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

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

(I know I'm the resident percussionist, which makes this request all the more ardent)

Can't go wrong with the Percussions de Strasbourg.

Anemoessa: I listened to this version, credited to "Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Chorus of the Netherlands Radio; Richard Dufallo. Concertgebouw Amsterdam, 16/06/1979" (?):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH0ss-cIigk
It's got great mood and sweeping drama with dense masses of orchestral and choral sound. The choir often just turns into a wash of sound. Harley notes that the material for choir is very similar to the material for orchestra (quarter-tone clusters, glissandi), which makes sense.

Dikthas: I just listened to the Irvine Arditti/Claude Helffler recording of this violin/piano duo twice while spaced out and reading ilx and working on taxes. Seems like a fun dialogue between the two parts, with a lot of variation in texture, dynamics, register, and activity.

Palimpsest: I really like this one. I listened to the recording by Aki Takahashi/Society for New Music/Charles Peltz. Very energetic and complex but still easy enough to follow (as this kind of thing goes). Rhythm seems to be the focus here and there's usually a pulse, against which you have all kinds of layered cross-rhythms, or which break for bracing metrical changes. (Harley says up to four simultaneous tempi just in the opening piano solo!) There are clear motives. The piano, string, wind, and percussion parts are all treated something like distinct entities that are sometimes featured on their own, sometimes juxtaposed against each other, then combined about 10m in into a homophonic chorale-like texture. Harley notes that it is a relatively rare piece that has no microtones; we actually end up in modal territory eventually. Really clear, dramatic, satisfying conclusion.

I listened to Aïs twice last night and enjoyed it quite a bit, the energy and interplay between the baritone singing a three-octave range of material, the orchestra, and the percussion - never really reverting to a traditional voice + accompaniment texture. I feel like Xenakis was mostly having fun with his material in this period.

And as promised, 42 minutes of percussion for this week:

Week 22
Pléïades, 6 perc, 1979

I love Xenakis' more percussive and textural orchestral pieces. The opening to Pithoprakta is exactly the kind of thing I need sometimes, and this piece certainly takes those concepts and explores everything so much further, and it's far more "precise"

Currently listening to the Les Percussions de Strasbourg (DENON recording, 1988) version, but there appears to be one released a couple years ago by DeciBells under Domenico Melchiorre that is six minutes longer. Definitely enjoying the Strasbourg version so far, but very curious to hear other versions now too. Other Xenakis recordings done in the last 10 years really have some amazing recording quality (better mics? mic placement?) that pulls you into the sounds more viscerally, especially when listening on a good setup.

I've listened to three recordings now: Kroumata Percussion Ensemble (1990), Red Fish Blue Fish/Steven Schick (2007), and the Strasbourg (86). Interesting that none of them exactly follow either of the two possible orderings that Harley says X allowed!:

The composer allows for two different orderings of the movements: (1) Claviers—Peaux—Métaux—Mélanges; and (2) Mélanges—Claviers—Métaux—Peaux.

The Strasbourg and RFBF recordings reverse the order of "Claviers" and "Métaux" in (2). Kroumata do it Métaux-Claviers-Mélanges-Peaux (which kind of works!).

The microtonal "sixxen" instruments that were designed for the "Métaux" movement sound really pleasant in the Kroumata recording and it's easy to pick out the different layers - generally, layering parts in different tempi seems to be a core idea of this piece. My favourite is "Claviers", where we start with a melody played in unison that then starts to diverge as the different mallet percussion players start playing it at different tempi - it actually reminded me a bit of Reich. Overall, it's a piece that rewards close listening, I find, while I also think it does some dazzling and spectacular things that I can imagine a general audience latching onto.

Week 23

Komboï, amp hpd, perc, 1981; Chojnacka, Gualda, Metz, 22 Nov 1981
Embellie, va, 1981; G. Renon-McLaughlin, Paris, 1981
Nekuïa (phonemes and text from J.-P. Richter: Siebenkäs and Xenakis: Ecoute), SATB (54 minimum), orch, 1981
Pour les baleines, str, 1982

Welcome to the 1980s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6f8X306XLk

I listened to Komboï yesterday morning, the Chojnacka/Gualda recording. I was listening casually but really liked it - the manic glitch electronica/proto-Aphex Twin qualities in Khoaï mentioned above seem even stronger in this - really interesting and gripping rhythms. Reading Harley now:

The combination of harpsichord and percussion is not at all a common one, but the percussive nature of the keyboard, together with the power it is capable of when amplified, makes it an interesting match for the percussion’s range of sonorities and dynamics. Rather than exploit the aggressive chararacteristics of the instruments, however, Xenakis creates passages of delicacy and beauty, particularly in the combination of harpsichord and vibraphone.

