Friday, October 16, 2009 at 7PM, ICE and Miller Theatre are co-hosting a panel discussion, focusing on Xenakis as an interdisciplinary innovator.

Steve Schick will perform Psappha, and then a diverse and distinguished panel will discuss the music.

Click HERE to meet the panel.

Madame Françoise Xenakis, in conversation with Andreas Waldburg-Wolfegg, looks back on the fraught relationship between Iannis Xenakis and fellow composer Pierre Boulez, and recounts French President Georges Pompidou’s failed attempts to bring the two of them together. Listen to excerpts from the interview in the latest podcast from Tracing Xenakis.

Andreas: What fascinates me, speaking of construction, is that when I look at this period of Xenakis’ work, and I look at what he was doing as an architect and a composer, someone like me thinks—it’s something that I, personally, adore, that I find very interesting—but it’s not very popular. I wonder how he lived with that.

Mme X: He wasn’t preoccupied by it. I don’t know if he thought about it; it wasn’t his problem. He had this expression—“it’s not my problem”—which he used to brush a lot of things off. When he didn’t feel like dealing with some triviality, he would just say, “It’s not my problem.” His problem was creating, seeking, finding the unbeaten path. The rest…he never said “I don’t have time,” but he would say “I’m not interested.”

W-W: There were moments, if I’ve understood correctly, in which there was a lot of distance between him and his fellow composers.

X: He was hated. He was subverting…and then he met Boulez at Louis Saguerre’s. Saguerre was an old homosexual; delicious, but a bad composer. And [Saguerre] had put together this kind of salon where all the emerging composers came to see him. And Boulez was there—it was a musical atmosphere, and he was already a conductor, and Boulez had a group of followers who were all exceptionally eloquent. He is a man of striking intelligence. But Boulez hated Xenakis so much that he would speak out against him violently and in public. For him, [Xenakis] was something terrifying. That a man who was nothing, who only had a half a face, who was a communist … that was untenable for him, even though he may have thought highly of him. It never went away. They crossed swords. Boulez would say that Xenakis was telling architects that he was a composer and composers that he was an architect. But of course it wasn’t like that. He was dishonest.

W-W: It strikes me that Xenakis really remained an emigrant in perpetuity.

X: In perpetuity. He was a permanent emigrant.

W-W: It’s interesting because it’s very much like the history of classical music of the 20^th century. It’s a kind of emigration until 1985, I think; all the composers—

X: They all came from abroad. Bartók, Shoenberg…they were in exile. But most of them, in literature as well, they were politically right-leaning. The reds…

W-W: There were fewer of them.

X: There were few and they weren’t seen well. Communism was scary at that time.

W-W: And there was also, if I understand correctly, a whole political aspect to Xenakis’ composing, naturally.

X: Of course, it’s very political.

W-W: Yes, all these institutions like Darmstadt and Ircam, all that is—

X: Absolutely. And Pompidou—we dined with Blaise at Pompidou’s three or four times—and he would say to Iannis: “you’ve got to get along, you both have” and so to earn a living Xenakis at first had to work at Ircam, and after 3 days he wrote, “I cannot go on; Boulez is taking over.” And Pompidou said “you’re not trying hard enough.” And Iannis said “I don’t have time for this.”

W-W: It’s pretty unbelievable that the president was involved in this at all.

X: And his failure to bring [Xenakis and Boulez] together was saddening. He thought it was really too bad.

… Stay Tuned!

Download the Full Text Here

Hear the full original conversation:

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Translated from the French by Sarah Green and Maro Elliott.

Preview: Steven Schick & the International Contemporary Ensemble/Xenakis

Chamber Music, Chicago Artists, Classical, Experimental, Vocal Music, World Music

*Critic’s Choice
International Contemporary Ensemble
When: Thu., June 4, 7:30 p.m.
Phone: 312-280-2660
Price: $25, $20 members

Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who died at 78 in 2001, remains one of the most original and intimidating voices in contemporary classical music. His often radical music is a tough sell for orchestras, though, who can be reluctant to program it for audiences who may know they’re supposed to appreciate it but don’t actually like it—it’s not hard to find a Xenakis recording, but chances to see his work performed live are few and far between. He sought to apply tools from math and architecture to composition, constructing his pieces as much as writing them, and he formulated a theory of stochastic music that borrowed concepts from the probabilistic behavior of atomic particles—to borrow a phrase from the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “he began looking at the orchestra as a scientist looks at a gas cloud.” Approaches like this might sound like they’d result in dry, dull music, but some of his compositions are among the most exciting and frightening ever written. For this program of Xenakis’s chamber pieces, percussionist Steve Schick, a music professor at UC San Diego, joins 17 members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a top-flight crew based here and in New York. Despite their relatively conventional orchestral instrumentation—there’s no music for tape scheduled tonight, no amplified harpsichord, no computers “reading” graphic notation—these are some of Xenakis’s most satisfyingly jarring works. The evening begins with Schick performing the percussion solo Psappha and continues with several ensemble pieces: Echange (with solo bass clarinet), Akanthos (with lead soprano), and Palimpsest. Closing the show is Xenakis’s final composition, 1997’s O-Mega for percussion soloist and ensemble, in its Chicago premiere. —Peter Margasak

Part I
Madame Xenakis tells the story of how she met Iannis, and speaks about his experience in the Second World War and his upbringing.

