"Drawn Into the Flight Path of the Sounds": Xenakis Listening Thread

I listened to that recording of Hiketides Suite twice this morning while doing breakfast, before reading anything about it. It's a bracing racket. Good variety in texture, density, and dynamics, and a satisfying conclusion, but I didn't pick out the form, really.

Just listened to the Sakkas/Gualda/Ensemble de Basse-Normandie/Weddle recording of Oresteïa. I was apprehensive about going into this without being able to understand the text but the music is energetic and engaging enough without it. Great percussion and trademark glissandi. Vocals are at times broadly reminiscent of Beijing opera?

Actually found it exhilarating

It is!

The Hiketides Suite and not picking out the form: could possibly have to do with its suite-ness? At the very least, the 50-strong chorus isn't there, and it may have been excerpted/modified in other ways as well, for all I know? One reaction I had, not necessarily very related, was that I felt I recognized types of elements from quite a few of the past works that we've been through already, but I've only really listened once so far.

OK, I did not know this story:

The origins of Iannis Xenakis’ Oresteïa are almost more remarkable than the music itself, a truly bizarre “only in the USA” sort of story. Sometime in the 1960s the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan discovered that its name was not derived from some Native American language, but rather from Greek. Filled with pride at its newfound ethnic association, the town decided to hold a Greek festival capped by performances of The Birds and Oresteïa in a Greek-style amphitheater constructed on the local university baseball field. They hired an authentic Greek director and also agreed to engage the services of an authentic Greek composer to write the incidental score. Xenakis, in turn, fired with enthusiasm for the project, wrote more than an hour and a half of music for the production, which by all accounts was a huge success. In order to salvage the work for concert performance, Xenakis later prepared a cantata lasting around 50 minutes, adding in the mid-1980s the movement “Kassandra”

https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-8023/

OK, wow, so both parts in "Kassandra" are sung by the bass, singing in his falsetto to do Kassandra's part.

Programme notes from the 08 Miller Theatre performance were v helpful: https://fr.scribd.com/document/211150822/Xena-k-is-Oresteia-Notes

Wow, that's quite the origin story. I'm amazed it took them that long to tease out the Greek connection.

The Hiketides suite does feel like a medley/potpourri of Xenakis's various idioms up to this point. While I similarly struggled to make out its overall form (not a first tbh), it was a solid listening experience. A highlight: one of the quieter, more atmospheric sections (5:45-8:29, more or less, in the LPO/Tamayo recording) with some, dare I say, late Romantic mournful intonations coming from the brass above a substratum of quivering strings, distantly recalling Ives's The Unanswered Question. The folk melody that follows is uncharacteristically pretty as well.

Oresteïa: this is a big one, of course, as befits its model. Too bad there's no available recording of the final 1992 version, with an appended section titled 'La déesse Athéna', which reportedly echoes 'Kassandra', itself an addition from 1987 that requires the baritone to engage in some heavy duty ventriloquy against an all-percussive backdrop. The result is flat-out bizarre and once again foregrounds Xenakis's ability to re-estrange the classics, and I must say I'm quite fascinated by the decision to ascribe the Greek chorus to a soloist in a context where an actual choir is readily available. Without 'La déesse Athéna' to balance it out as the suite draws to a close, however, its inclusion feels almost outlandish and drives home the contrast between Xenakis's later compositional language – which has its detractors – and his earlier works. I myself ultimately prefer the more hieratic segments for choir due to their anchoring in Eastern Orthodox chant, nicely stressing the continuity between Ancient Greece and its subsequent avatars. The Erinyes's swarming fury before they are euphemized into Eumenides is also impressively handled. Interestingly, the ending is anything but serene despite Athena's clear-cut verdict, which is meant to appease the antagonists.

Week 7

Terretektorh, 1966
Polytope (de Montréal), 4 orch groups, 1967 (I think there's a recording?)
Medea (incid music, Seneca), male vv, orch, 1967

https://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Medea-Syrmos-Polytope/release/1668175

'Polytope' also on Editions RZ 2cd comp

Forgot it was conducted by Marius Constant! Who wrote the theme to The Twilight Zone

Around the same time this came out, which I remember has a few crazy moments - https://www.discogs.com/Marius-Constant-Eloge-De-La-Folie/release/1481688

Weird to think of anything even remotely avant-garde resonating within the Montreal Casino, a tacky capitalist temple if ever there was one. Except, of course, it housed Expo 67 at the time and was home to the French and Quebec pavilions.

