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

"Evyrali" is awesome.

Evryali there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four-post bed

Listening to Aki Takahashi's performance now, I'm so used to hearing her Feldman performances that I guess I wasn't expecting this level of almost mania.

There's a lot of cascading up and down the keyboard, sometimes I suspect each hand in a different direction. This motion seems coherent, in a way, despite no clear tonal center or traditional harmonic structure, if only because the change to repeated chord clusters or a swirling monophony or dead silence feels abrupt, almost shocking.

I'm trying to balance "sounding smart" with "knowing what the heck I'm talking about," so please bear that in mind. I'm not a musician (I'm a drummer) so I'm probably using the language incorrectly.

Does anyone have a Spotify link to Cendrées to add to the playlist?

On to Cendrées now on YouTube, the version with the description in English (Chœurs de la Fondation Gulbenkian de Lisbonne / Orchestre National de France / Michel Tabachnik). I can appreciate Xenakis' dedication to the art of the glissando, but I wonder if he ever felt pigeonholed? Pressured to write glissandi anytime he was composing for strings? Do you think people stopped him on the street and begged him to do a glissando for them?

He moved away from glissandi in the Week 12 pieces!

I listened to Cendrées twice now, following the score the second time, and this is revelatory, almost exhausting (and exhaustive in the range of techniques and sonorities it integrates). I think I'm still processing it all.

From (brief) loosely structured quasi-improvisatory passages (often with expressive, emotional directions) to all the rigorously notated complex tuplets, sustained vocal drones vs barked or guttural sounds ("of rage"), masses of orchestral and choral sound vs the delicate quarter-tone flute solo and duet vs 'clouds of phantom sound', massed glissandi vs staccato bursts, the piece kind of does it all, sounds beautiful, and remains compelling the whole way through, without ever being predictable.

Tom, your description of Evryali makes perfect sense and is really not a world away from Harley's:

One of the most striking aspects of Evryali is the rhythmic drive that propels the music at a relentlessly steady pace (the sixteenth-note pulse is set at 480 MM). The music is not metric, but most passages are built upon this pulse, the exceptions being two appearances of a more rhythmically diffuse, cloudlike texture, and the three measured silences.8 Otherwise, the music is made up of three sonic entities: “waves,” arborescences, and fixed-range rhythmic passages. The waves and arborescences are closely related, in that wavelike contours form the primary outlines of the arborescent passages. The difference is that the waves are monophonic entities, whereas the arborescences are polyphonic. The sketches confirm the importance of graphic design, with the dendritic shapes of these contours being sketched on graph paper rather than plotted on score paper. From his earliest works, Xenakis often sketched musical ideas on graph paper, linking graphic designs with compositional and/or instrumentational concerns. Here, for example, he would have had to keep in mind, when tracing his arborescences, that the two hands and ten fingers of the pianist can only reach so far. In fact, Xenakis overlooked this limitation on a number of occasions, and even includes a high C#, beyond the range of any piano, in the penultimate passage of arborescences.9

As with Aroura and Eridanos, it is difficult to perceive large-scale divisions in Evryali. The alternation and layering of the different textures proceed by means of shorter and longer passages. The silences are, by their placement, treated as independent entities, resonating in a special way the extraordinary rhythmic energy of the music. Harmonically, the set intervallic structure of the static, rhythmically defined passages contrasts with the more fluid waves and arborescences that tend to proceed chromatically. There does not appear to be any overriding principle or sieve linking the numerous manifestations of the fixed-rhythm entity; each is built from a different intervallic configuration, the density ranging from three to eight pitches.10 Sieves appear to have been applied to the generation of rhythmic patterns, but the layering of these structures makes precise determination or comparison of their content virtually impossible. There is no concern on the composer’s part that these sieves be identified. In very general terms, they exhibit statistical similarities by containing values limited to just a few multiples of the basic unit of pulse.

I first listened to Kayako Matsunaga's approx 6 minute-long recording twice and felt like it went right over my head. Now I'm listening to Takahashi's 10-minute recording and it's making much more sense to me - maybe the pacing just works better for my slow brain but I definitely feel the driving pulse here and catch the melodic motives.