The title, Komboï, means “knots,” in this case of rhythms, timbres, structures, personalities (Xenakis 1982b). There are, as might be expected, a wide range of rhythmic structures and patterns deployed. The opening, for example, launches into a fast, regular pulsation on the bongo. Xenakis sets up an interlocking pattern of accents on top of the ticking drum: the dynamic accents at first follow a durational pattern of 8–3–3; the timbral accents, manifested by punctuations on other drums, follow a more variable pattern of 4–4–long (18, 30,16). The variation of these elements, together with the agogic accent created by the occasional shift of the bongo pulse to triplets, continues through the first section.

Set against this, the harpsichord outlines a pitch sieve by means of rising chordal sequences. This sieve bears little resemblance to the pelog sonorities of Serment or Jonchaies. There are no adjacent intervals of a major third, and there are segments of three whole steps outlining whole-tone tritone segments. The pattern of the six-note chords remains fixed, and the harpsichord continues the passage by fragmenting the rising sequences into increasing disjunct segments. A brief reference to Mists is found at m. 16. An elaborate arborescent flourish in the harpsichord drops down to the low register in preparation for a pause, then the vibraphone signals the second section.

As in the piano solo from the previous year, this long section features stochastic clouds of notes, beginning with the harpsichord (the pitches belong to the same sieve as before), then adding the vibraphone. In his score, Xenakis uses the word crystalline to describe the character of this passage. The timbres of the two instruments fuse in a remarkable way, creating a sound of striking beauty. The density and ambitus of the notes ebb and flow, passing back and forth between the instruments. The two do not share the same pitch sieve, counteracting the timbral synthesis of the instrumental combination. Brief interjections of a repeated chord in the vibraphone (an A major triad with an added B) act as transition to the next section, which continues the combination of harpsichord and vibraphone but in a completely different style.

In a passage toward the end of Dikhthas Xenakis creates a tonal, toccata-like atmosphere by combining two modal segments. Komboï contains a similar section, though the sonority is much closer to gamelan than to Beethoven. A three-note pattern in the harpsichord is juxtaposed against a four-note pattern in the vibraphone, with additional gonglike punctuations from lower notes in both instruments. As in the beginning, Xenakis layers a number of temporal patterns onto the pulsating three-note figure in the harpsichord. While the left hand of the harpsichord creates a triplet pattern, accenting every three notes, the vibraphone articulates a more complex pattern: 3–3–3–3– 3–2/3–3–3–2/3–3–2. The number of repetitions of the triplet follows a 5–3–2 pattern. Interestingly, the ordering of the notes, both in the vibraphone and the harpsichord, repeats, these cycles coinciding with the rhythmic cycle of the vibraphone. Thus, the material is very carefully constructed, setting up a cycle of repetition that, once established, is then subject to permutation.

After well over a minute of this, the harpsichord breaks out with another Mists-like flourish, only to have the vibraphone jump right back in, taking over the harpsichord’s pattern from before. This reversal carries into a more radical variation, a rhythmic layering in which each instrument sees its material broken into two independent tempi. Subsequently, the hitherto static pitch material opens out into layered contours, meandering lower and lower until the section ends with an ascent and final pause, the gamelan sonority ringing on.

A sparser passage follows, built on a fixed sonority of two interlocking chords different from the previous section. They are paired either with the vibraphone or the harpsichord, but the vibraphone soon drops out to switch to woodblocks. Gradually, a regular pulse is built up, the harpsichord playing an irregular pattern of alternations between the two chords. As the woodblocks join the pulse, the harpsichord breaks away, first with another flourish of layered runs and then with a much more sporadic continuation of the two chords. The irregular structure of the harpsichord part leads quite smoothly into a second passage of stochastic flurries, this time in counterpoint to the regular pulse in the woodblocks. A further rhythmic variation is introduced in a short passage for harpsichord as the woodblocks fade out, where two-part layered scalar contours accordion in and out over the range of the keyboards.

