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

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

Ah, thanks ppl!

Wow, just listened to Eonta, the recording on Mode Records' Vol. 11: Works With Piano, found on NML. That's a fantastic cacophony; the dialogue between the brass and the frenetic piano with pedal down is really effective and it comes to a satisfying conclusion.

Acc to this, Atrées was again written with the same Fortran stochastic programme that was used for ST/10, although some liberties were taken: https://www.iannis-xenakis.org/fxe/catalog/genres/oeuvre_24.html . Instrumentation is interesting. The title is I think a reference to the Greek myth of Atreus, who, uh, seems to have killed his half-brother with his brother, then killed his nephews and fed them to his brother when he found out his brother was sleeping with his wife, and then raised the incestuous son of his brother and his niece, who eventually killed him?

Putting on the Simonovich-conducted recording on Spotify now. I'm enjoying how the various articulations (glissandi, flutter-tongue, ringing tuned percussion, col legno, etc) layer and overlap across the soundstage in this recording.

Hm, well, that was not bad as a quasi-ambient listen but it seems to be going in the opposite direction from "Nomos alpha" with regards to expressivity. Obviously, mobile form precludes the expression of any linear narrative.

Spacious and pointillistic, Atrées is easy on the ears. The sole commercially available recording (from 1967) doesn't quite do the piece justice, however. Maybe I've been spoiled by the technically perfect playing of subsequent generations of classical musicians, but something about the tone seems off. It's too audibly… human.

Eonta is timbrally unique, even bizarre, and lives up to its title, which means 'beings' – a vague metaphysical designation that can suggest just about anything, really, from the monstrous to the nondescript and back. These 'beings' (the instruments themselves?) alternatively collide and overlap, but they also seem perfectly willing to ignore each other and simply go about their respective ways, at least until the denouement. As a general rule, however, the piano seems to be locked in a physical struggle of titanic proportions, while the brass section, which tends to be treated as a unified block, is more hieratic in its utterances, echoing Akrata. This one's a highlight.

Nomos alpha's self-conscious use of extended techniques makes for a remarkably colourful solo cello piece, and its ability to sustain forward momentum from start to finish despite the material's fragmentary nature is highly impressive. As ever, my understanding of the rules/laws ('nomos') that underlie Xenakis's compositional process is borderline nonexistent, but the audible result is indeed expressive. Nor, come to think of it, is Nomos alpha a stranger to the Romantic tradition of bravura solo pieces.

Just catching up a bit now. Parts of Bohor had me thinking Sunn O))) could do an interesting "cover," low menacing guitar chords and one of their friends slapping around some broken wind chimes.

All right, we've got two vocal works up this week, including the large music drama Oresteïa (which I do recall listening to raptly as an undergrad).

Week 6

Hiketides: les suppliates d’Eschyle, 50 female vv, 10 insts/orch, 1964
Oresteïa (incid music/concert work, Aeschylus), chorus, 12 insts, 1965–6

Maybe I've been spoiled by the technically perfect playing of subsequent generations of classical musicians

I am doing my part to resist this trend btw.

Ah, I saw the Oresteïa in Oslo in 1994 with the composer in attendance! Specific memories are limited after more than a quarter century(!?!), but I do remember it being pretty awesome.

Dunno whether this will work outside Norway, but from 20:30 here are a few minutes from a rehearsal for that performance, plus composer speaking:
https://tv.nrk.no/serie/ultimafestivalen/1994/FKUM49000494/avspiller

Ramones inspired count-in there.

Listening now, I do remember the massed Acme-type sirens/whistles being downright scary, as befits the Eumenides.

I do not remember whether we followed this bit from the score:

200 small metal flags should be distributed to the audience, at the end of the work. They wave them joyfully, uniting with the spirit of the choruses.

Hiketides: les suppliates d’Eschyle, 50 female vv, 10 insts/orch, 1964

I notice that the iannis-xenakis.org site does not list any version with chorus, only one for brass and strings, which appears to be the one I find on Spotify with Tamayo and the Luxembourg PO (as Hiketides Suite). It does appear to have existed though, with the chorus also playing a multitude of percussion as in the Oresteïa, judging from e.g. this PDF article.

Sund4r, did you see Noël Akchoté has arrangements of parts of Oresteïa for guitar on Spotify? I put them on the playlist (they're short).

Yeah, I've listened to his Xenakis album before. Iirc, they are extremely loose out jazz reinterpretations?

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