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

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.

Btw, the piece was commissioned by la Société de musique contemporaine du Québec and premiered in Montreal.

I haven't listened to the latest batch yet, but so far I am pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of Xenakis pieces that were commissioned by Canadian institutions and/or premiered in Canada.

"Epei" for "since" is Greek, yes. IIRC it works a bit like in English, in that it have the force of both "after" and "because".

*can have

Another light week for the last week of metal poll; 1976 was about solo and chamber music for X, it seems:

Week 17

Retours-Windungen, 12 vc, 1976
Dmaathen, ob, perc, 1976
Khoaï, hpd, 1976

The first one seems absent from Spotify, except for a later 8-cello version, which from a quick sampling sounds pretty representative of the 1976 one.

Dmaathen is a fun listen! It may not be entirely coincidental that i) I love oboe and ii) I was seven years old in 1976, and this somewhat reminds me of some of the more far-out soundtrack work to children's TV (at least on Scandinavian state broadcasting) at that time.

Whoa, Chojnacka's Khoaï almost feels like some kind of manic 2003 glitchtronica project!

Late to the party, with little to add, but of the previous three, I enjoyed Theraps the most, and heard it as a double-bass expansion of the single-minded concept at play in Mikka. Epeï is quite cool as well, similar in some ways to the heterophonic idiom Ștefan Niculescu was pursuing around the same time. Psappha was pleasant enough, but it's not the most memorable of his works for percussion imo despite having been recorded numerous times.

I listened to the recording of Retours-Windungen by the cellists of the Berlin Phil on NML and also watched a clip on YT of Nomos playing it in a French museum, with the cellists in a circle around the audience. Without reading about it, it's a very nicely crafted short piece in a kind of ternary form. The first section might actually suggest the influence of minimalism. There's a steady repeated pulse and the harmony is surprisingly clear, simple, and largely (I think) diatonic at first, with a lot of major thirds iirc. Dense clusters build up, though, and we move into a B section that is more typically Xenakis, with a lot of timbral effects (col legno?) and glissandi, and no literally stated beat. This builds back into more rhythmic material but much more aggressively so than in the first section, and in gnarly clusters.

Listening for a second time to Dmaathen (Christian Hommel/Johannes Fischer). At the outset, you'd be forgiven for not believing it's Xenakis. It's a folky tune with a beat! But then we get long held multiphonics on the oboe and complex, less regular rhythms in the percussion. The percussion actually becomes more of the focus, with a wide timbral and dynamic range, although it drops out at times and I begin to focus more on the oboe multiphonics at that point. Quite a dynamic range in the oboe as well. About 4:40, the rhythm becomes regular and the oboe part is more melodic again for a while before we return to long multiphonic effects; more of an emphasis on tuned mallet percussion here. It sounds like there may be water bowls around 6:30?? We move back and forth between more melodic passages and more timbrally-oriented material, while the percussion part moves between being silent, being an accompanist, and being overpowering. It's almost dizzying.

Whoa, Chojnacka's Khoaï almost feels like some kind of manic 2003 glitchtronica project!

I'm listening to Jukka Tiensuu's recording. I've heard this piece before but not in ages and yeah, the above is accurate. Quite intense and energetic. There are recurring motives and phrase structure; in a way, it's also reminiscent of a hyperdrive version of Baroque counterpoint.

Week 18

Mikka ‘S’, vn, 1976
Jonchaies, 1977
A Colone (Sophocles), male/female vv (20 minimum), 5 hn, 3 trbn, 6 vc, 4 db, 1977

Whoa, Chojnacka's Khoaï almost feels like some kind of manic 2003 glitchtronica project!

― anatol_merklich, Monday, March 1, 2021 4:54 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

YES. The harpsichord is my favorite keyboard instrument, so Khoaï and all the Xenakis/Chojnacka collabs are IT for me. Ligeti's harpsichord pieces (Passacaglia Ungherese, Hungarian Rock, and Continuum) scratch a similar itch but are definitely less far-out

Mikka 'S': Listened to Irvine Arditti's recording a few times. The idea of the continuous glissando from Mikka is still there but for most of the piece, there are two voices on the single bowed instrument, sometimes with separate glissandi in both, sometimes with a pedal (often on open strings, from what I gather) in one. In the last section, we lose the counterpoint and the gliss is punctuated with aggressive bow attacks. The very end of the piece has felt abrupt every time. Fascinating, regardless.

