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

I couldn't find any available recordings of the score for Thessaloniki World Fair.

*film score

James Harley (U of Guelph composer) on the ST series and ST/48 in particular at AMG:

In the period leading up to 1962, Iannis Xenakis was preoccupied with developing a compositional system that would be completely automated. His application of mathematical techniques adapted from probability theory in earlier pieces such as Pithoprakta and Acchorpsis lead to what he termed "stochastic" music. In this approach, as many compositional decisions as possible are made through the application of some probability function, often interlocked to create Markov chains, enabling one event to influence the next in some fashion. By 1962, Xenakis had managed to create a computer program to test his composition algorithm, and on that basis he produced a family of works.

The orchestral ST/48 is the piece of this set that is for the largest forces, but is probably the least known. It was not performed until 1968 and has been little performed since. The algorithm produces music on the basis of pre-defined sections, the durations to be determined by some function. ST/48, which lasts ten minutes, has seven sections, each lasting anywhere from twelve seconds (IV) to well over two minutes (V, VI). Xenakis' trademark glissandi are heard, but the strings are treated somewhat less intricately than in such piecvs as Pithoprakta. Instruments tend to play one note (or glissando) then drop out, creating a statistical, kaleidoscopic texture. The primary distinction between the seven sections is the noticeable shift in overall density. The highest degree of activity is found in sections I, V, and VII. The final one is quite brief and markedly denser than any of the others.

Bohor was side 1 of the LP I mentioned above. Apparently, the North American pressing of the LP was specifically mastered by Xenakis and Bob Ludwig to increase in volume at the climax? I haven't heard any versions on CD to compare. Three years later, Ludwig was mastering Metal Machine Music.

The liner notes to the LP are correct: "the piece demands total surrender". 20 minutes is about the right length for this kind of experience.

Although algorithmic/generative music is not overall my jam most of the time, ST/48 was actually pretty pleasant and unexpectedly placid-feeling on first listen.

Listening to JACK Quartet's recording of ST/4 on Naxos for the second time and not totally sure what to make of it. I don't really get the sense of form, narrative, and drama that I get from the Xenakis pieces I like most but the sounds are interesting and engaging in an ambient sort of way.

ST/10 isn't on Spotify, anyone have a YouTube link?

Bohor: I'm not sure if I've listened to this since I was an undergraduate - listening now, it seems like something that should have been way up my alley then. Maybe it was? The notes to the Electronic Music question whether we will ever know anything about how the piece was composed but this is actually quite detailed and informative: http://sites.music.columbia.edu/masterpieces/notes/xenakis/notes.html . I knew none of this!

I'm finding it a little harsh at times but it's also kind of an awesome (in the old meaning of the term) sound. Succeeds at evoking the intended feeling of "being inside a bell". The noise in the last three minutes is fantastic. I feel like the common thread between the pieces in the period we're exploring this week is a move away from dramatic linear sectional forms and more of a 'music as environment' aesthetic?

It just ended - feels like a shock to no longer be in the bell, and feel a little deafened.

ST/10 isn't on Spotify, anyone have a YouTube link?

I can find it on Spotify in Norway; might just be hard to search for by title, or licencing may differ between countries. It is on the album "Iannis Xenakis: Atrées, Morsima-Amorsima, Nomos Alpha, ST 4, Achorripsis", disc 2 track 3:

Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/43H1Wm5cYm7TEuMKrAvxEQ?si=jrIIHXJXRqSfBI2B1jaJEA
Track: https://open.spotify.com/track/7yp5MsjkDvvlYsTP9IhaqA?si=K9xb_3N8QImrHPxyztTqRQ

ST/4 is an adaption of ST/10, by the way (in case it wasn't obvious, the number indicates the number of players):

"The quartet is in essence a transcription of the score for the larger ensemble. ST/10 includes a string quartet as part of its ensemble, so those parts were lifted directly. The next step of the transcription, though, was to add in anything else from the other parts of ST/10 that would be possible for the quartet to play. This includes percussion, where a drum roll would be transcribed as tapping fingers on the body of the string instrument, and harp, where the extended lower range could be played by the cello with judicious adjustment of the tuning peg of the lowest string."

(From https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/12-13/xenakis/xenakis.html)

IIRC, the tuning-down-the-cello-while-pizzicatoing-trick is also used in the Nomos Alpha solo piece? We'll see when we get there soon enough.

I am falling behind already, fuck.

