Présences de / Presences of Iannis Xenakis, Paris, CDMC, 2001, 268 p.

Edited by Makis Solomos

Twenty five international specialists —musicologists, performers, composers, architects or philosophers— explore in this book the multifaceted universe of Iannis Xenakis.

Introduction

On January 29^th and 30^th, 1998 the first symposium completely devoted to Xenakis, Presences of Iannis Xenakis took place. This symposium was organized in Paris, at the Centre de Documentation de la Musique Contemporaine (CDMC) and at Radio France and brought together several international specialists [1] , musicologists, performers, composers or architects: Serge Bertocchi, François Delalande and Evelyne Gayou, Mihu Iliescu, François-Bernard Mâche, Makis Solomos (France), Angelo Bello, Ellen Flint, James Harley, Ronald Squibbs (USA), Peter Hoffmann, Philipp Oswalt, Elisabeth Sikiaridi (Germany), Agostino Di Scipio (Italy), Benoît Gibson (Portugal), Nouritza Matossian (Great Britain), Haris Xanthoudakis (Greece). The present book is a collection of their papers [2] . It is enriched by the articles by Joëlle Caullier, Matthieu Guillot, Jean-Luc Hervé, Antonio Lai, Ricardo Mandolini, Beatrix Raanan (France), Cãndido Limá, Helena Santana (Portugal), Linda Arsenault (USA), Carmen Pardo (Spain), Sven Sterken (Belgium) [3] . Moreover, two articles written in Greek by Xenakis were translated in French for this occasion.

Literature about Xenakis already constitutes an important corpus. From a Ph.D. thesis to an occasional reference, from an analysis of the theories to an aesthetic interpretation, many authors have written about Xenakis’ work since the middle of the 1960s, contributing to the emergence of what could be called “Xenakian studies.” Compared with this field, the present book represents an innovation in that it opens the path to a second generation of commentators, who introduce new problematics and a new style.

Presences of Iannis Xenakis opens with articles about two periods of Xenakis that have not yet been analyzed extensively: the period before Metastaseis in the early 1950s, and that of his late works (since the end of the 1980s). In the article “Problèmes de composition musicale grecque” that Xenakis, already living in France, sent to a Greek periodical, he clearly explains his preoccupations during this first period. To quote François-Bernard Mâche about the suite for piano Six chansons of 1951, Xenakis had “the ambition to be for Greece was Bartók was for Hungary” [4] . “Du projet bartókien au son. L’évolution du jeune Xenakis” by Makis Solomos examines this project by analyzing some pieces from this period. Moreover, it asks the question of the transition with the first recognized works, a transition that leads to the abstraction and the emergence of sound. The article by François Delalande and Evelyne Gayou, “Xenakis et le GRM”, focuses on another important moment for Xenakis: his work in Pierre Schaeffer’s studio. This article proposes to recount the facts, i.e. the relationship between Xenakis and the GRM; it also attempts to determine the differences between Xenakis and Schaeffer. In “Formal analysis of the music of Iannis Xenakis by means of sonic events: recent orchestral works”, James Harley creates an overview of Xenakis’ orchestral works from the last twenty years. He analyzes excerpts, and more particularly their sonorities. The study “Xenakis et le ‘destin’ de l’Occident” by Mihu Iliescu focuses on the turning point that occurs in Xenakis’ last period. He interprets this turning point as “a way of refocusing (for some, very disconcerting), which brings him to reconcile with […] so-called ‘musical’ music”. In the following article, Makis Solomos treats the same turning point, but he interprets it as a symptom of the fact that, during Xenakis’s last period, gesture is more predominant than sonority.

