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

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

And getting back on topic, here's our listening for this week. Between 45-50m this week; a mix of small ensembles, solo, and tape music. I'm leaving La légende d'Éer for next week, since it is 46m on its own.

Week 19

À Hélène, Mez, female vv, 2 cl, 1977
Akanthos, 9 insts, 1977
Kottos, vc, 1977
Ikhoor, str trio, 1978
Mycenae alpha, 2-track, UPIC, 1978

Just in for a nod in agreement to Jonchaies being a monster. I already knew that, of course... because it was in pom's period polls not too long ago, where glowing talk about it made me check it out. :)

Happy to hear it. :)

I've fallen behind but I'll try to catch up in the coming days.

So have I tbh. 21st Century Guitar took up my whole week.

So, based on one listen while putting together breakfast and dealing with the sound of construction, À Hélène seems like another declamation, although with what I think of as more conventional choral vocal timbres (at least in this recording) and with a bit more to it melodically - nothing very disjunct or dissonant but no strong sense of development or dynamic range. I'm listening to a version by members of the Danish Natl Radio Choir on NML. Are there clarinets in other recordings? This is just voices.

Akanthos otoh seems really gripping and emotional. I was listening to the recording by Tony Arnold and ICE from this album: https://moderecords.com/catalog/261xenakis/ . It flows really organically, the wordless vocal is really expressive, and the instrumental responses are evocative and dramatic. Very effective blend of X's timbral and dynamic explorations with melody and pulse.

I listened to Rohan De Saram's recording of Kottos from the Arditti album. It's pretty cool. Seems to juxtapose deep scratch tones (on-the-bridge bowing acc to Harley - just checked), glissandi (with art. harmonics), and long bowed pitches, then develop each of these ideas with greater activity, again keeping a good pulse near the end.

I stuck with the same album for the string trio Ikhoor. This is a satisfyingly constructed and energetic piece that again juxtaposes and reconciles a couple of ideas. It starts with quick rhythmic hocketing between the three players, over which glissandi begin to emerge, which become a focus of the B section. Some ostinato material also appears here. We then return to the rhythmic back-and-forth but using something closer to the ostinato material now, before we get to longer sustained harmonics, which again become rhythmic.

Mycenae alpha: all right, no mellowing here. This is a nicely raw and bracing slice of noise with effective stereo movement. What sounds like a flanging effect at times. The comparative simplicity of the 2-track construction actually means that it translates v well to headphone listening. Reading a bit from here, it seems that the UPIC system was an early system for transforming graphic composition into sound, where the composer would draw on a tablet w axes for pitch and time: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02986061/document . You can see some of his preparatory sketches here: https://fr.calameo.com/read/0043738738c59884d6fd2?page=1

Superficially catching up…

Retours-Windungen: watched the Ensemble Nomos's performance on YT and it was quite placid and pleasant despite its forward momentum. I am not at all surprised that it was written for the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic, who don't appear to have recorded it, however.

Dmaathen: an unexpected pairing, and since I, like anatol_merklich, also love the oboe, I am quite taken with this piece's archaisms. In fact I prefer it to his works for solo percussion.

Khoaï: this is way more metal than 99% of avant-metal fare, and I'm here for it (listened to Jukka Tiensuu's recording).

Mikka ‘S’: I know this one from the Arditti two-fer and I still enjoy its deceptive single-mindedness a great deal.

Jonchaies: spectacular, possibly the peak of his orchestral output as far as I'm concerned. Per Nørgård's Terrains vagues, a belated offshoot of Jonchaies, is also worth looking into if you're a fan.

A Colone: Xenakis in his Ancient Greek ceremonial mode, and too text-oriented to speak to this non-Greek speaker.

À Hélène: along similar lines, although I much prefer this one, perhaps due to its relative accessibility melody-wise (there was no clarinet on the version I heard btw, by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart).

Akanthos: more enjoyable still, in no small part thanks to Tony Arnold's performance and because this piece comes across as a synthesis of the ancient and the modern rather than a doomed attempt at recreating the former.

Kottos: I get why Nomos alpha's controlled chaos is more revolutionary, but I think I prefer this one for its craftsmanship and overall coherence.

Ikhoor: Harley points out that this one owes much to Jonchaies and exhibits a greater concern for tempo and pulse, which I think suits Xenakis quite well and partly explains why late 70s/early 80s Xenakis may well be my favourite of his avatars.

Mycenae alpha: loses some of the sense of discovery that marked his early electronic works but more than makes up for it in simplicity of execution.

still have to get to most of these. butsince it hasn't come up yet about Jonchaies, it's worth noting: its middle section is basically a straight transcription of the rendered computer music crescendo at the center of Legende d'eer

I know a lot of people who always rate the orchestral works as The Work, and point to his transcriptions of his electronic efforts almost as proof that they were mostly useful as research. But that unbelievable rhythmic shepard's tonepile in the middle, it still does the exact same thing to my brain every time I hear it, it goes all the way in, that piece is still the summit for me. Hearing Jonchaies nailed all these issues for me about what a score is, what's an artifact, what depicts a sound...

Unlike Persepolis there aren't too many mixes of it out there, just make for sure you are not listening to one released on Mode. the 2016 one on Karlrecords from a few years ago does some interesting things with EQs that amp it all up without ruining it. but it's still the original stereo on Auvidis right down to the cosmic liners, which a generous person uploaded: https://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-La-L%C3%A9gende-DEer/release/978498

As promised,
Week 20

La legénde d'Eer (Diatope), 4- or 8-track, 1977

Well, this is delightful brain-melting noise so far.

I'm listening to the 2003 Naive release, on NML. It's almost done and it was very satisfying - the overall shape is very clear, there's a lot of sonic variety, and I really enjoy the high tones that begin and end the piece. I gather it's a mix of synthesized and prerecorded sounds?

And we're back with:

Week 21
Anemoessa (phonemic text), SATB (42 minimum), orch, 1979
Dikhthas, vn, pf, 1979
Palimpsest, eng hn, b cl, bn, hn, perc, pf, str qnt, 1979
Aïs, amp Bar, perc, orch, 1980

42m percussion ensemble piece Pleïades will get its own week next week.

Falling behind as usual, but I always catch up in the end, so it's only a matter of time…

Spotify playlist caught up, me not so much. Let me know if there are better recordings, different recordings, any recordings of Anemoessa, etc that I can add. Easy enough to skip around if there are four different interesting versions of one piece.

There are four (!) recordings of Pleiades on Spotify, if anyone already has a favorite, lemme no