Bohor is legendary

one of the things I have grown to love about Xenakis' electronic works are the radical differences in each commercial release -- the mix is the performance. it used to drive me insane in the same way trying to find the 'best' recording of a symphony but you quickly learn to love the details

my go to listen for the 1957-1962 electronic works is a CDR rip of the Nonesuch 'Electro-acoustic Music' LP, which is far murkier but also has much greater dynamic range. nothing compares to how loud the ending of Bohor gets on those mixes. the EMF 'Electronic Music' CD jacks up the treble in fascinating ways -- tons of detail in the high end, but it's more like reading a score than hearing it. this thread might be an excuse for me to finally buy and burn a CDR of the Recollections GRM edition on bandcamp.

the youtube uploads of the orchestral pieces which sync the listening to the sheet music / graphical scores are kind of revelatory

skipping ahead to mention this, but Chris Marker's TV series 'The Owl's Legacy' spends all of episode 8 on Xenakis circa his development of the UPIC system. you can probably already imagine how much Marker has zooming the camera in on late 80's computer monitors as interns digitize images of owls to play them back as audio waveforms, or interviewing people about using lightpens to directly draw sound vibrations, it's all pretty reassuring

Ha, I didn't realize there were significantly different mixes on the different releases.

At least for the Nonesuch release, it is the same mix as the original French LP release but changed in the mastering process, as I mentioned above.

What's the story behind the 2019 remastered version on The Wire Recordings that is on Spotify?

I'm listening on free Spotify but based on the first few minutes, it seems loud and distorted compared to the version on the Electronic Music CD? Much less pleasant.

(That said, it's free Spotify so ignore everything I say.)

On one listen (while reading) to the Spotify link above, ST/10 didn't seem to reveal much more than the ST/4 adaptation to me but I'll listen again this week. Bohor definitely this week's highlight.

I'm only dipping in here and there but I've been inside the Bohor bell for ten minutes now and am spinning out a little. You can definitely hear the Iraqi and Hindu jewellery being dragged across something (and around yr head, again and again and again).

>What's the story behind the 2019 remastered version on The Wire Recordings that is on Spotify?

That's unlistenable! Clearly remastered from vinyl, clicks left in, sawed off. The modern temptation when mastering drone music that mostly lacks transient peaks is to slam it.

The Erato / Nonesuch LPs include the mix number in the title, while later CDs usually fail to indicate - https://www.discogs.com/Xenakis-Bohor-I-Diamorphoses-II-Orient-Occident-III-Concret-P-H-II/release/12646028

'Bohor I' usually starts with the underlying drone mixed just as loud as the scrapes. The EMF CD I think is just a radically EQ'd version of 'Bohor I' with a less extreme volume curve at the end. The Recollections GRM vinyl is closer to 'Bohor I'. I am taking a wild guess by saying this, but the version which starts by fading in the scraping by itself, and adds the drone around seven minutes in -- might in actuality be 'Bohor II'. I'll leave that to the experts

CD releases of every electronic work after Persepolis is where it really starts getting crazy. So many radically different versions by other composers & engineers. I have the original eight channel multitrack for Persepolis, and you can imagine how utterly raw each channel's sounds are -- there's no pre-printed volume curves or fades between sections, the structure & conducting all comes in the mixdown. The tape is the score & the playback is the performance

Ha, I did make it all the way through but it was startling how unpleasant it was compared to the 97 CD.

I've got the EMF CD, which I bought in New York a couple of months after 9/11.

ok I was totally wrong. 'Bohor II' was the official title of the tape component for the multimedia work 'Polytope de Cluny'. Every commercial release of that tape has been under the title 'Polytope de Cluny', and all subsequent releases of 'Bohor' omit the numeral, I suppose to keep things less confusing

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01789708/file/Iannis%20Xenakis,%20La%20musique%20électroacoustique%3A%20The%20elctroacoustic%20Music.pdf

Why Bohor? - Charles Turner (CUNY Graduate Center, USA)

the following article on the different versions of 'Legende d'eer' is fascinating too

going through the Recollections GRM mix of 'Bohor' now & also found a less-badly-remastered version of the less-drony 'Bohor' sund4r found - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DODVNHukY0I

Oh geez, emil.y, if this Wire remastering of Concret PH is what you listened to, the CD version is not nearly as harsh.

Heh, a morsel of gossip from the article preceding the Turner one: <i>Bohor</i> was dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer, who was asked if he liked it: "I detest <i>Bohor</i>, which Xenakis was so kind as to dedicate to me. I could tell it to his face, because he is one of the few with whom that is possible."

