Iannis Xenakis [part 2 of 3]

In "Art/Sciences, Allianges", Xenakis formulates the link between the arts, and between art and science, already affirmed in his own works: he uses the compositional methods of Metastasis in order to realize the shells of the Phillips Pavillion. 'Allianges' in French means alloy, but it is to be interpreted more as 'synthesis', than in the sense of a perfect fusion between parts. The base of this fusion is Pithagorean math, with his implied links between arithmetics, astronomy, geometry and music. In the following articles collected in "Musiques Formelles" the word 'formalization' is substituted with 'axiomatization'. An entirely 'axiomatic' composition in the opus of Xenakis is Nomos Alpha. Examples of 'axiomatics' developed by the composer is the 'reticulum theory', on whose base has been realized the first part of Jonchaies, and the 'vectorial spaces'.

If it is possible to compare exactly composition and theory in Xenakis, it's because the idea of formalization, of 'mechanism', has a practical goal. There is an independence of theory from composition, as in hindustani music "a book of theory cannot be distinguished from a book of religious teachings and [...] the purely theoretical instructions the musician obtains are almost exclusively aesthetical, not technical [...] since he finds a practical instruction among an active musician" [Derek Bailey: Improvisation and practice in music, Da Capo Press, 1993]. A reference to an improvised style of music helps us to hint at the distance between this world and the one of Xenakis ("The expression aleatory music today means improvised music. Using this way the word 'alea', that in scientifical terms implies casuality, means making an abuse, and it reflects a counterfeiting and sentimental attitude" [Iannis Xenakis, "Ad Libitum", in The World of Music, vol. 9, no. 1, 1967]) and to have a clue on John Cage ("he introduced a new freedom in music, and its realitazion, as it happened in painting with Jackson Pollock" [Iannis Xenakis, "Su John Cage", 1993, in "Universi del Suono", Ricordi, 2003]).

Xenakis developed first of all a compositional method, the 'stochastic theory' – the use of function of distribution of probability in order to compose instrumental music, then the theory of games, the symbolic logic, the groups theory, the reticula theory, the stochastic dynamic synthesis – the use of functions of distribution of possibilities applied to the synthesis of sound, the theory of arborescence, the theory of brownian movements, the theory of cellular robots, and finally the UPIC system (Poliagogic Unit of CEMAMu), a technological invention.

It's now time to look closer to some compositions, in order to verify how theory and compositional practice intertwine. Metastasis, whose title means 'after the stasis', it's a composition for orchestra of 61 instruments: 12 winds, 7 percussions played by 3 musicians, 46 strings, and it's long about 9 minutes. It ain't a stochastic composition, but a piece based on the idea of continuity and discontinuity, something of interest for Parmenides and, after, Albert Einstein – the relationship between matter and energy: if you modify one of the two variables, you act also on the other, and at the same time the composition is influenced by Olivier Messiaen and his theory of rhythms. In 1954 Xenakis was still studying composition with him.

The ideas of rhythms and of continuity/discontinuity help Xenakis to put together the linear perception of the music with a relativistic vision of time. It all starts from the sounds of nature, about whom Xenakis wrote in his writings about stochastic music. The aim of the composer is to "blow up the frames of representation" [Makis Solomos, Apollo e Dioniso, gli scritti di Xenakis, in "Universi del suono", Ricordi, 2003] so to obtain that the events you listen are not evoked or represented, but burst in through music. We're not that far from Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty'. If in Pléiades-Mélanges, as an example, at a certain point we can hear a group of percussions that hint to something that can remember the shuffling of horses, while the ones coming immediately before can evoke some war drums, their value is never descriptive, exactly as it occurs in baroque music.

"The textures act directly, without passing through language, through representation, through codification: they provoke a physical shock. Their violence is a mean to divert the listening from the research of a 'meaning' [...]. There's no need to look for a reality outside the perceptible". [Ibid.]There's no duality, in Xenakis, between nature and culture: nature is the only thing that exists, and if there is tension, conflict, it is because "composing is a fight [...] a fight to produce something interesting". From there it comes the hint to the inner time, and the interest of the composer for the evolution of human perception, starting from the study of the perception of the time in prehistoric societies and the attention on Jean Piaget's experiences on the development of that perception in children. The time itself is nothing more than a surface phenomenon of a deeper reality, the movement ('déplacement'), what Xenakis try to reproduce with his music.

Strings open Metastasis in unison, before they part in 46 different segments, one for each instrument. Intensity, register and density are the variables on which the score lingers, taking the place of progressive linearity of traditional scores, included serial scores. First and third movement of the composition doesn't have a theme or a motif, relying entirely on the force of the idea of time. The second movement, instead, has a melodic element played by the strings, and conceived following the dodecaphonic method of Schonberg and elaborated using the Fibonacci series, a technique that Bartòk used for some of his own themes. The score has been written on a cartesian diagram, then translated tri-dimentionally into the structrure of the Phillips Pavillion.