Jonchaies: this is fantastic, a real tour de force. (Listening to Tamayo/Luxembourg Phil). He worked his increasing comfort with melody and pulse into a massive orchestral piece that brings back the grandiose sonic aspirations of his early pieces.

Harley:

Jonchaies (“rushes, reeds”) calls for an orchestra of gigantic proportions: 109 musicians, including quadruple winds (with six clarinets and six horns), six percussionists, and an extra large string section. Parts of the piece are volcanic, with thickly layered, pounding pulsations, or wailing clusters of brass. Other parts, however, are surprisingly delicate, even lyrical. The long opening section for strings alone (with a few discrete intrusions by the bass drum and temple blocks) is, without a doubt, one of the most melodically expressive passages in all of Xenakis’s output. After a dramatic launch, a glissando rocketing up to the high register to fall back slightly to a sustained B6, a modal melody unfolds. As it wends its way slowly down to the mid-low register and then back up again, the melody splits off into six voices, each following more or less the same contour by some degree of delay. The resulting texture is at the same time quasi-imitative and quasi-heterophonic. Each of the six voices is assigned a roughly equal complement of string instruments split into three layers, one bowing the notes normally, the second bowing them and adding a glissando, and the third (not always present) plucking the notes. The resultant additive sonority sounds like an Indonesian gamelan, enhanced by the intervallic structure of the pitch sieve used...

... The opening melody zeroes in right away on the intervallic structure Xenakis was attracted to in the Javanese gamelan. The major third is surrounded above and below by a semitone, outlining the interlocking fourths he mentions. The unfolding of the melody proceeds primarily by a steplike motion (from one pitch of the sieve to the next) or by jumping over one note to the next. The difference in sonority between this melodic structure and the chantlike melodies in the choral works written just prior is striking. In those, the contours appear to be freely composed, guided by the prosody of the text and a knowledge of Greek tetrachordal organization. The restricted range allows the flow of the language to proceed in a relatively natural(istic) way. In Jonchaies, and many subsequent scores, the intervallic structure of the sieve, which often remains fixed throughout a section or piece, creates a certain identity or “timbre.” The periodic nature of the sieve creates uniformity throughout the full range of the material, though its nonoctaviating structure (where the interrallic pattern does not repeat at the octave) structure has the effect of weakening the tonal implications of the leading tones to create a more mysterious, compelling expression. With six rhythmically independent lines carrying on together, the string sound is certainly complex, but the strong identity of the intervallic structure of the underlying sieve produces a clarity that would otherwise be missing.

The remaining sections of Jonchaies are quite different from the opening passage, but no less powerful. The second part is the most substantiated (at five minutes, being a full minute longer than the opening), and it is built from layers of rhythmic pulsations involving the full orchestra. Each layer moves chromatically along a slowly undulating, independently conceived, contour. The driving pulse is occasionally fractured by certain layers shifting to a different tempo. The orchestration is noteworthy for its dynamic mixtures of instruments, the timbral components of each layer shifting as lines enter and drop out.

The third, relatively brief, section turns the spotlight back onto the strings, supported by sustained clusters in the winds and rolls on the low drums. The strings repeat a sharply defined gesture four times, varying the proportions with each. A strongly articulated ascending passage, in which each of the five families of strings proceed along independent rhythmic and melodic trajectories, is succeeded by a static passage of chordal pulsations, this time synchronized, leading into a glissando passage that falls back down again, each group proceeding independently as before. A conceptual link to the earlier sections is found in the wavelike contours of the material, with each passage offering a different musical perspective on the title, conjuring winds blowing through a field of rushes.