He is quoted in the liner notes to the CD as saying "Bohor was, for the worst (I mean for the best!), the wood fire of his beginnings. No longer the crackling embers of Concret PH, it was an enormous series of explosions, an onslaught of stabs with a lancet in the ear at the highest level on a potentiometer."

Anyway, that Youtube clip that Milton shared is much nicer than the remaster on Spotify and actually a v pleasant listen.

Found out I had a rip of the EMF disc in the file system vaults, and yeah, that is quite different.

Also, all the STs have been really clicking for me today, and have never really done so before. A bunch of repetitions must have helped a lot, even though they haven't been very focused. "Ooh there is that little tune again!" :-D

Oh, EMF = Electronic Music Foundation. Yeah, that's the same disc I have.

Liked ST/10 better on second listen.

The last few days ended up being extremely hectic and I forgot about this! Let's do a lighter week. This should be about 28m of music:

Week 4

Polla ta dhina (Sophocles: Antigone), children’s vv, wind, perc, 1962
Morsima-Amorsima, pf, vn, vc, db, 1956–62
Akrata, 16 wind, 1964–5

Well, on first listen, Polla ta dhina shows that Xenakis is still delivering surprises in the fourth week. Will say more soon.

Iirc Morsima-Amorsima is from the generation* of last week's ST works, and there was also another one called Amorsima-Morsima which may have been discarded or renamed? Will check.

*) heh in two senses

Akrata: This is the one from this week that I knew before, from the Ensemble Music 2 album. Good to revisit it, listening more closely and reading up a bit. James Harley's AMG summary is good: https://www.allmusic.com/composition/akrata-for-8-winds-8-brass-mc0002449168 and "8 winds and 8 brass" is more accurate than "16 winds". I like winds a lot and enjoy this one, though it doesn't have quite the intensity of a lot of Xenakis. As Harley notes, a lot of it consists of rapid flutter-tongued staccato single notes passed around between different instruments, in a klangfarbenmelodie sort of way. The sounds come together in passages of greater density or more sustained sound. A bit like a study in articulation, sustain, and timbre. Also one where Xenakis uses space and silence a lot. A bit of an eerie quality.

Morsima-Amorsima: I liked this one a lot, probably because chamber music is my thing. Just listened to the Callithumpian Consort recording on Spotify and the UNT College of Music recording here: https://youtu.be/_SyJrZFWWb0. Based on this, as anatol notes, it was created with the same program that was used to compose ST/10, following a stochastic plan by the composer, according to which the algorithm defined the time of entry, articulation, instrument, pitch, 'slope' of glissando, duration, and dynamic level of the individual sounds: http://brahms.ircam.fr/works/work/12838/ . I like the space and sounds, the way the percussive piano is juxtaposed with all the string articulations, esp the glissandi.

Listened to M/A half-distractedly on walk yesterday; impression I think was that it felt less busy and episodic, more rounded as a whole than the other STs, but must hear again obviously.

I've been digging this thread even though I've mostly been quietly lurking and listening. Morsima-Amorsima and Akrata are both pretty great methinks. Especially the latter. I feel like the former may have benefited from *watching* those same Texans Sund4r linked to, passing the notes around, early in the week.

Polla ta dhina remains completely unfamiliar...

Binge-catching up.

Of the three works in the ST series, 48 made the biggest impression. The quieter and dronier sections were somewhat unexpected, giving a sense of purpose to what otherwise strikes me as a rather aimless compositional exercice despite its typically intriguing theoretical underpinnings. At the other, more compact end of the spectrum, ST/4 is notable for serving an undiluted version of the stochastic formula, and I do begrudgingly admire it as a single-minded, forbidding object that sounds nothing like a string quartet ca. 1962. As for 10, its greater timbral variety is deployed with insufficient finesse (Boulez this is not) and it also lacks the austere aura of the string quartet adaptation.

The very title of Bohor is surprising, as Arthurian legend is not a narrative backdrop I spontaneously associate with Xenakis. Bohor (also spelled Bohort, or Bors in English) accompanies Percival and Galahad on the quest for the Holy Grail and is granted a glimpse into its mysteries as a reward for his humility and chastity. Xenakis was reportedly drawn to Bohor's 'severity' as well as to the name itself (which in French sounds a bit like 'bow-ore', the 'h' being silent). No pun intended, of course: there is nothing even remotely boring about this piece, whose sheer physicality is indeed awe-inspiring, to echo Sund4r's assessment, although I still have no idea – not that it matters! – what the exact connection is between the Laotian mouth organ, Iraqi and Hindu jewelry, and the Knights of the Round Table.