The present book voluntarily limits the place given to the analysis of Xenakian theories. Today, they are well known and it is no use to continue repeating what Xenakis has already said. The time has come to rectify (while not necessarily erasing) the image that continues to dominate: the image of a composer-“mathematician”. Xenakis has defined himself only as a “user of mathematics” [5] . Above all, it is his book Musiques formelles (and, even more, its American editions and updates, Formalized Music) that contributed to create this image. His music itself is far from generalizing any formalization. The “theories” section of the present volume is thus limited and, more importantly, contains analyses of a new kind. In “Boulez-Xenakis: la conjonction des utopies”, Ricardo Mandolini dares, shall we say, a comparison with Boulez to show that the two composers share, in the 1950-1960s the idea of formalization of music as a search for utopia. Agostino Di Scipio deals with Xenakis’ electroacoustic works. Starting with Xenakis’ hypothesis (about Analogique B) of second order sonorities, he proposes a discussion about the conceptual premises of Xenakis’ algorithmic and probabilistic thought. The text by Benoît Gibson describes the theory of sieves in a very clear manner. Above all, it demonstrates concrete realizations concerning pitches and rhythms in many compositions. “Notes on composing with the UPIC system: the equipment of Iannis Xenakis” by Angelo Bello explains the results of his research at the Ateliers UPIC during 1995-1997, which consisted in the implementation of frequency modulation at the UPIC system. In conclusion to this section, Jean-Luc Hervé suggests that Xenakis’ own research is close to the actual concept of “sound image”.

The third part of the book presents comments of aesthetical type. This kind of analysis is under-represented in Xenakian studies since, until now, these studies have been more focused on his theories. The first article of this section, “Entre mythe et science: un contenu de vérité”, by Joëlle Caullier, deals with how matter acquires a spiritual dimension. Analyzing the symbolic meaning of sound material of a work such as Nuits, Joëlle Caullier concludes that Xenakis has a double relationship to with the universe: “of wonder and of tragic feeling”. Carmen Pardo focuses on a very important Xenakis’ characteristic: abstraction, which she defines as a desire to unify many fields. Thus, Xenakis makes “perceptible all that is happening in terms of abstraction and sensibility, by creating a new unity which, nevertheless, maintains differences”. The article by Matthieu Guillot, “Monde et sons, écoute et inouï”, is a commentary of Michel Serres’s brilliant text, « Musique et bruit de fond » [6] . In “Xenakis et la pédagogie ou les mythes”, Cãndido Limá discusses Xenakis’ humanism and, more particularly, which of its aspects could be helpful for pedagogy.

In parallel with the development of aesthetic comments, the new Xenakian studies are more and more interested in the analysis of specific works. In the past, the main focus was on Xenakis’s theoretical premises. Today, musicologists want to immerge in the details of his compositions. With its eight analyses, Presences of Iannis Xenakis is symptomatic of this evolution. These analyses are classified by the chronological order of the works to which they refer. In the first, Antonio Lai, based on existing analyses of Nomos alpha, applies Thomas Kuhn’s theories to demonstrate that this piece “belongs to a current extraordinary phase, after the crisis of serialism’s paradigm”. His text aims to reveal the “disciplinary matrix” of the work, which is “the class of the theoretical postulates and [which has as] a prior function, [the] construction and [the] deployment of the composition. Helena Santana analyzes in the detail the spatial movements of Terretektorh. She also shows the relationships between spatial movement and timbre by giving several examples of timbral spaces developed in this composition. The two following articles analyze the same piece, Evryali, but their approach is completely different. Ronald Squibbs uses a structural analysis to put in evidence the categories that allow to classify the material of the work and to analyze its form. Linda Arsenault, on the contrary, hears Evryali as a programmatic music, which recounts the victory of Perseus over Medusa. Ellen Flint’s analysis of Psappha’s by starts from Thomas Clifton’s phenomenology of music. She shows how, subordinating timbral considerations to considerations of pure rhythm, Xenakis “creates in Psappha a multifaceted aural representation of the experience of time and of the psychoacoustic limits of the human perception of duration”. Beatrix Raanan focuses on the crucial role of breath in N’Shima. Her analysis treats it on the level of the microstructure (the textures) and also on the level of the macrostructure (the Hebrew phonemes of the two singers of the piece). To analyze XAS, Serge Bertocchi constructs a general table that precisely describes the deployment of its form in respect to factors such as scale (sieves), verticality, rhythm, register, dynamics, instrumentation, degree of order/disorder. Peter Hoffmann’s article explains the principles of dynamic stochastic synthesis that are used for Gendy3.  Then, he analyses this composition by means of resynthesis —which is possible because the piece is algorithmic— and by focusing on four excerpts.