Ah, OK, great. Do you know of an accessible digital streaming version? I couldn't find it on Spotify, Youtube, Naxos Music Library, or iTunes; only the later electronic work Polytope de Cluny.xp

Huh, I didn’t know that about Constant. I’m only familiar with his conducting. And as one of countless Romanian expats from that generation who settled in France.

MP3 of Polytope (h/t Milton): https://we.tl/t-QZnBs35uWj

Well, that's a heck of a noise.

Without having read up on it, it sounds like dense shimmering clusters in the different orchestras with some Shepard-tone-like string glissandi and thundering percussion moving across the soundstage that clears for a quieter section and then builds back up to the final crash. One of the more revelatory pieces so far for me.

Just listened to Terrektorh (Tamayo/Hague recording). Seems like Xenakis made a full return to huge orchestral sound masses in this period. The sweeping intensity comes across viscerally on the recording. Must be spectacular live.

Hm, does anyone know of a recording (or video of the play) of Medea? :(

The Hyperion/James Wood recording is to be found on YouTube from where I sit?

Check yr inbox.

xp

Oh wow, thanks to both of you. Somehow I didn't find that video.

I was able to read a few pages of Xenakis: His Life in Music by James Harley on Google Books; a thing with Terretektorh was that the 88 musicians (also furnished with various percussion etc as in a few other works we've just been through) were arranged in concentric circles around the conductor, and the audience amongst the musicians, so what you would hear would depend strongly on where you were seated (apparently, camp stools were stipulated to facilitate moving around).

Actually, that books seems to have been given open-access release:

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/24050/1006082.pdf?sequence=1

I also got it for zero dollars for my Kindle on the US Amazon site.

Btw I'd like to say that I really enjoy the pace set for this project. It's very doable to catch up after being busy elsewhere, and there is time to dig deeper into single works when desired, but it also moves along enough to give a sense of development and avoid a feel of stagnancy.

Thanks, glad you're enjoying it - and thanks for the book! Harley is an excellent composer in his own right.

Terretektorh kicks off with a Scelsi string drone and maintains its sense of single-mindedness throughout despite a progressively expanded timbral palette, which includes siren-whistles that somehow avoid sounding carnivalesque. The spatial distribution is, alas, lost on me (and, I suspect, you) but I can imagine the effect of scattering musicians among audience members being quite striking in a live environment (pre-covid, at least). This one’s definitely a keeper.

Polytope (de Montréal): yet another piece where the musicians – four orchestras, no less – are dispersed, blurring the line between listener and performer. It begins with a brassy rumble that repeatedly punctuates the thick symphonic texture, while the winds echo remote, nearly unrecognizable folk melodies, foreshadowing Ștefan Niculescu’s later works. The aural gruel is then broken down into more discrete instrumental elements, of which the percussion strikes me as the most memorable. It subsequently builds back up to a sustained collective pitch, yet without the intensity of its commanding beginning. Hardly the greatest of Xenakis’s scores, but still worthwhile.

Medea is a Seneca setting, which I found quite surprising at first, since Xenakis isn’t exactly known for his interest in Latin literature. Sure enough, he ‘hesitated’ upon receiving the commission: ‘I knew Seneca as a pseudo-philosopher, an imperial courtier, and above all a Roman who sought, like all the Romans of that period, to emulate the ancient Greek masterpieces.’ The deliberate emphasis on ‘barbarity’, to quote him yet again, is very much audible in Medea: the chanting (an all-male choir – a somewhat odd choice given the subject matter) is aggressively monotonous, almost barked, and the score occasionally calls for banging stones on top of the deliberately brutal writing for conventional instruments, so the quest for archaicness is quite extreme here. It’s a powerful work, but I don’t think I was in the right mood for it this morning.

I really need to go back to Terretektorh and Medea after reading a bit more but...

Week 8

Kraanerg (ballet), orch, tape, 1968

We will come back to Nomos gamma next week since Kraanerg is 75 minutes!

And was composed for the opening of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 1969, which I somehow didn't know or had forgotten until starting this project.

... how did people dance to this? Will need to try to find video after this.

Ha, OK, reading Harley on Kraanerg, the original choreography didn't go over v well with critics (although a second version was attempted in the 80s by a different choreographer and seems to have got better reviews). Fascinating to read about how eager the NAC was to open with an avant-garde modernist work in 69, and to show off their then-state-of-the-art sound system.