Confession: although I know I came across it in grad school and I think even had to read a paper about it, I don't actually know what a "sieve" is in this context. (Also, I couldn't explain Shepard tones very well if I had a gun to my head.) I will look it up soon enough since it seems pretty important in X's work, esp in this period.

Diving into Erikhthon now

I listened while sorting laundry, and not that analytically, but found it compelling - I'm not even really sure how he achieved that cold slate-grey wash of orchestral sonority and the energetic, almost manic piano serves as a striking juxtaposition; basically seems to work as a brain-smearing concerto, closing with a blast of brass.

Without looking it up, I think "sieve" may mean a kind of conceptual filter that excludes a certain subset of e.g. pitches, just as an actual physical sieve excludes particles larger than a given size (or only includes them, if you consider what's left in the sieve rather than what passes through it).

A classical examples is the "sieve of Eratosthenes", an ancient Greek algorithm for finding the set of prime numbers: First write down all the numbers 2, 3, 4, etc on a long strip of paper. Now, find the first number on the list; this is 2, which is prime. Cross out all multiples of 2 except for 2 itself, i.e. cross out 4, 6, 8, 10 etc. The current first number on the list is 3, which is prime. Cross out all multiples of 3 except for 3 itself, i.e. 6, 9, 12, 15 etc. The number 4 has been stricken out, so the current first number on the list is 5, which is prime. Cross out etc etc etc, and you end up with a long strip of paper containing all prime numbers and no non-prime numbers.

Cendrées is exhilarating and overwhelming. It saddens me to discover that there's no readily available commercial recording of it in 2021. Of all the works I hadn't heard before hopping onto this thread, this may well be the most impressive so far. Its maximalism feels like a summary of almost every tool at Xenakis's disposal up to this point yet it doesn't sound contrived in the least. It's not a compendium of stock gestures, it just works.

I'm less sold on Erikhthon, which is as high on energy as it gets, pitting the usual backdrop of string glissandi against a heroically assertive piano part, but without too little going on to sustain my interest throughout.

Evryali ('far-roaming') is the first of his solo piano pieces that I genuinely enjoy. The intro comes across as a quasi nod to US minimalism before it breaks down and reassembles itself into a series of almost Beethovenian developments that sound more pianistically idiomatic than anything else he'd written up to that point. I agree that a broader tempo greatly serves the work btw.

Week 14

Noomena, 1974
Gmeeoorh, org, 1974
Polytope de Cluny, 8-track, lighting, 1972

*with too little

xp

Sorry! Polytope de Cluny was in Wk 12, duh.

This is the real
Week 14

Noomena, 1974
Gmeeoorh, org, 1974
Empreintes, 1975

Does anyone know if Polytope II was recorded?

Could it just be an alternate title for Polytope de Cluny?

From the original (Oxford Music) list:

Polytope de Cluny, 8-track, lighting, 1972; Paris, 17 Oct 1972
Polytope II, tape, lighting, 1974; Paris, 1974

but idk if it's just another name for the Paris mix/staging of similar material??

Gmeeoorh: Just listened to Christoph Maria Moosmann's recording, which I already owned, twice. It's a long piece but really intense and exhilarating when I follow it. He virtually achieved the dynamic range and density of sound mass of his famous orchestral works on a solo instrument (which had to be played by two people - one person handling all the stop changes that provide all the timbral variety!).

Harley:

The long opening passage of arborescences, lasting close to five minutes, is articulated by a number of points where the arborescences stop, either in sustained clusters or held pitches (the first, mm. 39–42, is enlivened by irregular trills in both hands and the pedals), or in silence, allowing the sonority to resonate as it dies away. The sustained sonorities point the way to the second section, shorter by half, made up of massive clusters achieved by laying boards upon the manuals and pedals in order to open as many pipes as possible. The effect of these powerful sonorities is awesome. It is also extremely rich dynamically, through the ongoing stop changes. The arboresences return, hesitatingly at first, gradually building up momentum to carry through the longest span of the piece, which lasts around six minutes. After the silences that break up the beginning phrases, there is just one moment, at mm. 149–51, where the music comes to rest on a sustained sonority in the pedals. The arboresences fall off to a similar passage in the pedals, and then that breaks off in order to prepare the stops for the next section.