Over the past few years, studies about Xenakis as an architect and about his multimedia realizations (polytopes) are beginning to appear. The present volume strives to give an important place to this aspect of Xenakis’ work. The fifth part opens with a text by Xenakis from 1980, “Espaces et sources d'auditions et de spectacle”. Referring implicitly to his polytopes, Xenakis studies the relationships between the audience and sound sources in respect to their size, location, nature and technology. The article “‘Morphologies’ or the architecture of Xenakis” by Elisabeth Sikiaridi offers a general introduction, but detailed, to the architectural questions set forth by Xenakis and their importance. Some of the points she develops are: the actuality of the Philips Pavilion, the differences between Le Corbusier and Xenakis, the faculty of abstraction that leads Xenakis to search for a general morphology. In the next article, Philipp Oswalt explains that Xenakis introduced a model of energetically formed space, as opposed to static Euclidean space, which works with traditional architecture.  This fact that allows him to develop a definition of space “as a permanently changing field of densities”. In “A la recherche de l’espace paramétrisé. Les surfaces réglées comme thème dans l’œuvre de Iannis Xenakis”, Sven Sterken echoes this problematic and shows that, with ruled surfaces, Xenakis’ architecture “considers spaces as volumes covered by dynamic folds”. 

In the appendix of this book, in addition to the list of Xenakis’ musical compositions, there is a commented bibliography of his writings and of the writings on him [7] . The goal of this bibliography, with its important degree of exhaustivity and with its commentaries, is to become an indispensable research tool for future Xenakian studies.

I wish to thank the CDMC, especially Marianne Lyon, who co-directed the symposium that is the basis of the present book, and Katherine Vayne. The Fondation Salabert financially supported the symposium, which took place also thanks to contributions by the Instituto Italiano di Cultura and the Gulbenkian Foundation.

Makis Solomos

Contents

1. Sources and recent works

Problèmes de composition musicale grecque

Iannis Xenakis

Du projet bartókien au son. L'évolution du jeune Xenakis   

Makis Solomos

Xenakis et le GRM      

François Delalande

Formal analysis of the music of Iannis Xenakis by means of sonic events: recent orchestral works            

James Harley

Xenakis et le “ destin ” musical de l’Occident            

Mihu Iliescu

Notes sur les dernières œuvres de Xenakis    

Makis Solomos

2. Theories

Boulez-Xenakis : la conjonction des utopies 

Ricardo Mandolini

Clarification on Xenakis: the Cybernetics of Stochastic Music            

Agostino Di Scipio

Théorie des cribles      

Benoît Gibson

Notes on Composing with the UPIC System: The Equipment of Iannis Xenakis    

Angelo Bello

Les Images sonores xenakiennes : actualité de la pensée de Xenakis pour la création musicale aujourd’hui  

Jean-Luc Hervé

3. Aesthetics

Entre mythe et science : un contenu de vérité              

Joëlle Caullier

Le rôle de l’abstraction chez Iannis Xenakis                 

Carmen Pardo

Monde et sons, écoute et inouï             

Matthieu Guillot

Xenakis et la Pédagogie ou les Mythes             

Cãndido Limá

4. Analysis

Nomos alpha de Iannis Xenakis. La matrice disciplinaire et une évaluation contextuelle de l’œuvre               

Antonio Lai

Terretektorh : l’espace et le timbre, le timbre de l’espace    

Helena Santana

A Methodological Problem and a Provisional Solution: An Analysis of Structure and Form in Xenakis’s Evryali   

Ronald Squibbs

Iannis Xenakis's Evryali: A Narrative Interpretation

Linda M. Arsenault

The experience of Time and Psappha               

Ellen Flint

Le souffle et le texte : deux approches formelles convergentes dans N’Shima de Iannis Xenakis

Beatrix Raanan

XAS pour quatuor de saxophones        

Serge Bertocchi

Analysis through Resynthesis. Gendy3 by Iannis Xenakis    

Peter Hoffmann

5. Architecture and polytopes

Espaces et sources d’auditions et de spectacles           

Iannis Xenakis

“Morphologies” or the architecture of Xenakis          

Elisabeth Sikiaridi

Architecture of Densities           

Philipp Oswalt

À la recherche de l’espace paramétrisé. Les surfaces réglées comme thème dans l’œuvre de Iannis Xenakis          

Sven Sterken

Liste des œuvres musicales    

Bibliographie commentée         

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