Polla ta dhina is an Antigone setting. The children's choir recites Sophocles's text ('Wonders abound in this world yet no wonder is greater than man…') in a nearly static monotone while the orchestra explores a full range of alternately drone-bound and aggressively accented gestures, as though a second (instrumental) chorus were wordlessly doubling and responding to the first. Suitably dramatic.

Morsima-Amorsima: it sounds less immediately distinctive than the other works in these two batches, which is to say it comes closer to generic 1960s international post-Webernism despite being cut from the same cloth as ST/10, but I don't mean to throw shade by saying this. On the contrary, I think this is one of his best pieces from this period, as it really brings out a meditative sense of empty space I didn't at all get from ST/10 or its even more cramped string quartet reduction. It's also worth noting that an abstract stochastic composition is here rebranded, per the title, as an exploration of Fate (synonymous with Death) and non-Fate (Life, presumably).

I've never been a huge fan of all-wind ensembles, but Akrata's austerity compels. It reminds me, as so often with Xenakis's music, that 'classical' as a descriptor refers to antiquity first and foremost. Its utter rejection of any semblance of ornamentation brings to mind Galina Ustvolskaya's music.

Oh, and I came across an Amazon review that includes the following sentence: 'I have fond memories of having sex to Akrata on one occasion with another college student many years ago.'

Week 5

Atrées, fl, cl, b cl, hn, tpt, trbn, 2 perc, vn, vc, 1962
Eonta, 2 tpt, 3 trbn, pf, 1963–4
Nomos alpha, vc, 1965–6

I guess he was focusing more on chamber and solo music in the mid-60s?

I realized that I own another recording of Akrata, by Dufallo/Festival Chamber Ensemble, on Sony's 10-CD Masterworks of the 20th Century set. Listening to it now, what stands out is that the piece does benefit from the clarity and dynamic range in this recording.

Definitely feels stark and chilling.

Nomos alpha might have been the first Xenakis to pique my interest. Via some pre-millennial Realplayer transmission. LOL. (Unless it was Kottos. One of the cello pieces on the Arditti Quartet/Claude Helffer thing from the '90s anyway.) Which inspired a purchase and lots of listens. So he was very much a chamber/solo dude in my mind for a while.

I saw "Eonta" perfomed once. Awesome.

I listened to Rohan de Saram's recording of Nomos alpha twice on Naxos before reading anything about it. Certainly a lot more sparse than what we've heard earlier, which seems to reflect an overall tendency in Xenakis's writing as we get further into the 60s, perhaps because there was nowhere else to go. I also feel like it's more expressive in rhetoric, despite being built largely around timbre, articulation, and dynamics. Phrasing seems very clear.

I really like Rohan de Saram's studio take, although I haven't revisited it for the purposes of this thread yet.

There's a live rendition of his you can watch on YT, although it's sadly truncated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIGDMMN1lQI

It's nice to be able to see some of that expressivity in addition to hearing it.

Huh, so in the Atrées that I find on Spotify (on a 2-CD album with Simonovich et al), the movements are in the order 1-3-5-2-4. And it's not just a tagging error, judging from the parts that are on nkoda. Is the order supposed to be mutable in this one? error? whim?

From James Harley's Xenakis: His Life in Music:

With the exception of Morsima-Amorsima, the other scores (ST/48 and Atrées) also contain reorderings of sections, no doubt for a variety of reasons. Atrées, the piece most freely adapted by the composer from the original data, challenges most dramatically the need to respect the output of the program. Xenakis divides the form into five movements, and allows them to be played in any order. The notion of a mobile form, of course, had already been put forward by John Cage and Earle Brown, and applied by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, among other European composers.

order follows the original EMI vinyl release

that's the 2CD set I have, though I tagged each track with the original album art: https://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Atr%C3%A9es-Morsima-Amorsima-ST-4-Nomos-Alpha/release/1279483

actual performance youtubes (as well as the ones displaying the architectural scores) are really helping me dig into the acoustic / orchestral works, many of which bounce off of me in a way I never experienced with the electronic works. ST series really clicking

first disc of this, mainly focusing on the Erato vinyl, was my go to comp for the next run of pieces: https://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Iannis-Xenakis/release/1445107