The fifth section of Komboï features the harpsichord alone. In an effort to explore the subtle resonances and timbral changes the instrument is capable of, Xenakis asks the player to keep her fingers down on a ten-note chord. The passage consists of pseudo-melodies created by the articulations of these notes one at a time, punctuated by chords of both hands, or one or the other. These are accentuated by the addition of registral changes effected by the pedals. After some two minutes, the music finally breaks away to new pitch material, though still held to the same narrow range. As the percussion enters, the harpsichord shifts—after a break—to a reprise of the two-part, layered running contours, sailing right into another stochastic passage. The final section, the longest at over four minutes, constitutes an extended series of variations on seven chords, set against a whole range of rhythmic and timbral elements in the percussion, most notably a set of ceramic flowerpots. The chords, of variable intervallic content, are first introduced in order, accompanied by an irregular rhythmic structure on the woodblocks and drums. Thereafter, the progression is reordered in an unpredictable fashion, though the seventh chord becomes a kind of anchor, recurring more often than the others. As the percussion shifts to stochastic rhythms, the left- and right-hand components of the chords become separated and start to be treated independently. Finally, as the percussion switches to the flowerpots, the harpsichord repeats the seventh chord in its entirety for twelve beats. The percussion then takes over the pulse and the harpsichord launches into a complex passage in which the chordal components are again reordered and recombined, colored by intricate pedal changes (like the solo passage earlier). With various pauses and fluctuations of density, this material continues to the end, along with the evocative ceramic sonority of the flowerpots.5 The final chord is a composite, created from the left-hand portion of the sixth chord and the right-hand portion of the seventh chord.

At seventeen minutes, Komboï is one of Xenakis’s more substantial chamber works. The sections are laid out on a broad scale, with many “knots” and fluctuations of elements. It is striking just how well the two instruments go together. The plucked metallic sound of the harpsichord blends both with the vibraphone and the ringing tones of the flowerpots (strokes of a vivid sonic imagination). The various types of rhythmic material are familiar from earlier works, but the range of harmonic material is new. There is not just one sieve used, but several, and chords or melodic patterns of limited range are chosen with care.

Coming back to it this morning, this might be one of my favourites.

I haven't picked out all the pitch material but it really does manage to be pretty, varied, and energetic, and I really appreciate what's going on with texture, dynamics, and rhythm.

Going to slowly catch up with everything I missed before the week's through.

If you'll allow a preliminary challop, I think La Légende d'Eer is way too long for its own good.

I put both the recording Sund4r was listening to, and one by Huang and Wettstein, on the Spotify playlist, partly because it sounds intersting, partly because two of these pieces aren't on Spotify and I figured I could flesh the playlist out.

I listened to Garth Knox's recording of Embellie a couple of times - very cool through-composed work for solo viola; he really exploits the range of the oft-overlooked instrument while writing something pensive and expressive. It begins with a lyrical melody that is developed and treated in counterpoint with good use of double stops, then moves to more similar/parallel motion before the 2m mark, then we move to something like a call and response between a single voice and double stops. A folky melody enters, seemingly against a pedal. Then at the 4m mark, we move to a more active passage of more typical Xenakis string writing, with glissandi and fast virtuosic material spanning the instrument's registers; sounds like we're getting more quarter-tones here? In the last minute or two, he seems to reconcile the different textural and rhythmic ideas while also bringing in more scratch tones and increased glissando effects.

There's a broad overall progression in terms of sound and timbre,

Curious where the title comes from - as I understand, it could mean both "embellished" and "a lull".

Anyone know of a recording of Pour les baleines?

Found one - listened a few times. It's a 2.5m miniature, written for a Greenpeace benefit. Gets through a lot of string techniques, textures, and dynamic levels in its short time - the glissandi mimic whale songs at the end. Nice minor work.

Listened to this (OOP) recording of Nekuïa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Txie4lAMk
It's fantastic! Has a cinematic quality (in the horror-film sense), with the integration of more typical sound mass and glissando textures with a focus on more melodic material, at times a bit reminiscent of Bartok, sometimes almost post-Wagnerian and sweeping in character. A lot of intense dynamics and percussive sfz attacks.

Week 24

Pour la Paix (Xenakis), SATB, 2 female spkrs, 2 male spkrs, tape (UPIC), 1981, version for SATB (32 minimum)
Serment-Orkos (Hippocrates), SATB (32 minimum), 1981
Pour Maurice, Bar, pf, 1982
Mists, pf, 1981
Lichens, 1983

A bit of everything this week

I listened to Serment-Orkos and Pour Maurice, two short vocal works, this morning. I enjoyed both but don't have a lot to say about them yet. The latter is especially cool, with manic atonal piano and the baritone jumping through registers in vocalise. The former sounds like there may be crunchy quarter-tone clusters in the choral harmonies (perhaps just dense clusters?) but has some relatively clear and simple melodic motifs. Feels like there's a centre on D at times.

I listened to Mists a few times, first Klara Kormendi's recording, then Roger Woodward's, which I vastly preferred. Harley describes the form as tripartite, with a section based on linear 'arborescences', a section based on stochastic clouds of notes, and a final section that alternates passages of these two ideas. The overall energy and dynamic and registral range come across really fluidly in Woodward's playing.

