), p.Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, p.Hoffmann, "Iannis Xenakis," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, p.Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, p.Hoffmann, "Iannis Xenakis," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, p.Choong, Iannis Xenakis and Elliott Carter: A Detailed Examination and Comparative Study of Their Early Output and Creativity, p.Paul Griffiths, "Xenakis: Logic and Disorder," Musical Times, vol.Christopher Butchers, "The Random Arts: Xenakis, Mathematics and Music," Tempo, vol.Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Dr.Welcome to the web page of Thomas Xenakis, visual artist.This is a small selection of works the last few years only.Your interest is greatly appreciated.Thomas Xenakis
Special thanks to E.
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