There follow two contrasting passages, the first being a sustained harmonic sonority in which different pitches enter, then drop out, creating an evolving, but registrally and timbrally restricted, texture. After a break, a more active though still narrow-ranged passage enters to fill in a high span of pitches with staccato figures over a quietly sustained sonority in the pedals. These two passages, lasting four minutes, lead back to a final short passage of involved, linear polyphony, concluding with a return to the immense clusters of the second section.

His definition of "arborescences" btw:

proliferations of lines created from a generative phrase or contour

There's an explanation of sieves in there too but I think I'm too short on mental space to follow it right now. I'll try to find X's original book.

Sorry for the late heads up, but FYI: Helsinki realization of La Légende d'Eer is streaming online in 20 minutes' time (3 PM GMT) as part of the Musica Nova festival.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlgvRu73Ces

Interesting. I might be able to catch some of that.

Noomena: I listened to the Luxembourg Phil/Tamayo recording twice just now. It didn't make as strong of an initial impression as many of the other works. Somehow I heard it first as relatively undifferentiated then came back and listened to how he features, juxtaposes, and contrasts the different sections of the orchestra, which I think are being used with dense enough chromatic harmonies and sweeping glissandi that they turn into masses of colour, although we get some atonal melody lines at the beginning. It is interesting to hear how glissandi are handled differently in strings vs brass vs winds. We end with the whole orchestra in a giant block of sound with the strings keeping a pulse in furious accented bowings. (There's a 12-note chord here, it seems). This passage is presented briefly and economically - it arrives, makes its conclusive statement and then ends. At first it felt abrupt; on returning to it, it just seems concise.

Jvc, how was it?

Empreintes: Listened the the Luxembourg Phil/Tamayo recording three times now. It's quite different from the other works and I can see why Harley connects it to Scelsi and spectralism. It's largely built around a sustained G with a lot of subtle variation in timbre, articulation, rhythm, and dynamics; it then gets elaborated on with soft glissandi and clusters but for most of the recording, the sustained pitch is present. V effective moment after the 5m mark when the G becomes softer and the 'arborescences', the cluster sonorities and glissandi, take over, eventually completely. Then we get aggressive homorhythmic attacks in the strings, later echoed in the brass after sweeping long tones that pass through the sections, seemingly across the soundstage as well. Brass and winds both get featured with these more mf sections of staccato bursts that fade the piece out. The overall form works more like a narrative or journey from A to B than as something with conclusive unity, perhaps?

Sund4r, I found it quite engaging, an interesting and perhaps more immersive aspect was that the performance was recorded with a binaural microphone, so that the deluge of sounds was quite successfully spatially distributed in headphones. I need to compare this with my only recorded copy, Karl records' LP of La légende, but my initial impression was that the performance was very "digital", Hecker's Sun Pandämonium came to mind.

Here's one-minute clip from rehearsals: https://areena.yle.fi/1-50753985

I cursorily listened to the last batch and enjoyed Empreintes the most due to its audible spectralist bent and relative concision. Gmeeoorh is fascinating as the organ is not an instrument I associate with Xenakis, and I like it when he casts himself against type, but the work's nearly 20-minute running time does it no favours. Noomena seemed somewhat formulaic and left the least positive impression. That I haven't really been in the mood for Xenakis-esque sounds lately doesn't help…

I thought I'd wait a week to give people a chance to catch up after the ILM polls.

That sounds v cool, jvc. I listened to a small portion of it but couldn't stay - the sound definitely seemed good.

Let's do a light couple of weeks, since I think there's a lot of overlap between the constituency for this thread and the metal poll. I'll keep it just under 45m this week.

Week 15
N’shima, 2 Mez/A, 2 hn, 2 trbn, vc, 1975
Phlegra, 11 insts, 1975

That's about 31m, actually.

Good call, thanks.

I listened to both pieces this morning.