Mme Xenakis: Oh, I can tell you the story, it’s very strange. It was in 1950, in winter, you’ve got to understand that because your mother made you learn French and now, etc. My mother was schoolteacher and was remarkable with children, who obeyed her, and they became firemen, teachers, two of them were graduates of the ENA [Ecole nationale d’administration], etc, and me, it didn’t work on. I refused to take her orders. I refused. I ran away, yes, yes. And so she decided that I was a fool and needed to go to a trade school to learn how to make brassieres.

So finally she made me take an examination in order to be a seamstress at 17 years old. I flunked high school, I got myself expelled…I just didn’t want to do it. [read more]

by Doug Laustsen

When I first sought out Xenakis’ music, I made a trek to my favorite new music record shop.  I discovered that the few albums present in the racks lacked the details I hoped would give me an idea of which album to pick.  So, naturally I picked the album with the coolest artwork.  On the back of the album was a picture of Xenakis looking like a mad scientist at work over a large sound board. 
 
The music on that album, Mode’s release of the electroacoustic work La Legende d’Eer, sounded like the work of a mad scientist.  The label, I also found seemed to fit the composer pretty well – armed with well refined complex mathematical principles, he was working to create a sonic landscape previously unthought-of.  I’m sure his detractors would relish in the idea of his music being the auditory equivalent of Frankenstein, but to me his music is able to find a distinct balance between the grotesque and gorgeous all at once.  The bursts of motion and angular a-lyrical sounds – both in the electro-acoustic works and ones for conventional instruments – sound like the way the world we live in looks.  I wouldn’t expect anything much else from an architect, of course. 

Doug Laustsen is a musician and host of Endlesss Possibilities on WRSU-FM in New Brunswick, NJ. He blogs at epmusic.

by Steve Schick

I have had the great privilege to play the music of Iannis Xenakis many hundreds of times over the last 35 years. The collaboration with ICE on Palimpsest, Echange, Akanthos and Omega has been one of the most satisfying and exciting of any of those performances.  The group is superb, dynamic and passionate. The extraordinary Tony Arnold is, well, extraordinary.  What she does is so engaged and exacting, she seems to re-write the rules of singing.  I think the MCA concert in Chicago will be mind-blowing!

by Jennifer Swanson and Eliza Bangert, Chicago Street Team Captains

About a month ago, we got together with ICE flutist/founder Claire Chase for a “brief” meeting that became an outline for the next month of our lives.   Claire’s excitement was contagious and we left with a plan for ICE’s takeover of Chicago.  The first step of this plan was to create a street team from scratch.  The team quickly grew from two people to twenty in a week and a half, exceeding everyone’s expectations.

Where did these people come from?  Who are they?

• composition students from Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Columbia
• a violinist and a classical guitarist from DePaul and Roosevelt
• flutists: one student from Oberlin, ICE’s home base; a freelancer from Evanston (also a former Oberlin student); a flute teacher/the Classical Revolution founder; and yours truly, the street team captains
• a friend of one of ICE’s board members
• the guitarist for Genital Hercules and son of a former classmate of Steve Schick
• a hipster sound artist from SAIC
• a contingency from the liberal-minded suburb of Oak Park; this includes a current classical literature major/cello player at the University of Chicago, an innovative environmentalist currently studying at Northeastern, and a bass vocalist from UIC
• two recording engineers
• a marketing coordinator for DePaul’s Community Music Division (also an active bass player)
• a freelance oboist in-between long-winded excursions to South America
• a recently graduated artist from SAIC, very excited about all contemporary forms of art
• a freelance pianist/Wicker Park barista

When approaching these people, all we had to do was utter the words “ICE,” “Xenakis,” and “buttons,” and they were on board.

Over the past few weeks, our team has covered the entire Chicago area with ICE posters, postcards, and buttons.  This paraphernalia has infiltrated cafes, bars, restaurants, bookstores, record stores, schools, and various new music, jazz, and rock venues.  The word is out and still moving throughout Chicago as we approach this hot ICE concert in less than two weeks, generating excitement in expected and unexpected places.

Both Xenakis fans and Xenakis virgins can’t wait for this live experience.