Pithoprakta ('acts of probability') is born from the idea of developing musically a sound matter using the applications of Boltzmann and Maxwell and the Newton calculation of temperature and pressure of gas. The composition is conceived as a modulation from order to disorder, realized through a 'swarming of molecules' whose parameters submitted to the calculation of probabilities are density and degrees of order, whose diagram has been realized thinking about gaussian distribution of the height. The two compositions are the result of a reflection towards the problem of how to realize a musical work making tabula rasa of the previous compositional methods. "To compose is to fight" said Xenakis, "a fight for the existence. A fight to be. When instead I imitate the past, I do nothing in reality, so I don't exist. [...] The difference is the proof of existence, of knowledge, is participation to the things in the world". [Bàlint Andràs Varga, "Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, Faber & Faber, 1996]

Iannis Xenakis [Part 1 of 3]

"The soul is a fallen God. Only the ek-stasis (the exit out of the Self) can reveal its true nature. We need to escape the Circle of Birth (reincarnations) through purifications (katharmoi) and sacraments (orghia), tools of the ekstasis"

-- Iannis Xenakis, "La voie de la recherche et de la question", 1965

It's 1958. Architect Le Corbusier and his scholar Iannis Xenakis are working on commission at the Philips Pavillion for the Bruxelles Fair. Composer Edgard Varèse is engaged in the sequence of sonic events that will compose his Poème Electronique, whose name comes from a statement of the architect when he had the assignment: "I will not create a building, but an electronic poem in which colors, images, sounds, and architecture will merge so that the audience will be completely dominated" [A. Capanna, "Il Padiglione Phillips a Bruxelles", Turin, 2000]. Xenakis, assistant of Le Corbusier since ten years, is working on the analytical study, and his work is based on the same ideas that led him few year before to give life to music works starting from the intuition – inversely pythagorean – of making music using mathematical formulas, until the definitive overtaking of seriality and the creation of the first 'stochastic' works as Metastasis (presented for the first time to the Donaueschinghen Festival in 1955), Pithoprakta (1956) and Achorripsis (1957).

Those are the years in which Xenakis issues some articles in the magazine “Gravesaner Blätter” by Hermann Scherchen, later published on the volume "Musiques Formelles" (1963, reedited and expanded in 1971 and in 1990), writings that mark the decade that is more related to the 'formalization' of the vast theoretical and musical work of the Greek composer. Twenty years later, during an interview, at the question "Doesn't mathematic interest you anymore?", Xenakis answers "It was an idea, today we need new ones, maybe more disturbing, more strong" [Anne Rey, "Expliquez-Vous Xenakis", Le Monde de la Musique no. 71, october 1984]. The 'disturbing' Xenakis hint at is the movement through time and space, and the primal chaos, and the energy under the phenomenic coordinates of time and space. In the same historical period who produced structuralism and the phenomenology of perception, both signs of the evanescence of Décartes and his self-consciousness, one of the two cornerstones of the last centuries along with Newton physics. A link between Apollo and Dyonisus, science and nature, whose analysis, as Makis Solomos underlines in his essay included in the Italian version of "Universi del Suono. Scritti e interventi 1955-1994" (Ricordi, 2003) is far from being understood in its own complexity, gives life to the art of Xenakis, as long as Nietzsche's philosophy.

Born in Braila, Romania, on May 29, 1922, at the age of twelve Iannis Xenakis move with his family in Athens. Here, he study architecture and engineering, quitting in 1941, when the Nazis occupy Greece. Soldier for the national Resistance, and after for the Communist Resistance, in 1945 the future architect and composer refuses to enter the national military guard created by the British protectorate in order to defeat the partisans, and he becomes a clandestine and is condemned to death in 1947 as a terrorist. That same year in September he leaves Greece for Paris, initially a stage befor going in the U.S.

In the European capital he starts studying composition under Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger, then he leaves to study with Olivier Messiaen. Graduated in engineering in 1947, the following year Xenakis enters in Le Corbusier's studio, and with him he designs different works applying on architecture the same principles of his research on composition. Since his "The Crisis of Serial Music" (1955) Xenakis attracts resentments and critiques, first of all for being not satisfied with a way to think about music whose crisis at the time was not completely evident. Between the lines, his personal vision emerges: "Music is a message conveyed by the matter between a man and another man, or a message of men to other men, so it has to speak to all the range of perceptions and human intelligence [...]. We need to establish a constant flow between the biological nature of the man and the buildings of his intelligence, otherwise the abstracts developments of the music of today are at risk of loosing themselves into a desert of infertility." ["La crise de la musique sérielle", 1955]

If the first works of the composer, from 1948 to 1953, are still ideally linked to the ideas developed by Gyorgy Ligeti and Franco Evangelisti, recovering popular tradition, it's the conflict with serialism to push Xenakis to develop new compositional tools. About serialism, its more evident limit is, for him, the predominance of the frequency of sound over intensity and timbre, and the predominance of quality and geometry of sound, whose result is a shape consisting primarily in a multilinear manipulation of the fundamental series. This is very limiting for Xenakis, at the point that, when in 1958 he will dedicate a text to Alban Berg, noticing the affinity with his first steps, he will riaffirm that "it is an error to say that dodecaphonic music abolished tonal functions replacing them with other functions. It is possible instead to evoke the influence of the Renaissance's polyphony." ["Alban Berg le dernier romantique", Le Figaro, february 7, 1985]

Between his contemporaries, Xenaki has affinities with Varèse – according to whom music is "the intelligence of the sound becoming body" [Edgard Varèse, "Ecrits", 1983] – since both are researching a rationality not foreign to the inner and visceral sense of the sound matter. This necessity has been also interpreted biographically, since the composer himself made statements as the following: "Everybody has observed auditory phenomenons of a great politicized crowd of dozens or one hundred thousand people. The human river articulates one rallying cry with an unvarying rhythm. Then another rallying cry is launched from the head of the demonstration spreading to the end of the crowd, and it substitutes the first rallying cry. A wave of transition [...]. Dozens of thousands machine guns and the whistles of the bullets add themselves to that total disorder. [...] Stochastic laws of those events, emptied of their political or moral content are the laws of cicadas or rain. They are the laws of the passing from pefect order to total disorder, in a continuous or explosive way. They are stochastic laws".[Iannis Xenakis, "La musique stochastique: éléments sur le procédé probabilistes de composition musicale", 1961]