Phlegra: Harley describes this as "organic", which seems right. I'm not sure how much it's the composition, how much it's the Ensemble Intercontemporain/Tabachnik performance I listened to on Naxos, or both, but I got a real 'live' feel of musicians in dialogue and interaction with each other, like the energy and feel of a good improvisation was captured in notated form. A lot of call-and-response sorts of passages, as one also finds in Boulez's Le marteau sans maître, for example, but with parts coming together in unisons or clusters and then pulling apart. The use of heterophony seems a little uncharacteristic. The quarter-tone relationships add to the conversational quality, I find. A lot of variation in instrumental timbre on sustained or repeated pitches. A piece I think I could come back to a lot.

N'shima: I listened to this video, curious about the OOP - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNd81WWYgYE
It's actually described pretty well at the link. The melodic lines were derived from computer-generated curves based on Brownian motion, apparently. The two singers sing/declaim in a very rough, raw, affecting style, influenced by Mediterranean folk music, using Hebrew syllables. The brass instruments respond and accompany in a sparse, stark way. There's some humour in the sul pont glissandi on the cello. Definitely interesting and expressive.

Had a leisurely walk with both Spotify recordings of Phlegra just now, and my somewhat superficial thoughts were along the lines of "this is probably the closest I've heard in this project to anything that could be called a divertimento" -- which while different, is I guess not entirely incompatible with Sund4r's reaction.

I really like N'shima--thanks for the heads-up! I just bought an mp3 of a different performance of it released in 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBhNNnnwyq4
https://www.discogs.com/Various-20-Ans-De-Musique-Contemporaine-Metz-6/release/12858271

Phlegra seems the most human composition in a long time. That may just be my interpretation, but it does seem like it comes the closest to acknowledging classical forms of the lot of these pieces so far. It's not tonal, but it's not tone clusters. It's not really abrasive, just a little jumbled to the classical ear.

I did like the singing in N'shima, also, it does kind of sound like turn of the century field recordings of Balkan folk music.

Also Craig I think that's the recording of N'shima I put on the Spotify playlist, although with a much worse cover:

https://resources.tidal.com/images/4eeb76a3/c60b/4b4b/9e21/3c8b0e077186/640x640.jpg

^ Totally! Yup, the file I bought has that cover
(an add'l unexpected surprise that I also just bought from that set was Pianophonie [1978] for piano, electronic transformation and orchestra by Kazimierz Serocki)

Tom summed up my feelings exactly. Both pieces engage with folk music more audibly than most everything sinceZyia, yet they do so without a shred of backward-looking nostalgia. I'll be revisiting these two for sure, especially Phlegra.

Week 16

Psappha, perc, 1975
Theraps, db, 1975–6
Epeï, eng hn, cl, tpt, 2 trbn, db, 1976

I see Epei is on YouTube but I can't find it on Spotify. I guess the word means "so what?" in ancient Greek, I'm curious to see if it's influenced by Miles Davis.

I just listened to Gert Mortensen's recording of Psappha from the 1990 BIS disc on Naxos Music Library and, wow, I guess the mid-70s is when Xenakis mellowed out? It's virtuosic and complex but a lot of passages here have a steady, comparatively easy-to-follow beat, even a groove. The folk/traditional influences are again apparent. I thought of Carnatic rhythms at times, although idk if that was an actual influence. The percussion timbres are also generally pleasant. (Apparently there are six groups of instruments for the one player, three of metal and three of wood and skin, with up to 15 instruments played at once.) It's still a long way from lo-fi beats to study to ofc and the beat is pulled away at moments before we ultimately build up to really intense pounding.

"Pleasant" is too mild: I find the sounds and variety thereof really viscerally pleasing, at least in this recording.

We’re not quite done yet but if I had to venture a crude ranking based on everything I’ve heard over the years I’d go with: middle > early > late.

Re "mellowed", "pleasant" etc: on my hunt for extant recordings of Epeï*, I was amused at the words of an Amazon reviewer:

a strange little limp piece, the most flaccid thing Xenakis ever wrote

*) it is sometimes possible to dig up badly tagged versions of hard-to-find works on Spotify by going via performers, album titles etc; no luck here though

And talking of Spotify and tagging: the Håkon Thelin recording of Theraps isn't as unreasonably slow compared to other recordings as it appears by its track length of 16:21. It is the last track of the album; Theraps actually ends at about 12:10 and is followed by a hidden track: POING playing a cover version of "Mr. Krinkle" by Primus.

