The Electroacoustic Music of Iannis Xenakis Author(S): James Harley Source: Computer Music Journal, Vol
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Electroacoustic Music of Iannis Xenakis Author(s): James Harley Source: Computer Music Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1, In Memoriam Iannis Xenakis (Spring, 2002), pp. 33-57 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3681399 Accessed: 27/04/2009 02:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Computer Music Journal. http://www.jstor.org --- JamesHarley The Electroacoustic Minnesota State University Moorhead 1104 7th Avenue South lannis Xenakis Moorhead, Minnesota 56563, USA Music of [email protected] Of the close to 150 compositions that lannis Xe- output can be distinguished (see Table 1). In each, nakis created, only a handful involve electroacous- the technical means change somewhat, as do the tics (sounds directly produced by electronic, digital, aesthetic concerns. There are connections to or other studio means). Those works, however, are the instrumental music he was writing around influential beyond their number. Any history of the same time, and there are also connections electronic music must place Xenakis as a central to the electroacoustic music being written by oth- figure, both for his innovations and for the impact ers (though surprisingly few). Throughout his life, his music has had on successive generations. His as clearly exemplified in his electroacoustic works, involvement in the creation of multimedia "specta- Xenakis sought to "extend the limits of musical cles" brought him wide exposure, although his un- thought" (Robindore 1996). compromising aesthetic vision precluded fame and fortune on a popular scale. Nonetheless, through his work, Xenakis (see Fig- Stage One: MusiqueConcrete ure 1) presented a bold, charismatic persona:he was a revolutionary,both in politics and in art. The res- Xenakis arrived in Paris as a 25-year-old refugee in tive students of the 1960s, in particular,were drawn November 1947. He decided, having barely escaped to him, to his peculiar mixture of forward-reaching Greece (as a condemned insurgent) with his life, to modernism and noisy, pounding primitivism. There devote himself to music, a dream he had guarded are many parallels between Xenakis's work and ex- within himself but which had been sidelined by perimental elements of popularmusic, particularly turmoil, both political and personal (see Matossian in the embracing of technology and high-density/ 1986 for fuller details of Xenakis's early life). As a high-amplitude sound set off by disorienting, hallu- trained civil engineer, Xenakis found himself work- cinatory light-shows. The electroacoustic music of ing in the architectural studio of Le Corbusier, Xenakis, Concret PH in particular,provided a link where he was able to earn a living while pursuing between the "academic"components of the 2000 In- music in his spare time. He would have known vir- ternational Computer Music Conference in Berlin tually nothing of contemporary music, but the mi- and the club-oriented "off-ICMC"celebration, held lieu he worked in was certainly cultured (Le concurrently. Additionally, a new Asphodel release Corbusier was acquainted with EdgardVarese, for of his massive electroacoustic work, Persepolis, is example), and he would no doubt have heard vari- accompanied by "re-mixes"by, among others, Japa- ous broadcasts on Radio-France.He very likely lis- nese techno artists. tened to the early broadcasts of Pierre Schaeffer, It is my aim to present here a brief overview of who, in 1948, presented his first experiments in Xenakis's electroacoustic music in the manner of a musique concrete on the radio and in concert. tutorial. Certain aspects or selected works from Xenakis met Olivier Messiaen in 1951 and began this area of his compositional output have been ex- attending his classes that year, a habit he would amined in some detail (Di Scipio 1998, 2001; Hoff- continue more or less regularly for the next two mann 2000a; Solomos 1993), and a more detailed years. Messiaen was a central figure in the Parisian study of these works within the context of the rest new music world; Pierre Henry, who began work- of his output is found in Harley (forthcoming). ing closely with Schaefferin 1949, had been his While there is a strong unity of aesthetic and com- student between 1944 and 1948 (Boivin 1995). Dur- positional technique running through his entire ing this period (1951-1952), Messiaen himself vis- oeuvre, five stages in the trajectory of his studio ited Schaeffer'sstudio, producing a short piece, Timbres-durees. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who sat Computer Music Journal,26:1, pp. 33-57, Spring2002 with Xenakis in Messiaen's class during 1951- ? 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1952, also created a tape study during that time. Harley 33 Table 1. Xenakis's electroacoustic music Year Title Medium Duration Studio Recording Stage I: Musique concrete 1957 Diamorphoses Tape 6:53 GRM EMFCD 003 1958 Concret PH Tape, 2:42 Philips/GRM EMFCD 003, Caipirinha multimedia CAI.2027.2, Bvhaast CD 06/0701 1959 Analogique B Tape 1:30 Gravesano/GRM VandenburgVAN 003 1960 Orient-Occident Tape 10:56 GRM EMFCD 003 (soundtrack) 1960 Vasarely Soundtrack GRM Withdrawn 1961 Formes rouges Soundtrack GRM Withdrawn 1962 Bohor Tape (8-channel) 21:36 GRM EMFCD 003 Stage II: Mixed 1967 Polytope de Montreal Orchestra (pre- c. 6 min Radio-France LP recorded) 1969 Kraanerg Orchestra and 75:00 Radio-France Etcetera KTC 1075, tape (4- Asphodel 0975 channel) 1970 Hibiki-Hana-Ma Tape (12- 17:39 NHK Tokyo EMFCD 003 channel) Stage III:Multimedia 1971 Persepolis Tape (8-channel), 55:06 FractalOX,Asphodel multimedia forthcoming 1972 Polytope de Cluny Tape (7-channel), c. 25 min CEMAMu Mode 98/99 multimedia 1977 La Legende d'Eer (Le Tape (7-channel), 46:00 WDR Colo)gne/CEMAMu Montaigne MO 782058 Diatope) multimedia Stage IV: UPIC 1978 Mycenae Alpha Tape (2-channel), 9:36 CEMAMu Neuma Records 450-74, (Polytope de multimedia Mode 98/99 Mycene) 1981 Pour la Paix Voices and tape, c. 27 min CEMAMu/Radio-France none radiophonic 1987 Taurhiphanie Tape (2-channel), 10:46 CEMAMu Neuma Records 450-86 multimedia 1989 Voyage Absolu des Tape (2-channel) 15:25 CEMAMu Perspectives of New Music Unari vers PNM 28 Andromede 1997 Erod Tape (2-channel) c. 5 min Ateliers UPIC Withdrawn Stage V: Stochastic Synthesis 1991 GENDY301 Tape (2-channel) 14:15 CEMAMu Withdrawn 1991 GENDY3 Tape (2-channel) 18:45 CEMAMu Neuma Records 450-86 1994 S.709 Tape (2-channel) 7:03 CEMAMu EMFCD 003 34 Computer Music Journal Figure 1. Xenakis at the mixing console, Le Dia- tope. (Photographby Mali; used by kind permission of the Xenakis family, along with all subsequent sketch and score examples.) relatively brief work, but sonically intense and quite unlike other music being produced at GRM at that time (such as Orphee, the opera by Schaef- fer and Henry, or even Deserts, by Varese). There was a strong concern among many of the compos- ers working in the studio to create sounds from relatively discrete instrumental or real-world sounds. Xenakis, on the other hand, sought to cre- ate dense, noisy textures that bore little direct re- semblance to the world around him. Instead, his sounds derived from the same imagination that was creating complex clouds and masses in the or- chestra-an imagination, it should also be pointed out, strongly affected by the chaotic, traumatic sounds of war. (One might also speculate that the hearing loss, particularly in the higher frequencies, Xenakis suffered from his injuries during that time would have shaped, to some extent, his attraction to "noisy" sounds and to high-decibel playback lev- els.) Indicative of the dichotomy described by the ti- tle, Diamorphoses combines noisy, primarily low- frequency sounds-derived from an earthquake, a jet engine, and a train-with more sharply defined, high-register bell sounds. The natural glissando ef- fect of the jet engine winding up is combined with glissandi of other sounds, produced in the studio by It was a few years later, in 1954, that Xenakis means of tape manipulations. Often, the composite was accepted as one of the first members of the sonority produces something quite new, the Groupe de recherches de musique concrete (re- sources being submerged. named de recherches musicales in Groupe 1958, The formal organization is quite clear: the two now commonly called GRM). His assimilation of outer sections of more-or-less sustained sounds the concerns of musical culture had contemporary noises, are contrasted with a cen- proceededrapidly. That same year, he completed (layered glissandi) tral, more discontinuous passage, filled with many his first major orchestral score, Metastaseis, a work shifts of with the bell sounds, that novel sonorities built from complex sonority (starting explores then Xenakis worked in configurations of string Figure 2); it adding others).