I wasn't real into Komboi, but I've never really warmed to 20th century percussion music for some reason. I guess it's a good thing I didn't try to go to conservatory, or maybe I'd have a different view on it if I was playing it for a living? I haven't made it to Embellie yet, but it's short, so I'll start there this weekend and maybe trawl through the thread for YT links and such for what I've missed.

There's a good chance you wouldn't be playing Xenakis for a living even if you did go to conservatory. :P

But, yeah, formal study can make a difference in your appreciation, although otoh X himself thought his listeners should need no special training.

I was listening to "Pour la Paix" walking home from work today! It's not very good though.

French/French based electroacoustic composers overly fond of spoken word imo.

X is usually not! Where did you find that piece?

Got it from a blog.

I found a couple things on slsk, too-- Pour la Paix and Pour les Baleines. Pour Maurice is on YT, I have that queued up.

Listening now to Embellies, which I really enjoy. It sounds like the player is playing too hard to keep in tune, which I suspect is microtonality, not pure punk rock aggression on the viola.

Lichens is much more exciting than the name implies imho

Pour Maurice using a lot of falsetto. There's also a recording on YouTube of a soprano singing it, which I'm not sure is going to be tolerable, but we'll see.

Actually nothing particularly shrill, if anything it's amusing to hear her bottom out on the low notes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVr7juBq2jg

Tom D OTM about Pour la Paix. Feels like the ending of Evangelion or something, important sounding dialogue I can almost follow sometimes separated by WTF moments. Also, in keeping with my near failure of French II in middle school, I almost wrote "Pour le Paix".

Really enjoying Nekuia. This doesn't seem so much farther out than Shostakovich or Schmidt symphonies. Why isn't this programmed?

Found Pour la paix here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKflilo45tk

It's definitely different from anything else so far in the way it's built around the spoken-word narrative by Xenakis's wife Françoise. Tom, I don't think the text is easy to follow - I used Youtube closed captions the first time I listened closely since, aside from the narrative itself being a bit rarefied and poetic and jumping around a lot in its timeline, the spoken voices are also soft compared to the electronic and choral sounds with which they are juxtaposed, are shifted around on the stereo soundstage, and are sometimes treated with effects. (Youtube captions also had trouble following the text, esp during denser passages.) The story is actually kind of beautiful, though, and the sonic treatment of the text is interesting and has a definite impact, when I come back to it on a second listen after having parsed the narrative. In the end, I just don't see myself coming back often to a piece that is so heavily text-based.

I also found Lichens exciting. A lot of energy, variety, and movement. Starts with just strings. Apparently, there's some kind of micro-heterophony going on where similar lines are being played at different tempo but it's hard to pick out. Feels like we have some clusters and glissandi here. Piece builds up with aggressive percussion and some back-and-forth with winds.

Week 25 (!)

Shaar, str, 1983
Chant des Soleils (Xenakis, after P. du Mans), SATB, children’s choir, 18 brass 6 (hn, 6 tpt, 6 trbn) or multiple, perc, 1983
Khal Perr, brass qnt, 2 perc, 1983
Tetras, str qt, 1983

I wish that Xenakis remix disc had included a version of Pour la Paix that replaced all the text with the narration from "Dead Flag Blues."

On a couple of listens (Tamayo/Luxembourg and an unlabelled recording on Youtube), Shaar seems like a good, enjoyable piece that mostly works the territory Xenakis has established in string pieces so far (clusters, glissandi, density of texture). Khal Perr (recording from Wallace Collection; Miller, John; Wallace, John; Gunton, Simon; Hathaway, Kevin; Terian, Christopher; Haggart, Robin) stands out a bit more, with more of a sense of dialogue between individual voices.

I'm a fan of string quartets but Tetras still hasn't really connected with me, for some reason. I listened to the Arditti and Jack recordings this week. It might actually be the first piece that just hasn't made that much of an impression.

Couldn't find a recording of Chant des soleils on NML, Spotify, Youtube, or iTunes.

Week 26

Thalleïn, pic, ob, cl, bn, hn, pic tpt, trbn, perc, pf, str qnt, 1984
Naama, amp hpd, 1984
Alax, 3 ens of 10 insts (fl, cl, 2 hn, trbn, hp, perc, vn, 2 vc), 1985

I just listened to Chojnacka's recording of Naama. Feels a bit different from the previous solo harpsichord pieces. More percussive stabs of clusters with a clear pulse, contrasted and then combined with passages of softer, less dense motivic material. I really like the sounds he (and she) get out of the harpsichord. Pretty intense and satisfying as a composition.