This is how Theraps is described in the liner notes to Frank Reinecke's recording:

There now follows a descent into the nethermost regions in Theraps by IANNIS XENAKIS, a work traditionally regarded as unplayable. Xenakis flings the soloist into an almost impenetrable thicket of notes, far beyond his technical capabilities and as perilous as barbed wire. Poised at and beyond the borderline of the humanly feasible, Theraps, as suggested by the meaning of this ancient Greek word, has a ‘servient’ function in that it casts player and listener alike under its spell. Indulgent relaxation is out of the question: “We live more intensively,” Xenakis explains, “when we have to cope with hosts of problems.” Theraps is designed for one thing above all: precise listening – to microtonal gradations, two-voice up-and-down glissando peregrinations, sustained natural intervals, and queazily distorted double harmonics. The piece jumps abruptly between these elements. Though the parameters of rhythm, melody, and harmony are addressed as well, Xenakis has wrested them from familiar patterns and plunged them into gargantuan archaic formations. Audacity and panic are never very far apart in this piece

This seems about right. The overall form isn't obvious but it remains gripping and engaging in a visceral way and never harsh to my ear. The sustained 'queasy' double harmonics (I think that's what I'm hearing) are most striking to me, in that I might have possibly even guessed they were coming from extended techniques on some kind of wind instrument.

Well, Épéï is definitely different and shows the mellowing. I listened to it here since it's not on Naxos or Spotify:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGgAf_6Y7JQ

It doesn't seem to have been influenced by Miles Davis (and Harley says the title means "since" - in Greek?) but if someone had told me that it was Xenakis's homage to modal jazz, I would have believed them. Again, we have regular pulse and it's built around a very clear, obvious three-note motive treated in canon with a second part that almost seems heterophonic (the instruments vary single pitches but then we get a bit of melody too). It proceeds to flow in an organic way, similar to Psappha. There's a lot of Scelsi-style variation of timbre and dynamics on a narrow range of continued pitches and everyone comes together on a huge unison at the end.

Harley's breakdown:

The music is very much built upon continuous textural transformations. Timbre, too, or instrumental color, is treated in a continuous fashion, proceeding from homogeneity rather than contrast, restricting the differences between the instruments rather than emphasizing them. The long opening section proceeds without interruption for close to four minutes, almost one quarter of the piece’s duration. The muted trumpet states a three-note motive, shadowed by the clarinet playing legato an octave lower, and proceeds to vary it slightly with each repetition. The other instruments surround this strange canonic variation with sustained notes in the same register, varied in all manner of ways. After this lengthy, incrementally evolving passage, there are two short, contrasting sections. The first proceeds without break into a narrowband glissando sonority, with all instruments outlining slowly undulating, independent contours, the blocklike dynamic changes moving twice from pp to fff. A short break leads to the second section, in which a uniform pulse, articulating six-note clusters that vary slightly with each new beat, gradually moves out of phase and then back in again. The next section, which carries through pretty much to the end, though in less continuous fashion than earlier, begins with a sustained pitch, A4, doubled in the trumpet and cor anglais. This pitch is varied through octave doublings, dynamic and rhythmic variations, and by increasingly wide-ranging glissandi. The sonority is strongly reminiscent of the work of Giacinti Scelsi, although the sporadic flurries of notes away from (and back to) the central pitch add an energy that is proper to Xenakis. At m. 111, there is a sharp interruption, a succession of fff clusters in all the instruments but the cor anglais. The music then starts up again as before, with little or no sign that this event had any impact on the material. The textural variations otherwise unfold gradually, carrying on right up to the closing passage. A short break signals the end, which bursts into a short statement of layered pulsations, each instrument moving back and forth between two neighboring pitches at a different rate. This gives way gradually to trills in all the instruments, then a rather dramatic heralding of a single pitch, E, spread across five octaves.