This rather enclosed section is succeeded by a narrowly banded texture featuring the brass, each instrument playing articulated glissandi. The emphasis shifts from horns to trumpets and trombones (from the more rounded sonority of the conical tubing to the more pointed sonority of the cylindrical brass). A “still point” is reached at m. 182, where the trombones sustain a chord through a fermata. The sound fills out again as all of the brass reenter, followed by the woodwinds, percussion, and finally the strings, as the concluding section begins. This final portion, quite substantial at something over three minutes, is by far the most complex. As many as seven layers of independent sonic entities are deployed at the same time. Overall, the music is filtered upwards beginning with the ripping glissandi of the horns, and finally concluding with the high chirps of the piccolos, xylophone, and marimba.

I have a better idea of what sieves are after reading some of this: http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/15753/1/11.2-Dimitris-Exarchos-&-Daniel-Jones.pdf

Jonchaies is incredible, yes – top 5, possibly top 3 Xenakis for me.

I'll try to catch back up tonight, the metal poll rollout had me busy most of last week. Spotify is as updated as I could get it, unless someone has a bead on A Colone or Retours-Windungen.

I bought the New London Chamber Choir/Critical Band/James Woods album Xenakis: Choral Music on iTunes since I couldn't find a streaming version of "À Colone" anywhere. It doesn't seem like the most exciting of his works. The singers mostly chant/declaim in ancient Greek (from Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus apparently) with occasional brass punctuations. There is a brief melodic instrumental introduction. The liner notes describe that this was Xenakis's effort to recreate speech patterns of the fifth century BC. I don't dislike it but I feel like I might get more out of it if I knew the language or had studied the text? At least the next track on the album is the mind-warping "Nuits".

Do people want a week to catch up after the metal poll?

I didn't dare ask, but that would be great, yeah.

No problem, also gives me time to listen to more of the metal albums (and do a little listening before Rundgren ballots are due!).

Thanks!

Listening to Khoaï now, it really is a trip. Is this solo harpsichord? Some of these sounds don't seem like they could have existed in the 17th century, but I guess theoretically they could have if anyone had thought to play them. Sounds like video game music, if you play really weird video games.

According to this article:

The continuous and very quick change of registers is possible only with modern harpsichords where registration can be made using pedals. If the piece is performed on a historical copy the player will be forced to ignore a great deal of these indications.

Harley also notes that Elisabeth Chojnacka, for whom the piece was written, incorporated "amplification as an essential element of her instrument".

Ah. I noticed some seemingly impossible timbre changes at one point near the middle, too, I wonder if that was a modern innovation. FWIW I didn't even know they were still making harpsichords until maybe a few months ago.

What I didn't know was that there was a modern harpsichord developed in the 20th century, heavily influenced by the piano (and perhaps the organ??) which apparently fell somewhat out of favour with the HIP trend in the late 20th century: these have 4', 8', and 16' registers controlled by pedals, and which can also be partially engaged to allow for some timbral variety. (You can find excerpts of the score for Khoaï that have staves for these different registers.) Seems they also have other differences like wound steel strings, metal casing, hard leather plectra, and more powerful soundboards (and possibility of amplification). There's some info near the bottom of this; the author is clearly not a fan: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-the-harpsichord/history-and-construction-of-the-harpsichord/3A52A2F5D80CF9382932EF6E1024EA02/core-reader

Based on the fact that it made Khoaï possible, I think I'm a fan.

Haha yeah there's a little 'editorial' in that tone. "Deficient sound," etc. I have a hard time understanding people who think you can't (shouldn't?) improve on technology in 400 years.

I'm not sure he's right about the early 20th c modern harpsichord being used widely by pop/rock artists. I think this is the instrument that was used in 60s pop; it seems much more stripped-down, without the pedals etc, just with a guitar pickup: http://collections.nmc.ca/objects/205/baldwin-electric-harpsichord?ctx=cedc754f-cd3e-4924-980f-7da04725a0e2&idx=8

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/PleyelGrandModeleDeConcert.JPG/600px-PleyelGrandModeleDeConcert.JPG

vs

http://collections.nmc.ca/internal/media/dispatcher/741/preview

If any rock bands did in fact use the kind of modern harpsichord that was played by Chojnacka and Landowska, I def want to hear it, though.

Getting OT but Tori Amos? This definitely doesn't look (or really sound) like the Baldwin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vi-hnpvMt0