It's a pretty huge sound for 75 minutes, with these jarring silences. The tape consists of processed orchestral sounds that travel across the soundstage and exist in an interesting sort of dialogue with the chamber orchestra. The instrumental writing recalls Akrata at times, especially with the staccato single notes that open the whole work.

"Processed instrumental sounds" = parts sound like noise

Are you reading Harley's 150+ page monograph on Kraanerg? Either way, I'm glad it exists.

I've never heard the Callithumpian Consort's recording with Stephen Drury at the helm, which is apparently the most detailed in terms of soundstage (figures, since it's also the most recent), so I think I'll go with that one when the time comes.

That's the one I listened to. And, no, I just read the few pages on Kraanerg from the book that is an overview of Xenakis that anatol linked earlier. The other one might be worth reading! Tbh, I had only known Harley as a composer and hadn't realized (or had forgotten) that he had written musicological books on Xenakis. It probably did come up at some point.

Maybe a legit candidate for best living Canadian composer?

I'm not familiar with his music at all. Which of his works would you recommend to a neophyte?

Tbh, I was going less by commercial releases and more by things I've seen live or heard in seminar but the Neue Bilder disc by New Music Concerts/Robert Aitken is a solid collection of his instrumental work. I'm putting on the Like a Ragged Flock album now (for flute [Ellen Waterman] and electronics).

Cool, thanks, I've added it to my list.

I've got "Kraanerg", Sinfonieorchester Basel, sounds kind of muffled to me.

The Drury recording is the first 'with restored analog tape' according to Mode, so you may want to try that one.

Well, yes, I got this one cheap secondhand, the previous owner probably got rid of it for that very reason.

the original Marius Constant 'Kraanerg' on Erato is definitely incredible - http://inconstantsol.blogspot.com/2016/08/iannis-xenakis-kraanerg-erato-1968-69.html

haven't heard the one Tom posted, but the 1989 Roger Woodward is also pretty fuzzy. The Drury (and I also suspect the Constant) directly injects the original tape into the mix instead of going for a room recording, so if you've got the Drury or the original you are well set

this is in the lineage of hyper-orchestra concrete where the tape parts are still somewhat recognizably derived from orchestral / acoustic sources (Varèse's original 1954 GRM version of 'Déserts', Berio's 'Differences', the orchestral version of Stockhausen's 'Hymnen', many others) - the blend between the live sounds and the tape part is key. and those previous pieces are more episodic / have more separation between live and tape, Xenakis really goes for the blend, and for duration. and volume, and violence. and I get the impression that the tape part frequently leads the scoring, where the orchestral scoring is following the result of the wild transformations on the tape. Which is where I get seriously on board, he just floors it from here

There's a few minutes of Graeme Murphy's well-received 1988 choreography on YouTube. I think I get how it doesn't drive into either of the opposite ditches of direct coupling to the music on the one hand, or full ignorance of it on the other, but rather runs in parallel using related processes. Staging pays homage to the Vasarely involvement at the premiere too.

looking at Harley's pdf and the youtube lecture he gave on 'Kraanerg' trying to figure out the workflow between tape and score

evidently because it wasn't going to be the kind of music in which a piano reduction was possible, budgeting included a full orchestra studio recording so they could have a tape to rehearse to -- and that's the original 2LP Erato. the tape parts follow the orchestral parts. no idea if the tape parts were derived from the same studio recording sessions. it sure sounds close though. Harley also notes the interdependence of the instrumental writing being the result of him cutting and pasting / transforming elements of contemporary pieces, inverting / reversing / altering tempo -- i.e. things very close to what's being done to the tape

Week 9

Nomos gamma, 1967–8
Nuits, 3 S, 3 A, 3 T, 3 B, 1967–8
Synaphaï, pf, orch, 1969
Anaktoria, cl, bn, hn, str qt, db, 1969

Running late, I'm afraid…

I encourage people to jump in with whatever pieces are up for the current week rather than try to catch up on past weeks, unless there is something you really want to go back to.

I definitely want to go back to Kraneerg, though! Maybe tonight, and with the proviso that I won't have anything even remotely intelligent to add.

Wow the percussion on Nomos gamma. Lots of energy and intensity there. Will come back and listen more carefully but made a definite first impression, even on the surface level.