Listen to Eric Lamb’s live interview with ICE’s sensational oboist, James Austin Smith, whose thoughts on Xenakis illuminate the fear and excitement confronting even the most virtuosic player on each page of a Xenakis score.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Solid. Singular.
I have these words written at the top of my “Embellie” (Xenakis’s 1981 solo viola piece) part. To me, the opening of the piece–all on the C string, uncomplicated rhythms [uncomplicated rhythms? Xenakis?!], and a determined, ruthless forte–embodies these words.
When I started exploring the piece, which was the first Xenakis I learned, I wrote to Garth Knox–former violist [...]
I dated a girl who was obsessed with the television show Xena. That should have been my first warning. She hated all contemporary music, and played a lot of World of Warcraft. (Second and third warnings.) She made me play WoW with her, and I named my night-elf hunter Xenakis, thinking she’d never know. I named Xenakis’s pet turtle Crumb, and [...]
April 26, 2009 – 10:26 pm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Xi (uppercase Ξ, lowercase ξ) is the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet. It is pronounced [ksi] in Modern Greek, and generally pronounced /ˈsaɪ/ (UK) or /ˈzaɪ/(US) in English. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 60. The Xi is not to be confused with the letter Chi, which gave its form to the Latin letterX. In ancient times, the Western [...]
April 22, 2009 – 12:14 pm
Our first performance of Xenakis changed me. I can’t really describe it, but it was molecule changing, atom splitting… kaboom!! Something shifted, got twisted, turned inside out… something deep in my head. I’ve been dreaming about it every night, but its one of those dreams that you only remember the vaguest of details. It was [...]
MUSIC REVIEW
Composer Xenakis still out there
By David Weininger, Globe Correspondent | April 21, 2009
At a time when many 20th-century composers have lost their aura of radicalism and begun to seem approachable, Iannis Xenakis resists the trend. Xenakis – who was born in Romania to Greek parents and died in 2001 at the age of 78 – [...]
For me, listening to Xenakis is a stripping-away of everything that I think I know about music. In ICE’s Miller Theatre production of Oresteia, the composer’s only opera, I was struck by the startling intensity ofXenakis‘ innovation: an extended duet between a baritone and a percussionist, with the baritone playing two characters (one in falsetto); passages for the [...]
March 25, 2009 – 11:58 am
Check out this eloquent preview of ICE’s upcoming concert with Steve Schick at Boston’s Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum. From Keith Powers, classical music critic for the Boston Herald:
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Boston Herald original link
March 20, 2009
With high-octane superstars like Renee Fleming, Peter Serkin [...]
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Tagged architecture, boston herald, computer music, Gardner Museum, ICE, international contemporary ensemble, preview, shah, Steve Schick, world's fair, Xenakis
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Three memories stick out whenever I hear Xenakis – which is more than
I can say for many composers. They each have to do with the music’s
effect on listeners, and not the music itself, but that, too, is a
comment on the music, right? Without the music, you don’t get the
effect of it, and, really, it’s that [...]
by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
There’s a moment of intensity in Iannis Xenakis’s work that always seems to be present in any of his compositions. For him, music was architecture, and architecture was music. It didn’t matter what perspective you heard it from – at the end of the day, sound [...]
Paul D. Miller, aka “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid,” made friends with ICE recently in Helsinki. He came in to our Sunset Park studio and recorded an audio interview, which will be featured on our upcoming March podcast.
He has also generously offered to share some of his own writings on Xenakis with Xi. We’ll be [...]
January 15, 2009 – 5:40 pm
“Athens—an anti-Nazi demonstration–hundreds of thousands of people chanting a slogan which reproduces itself like a gigantic rhythm. Then combat with the enemy. The rhythm bursts into an enormous chaos of sharp sounds; the whistling of bullets; the crackling of machine guns. The sounds begin to disperse. Slowy silence falls back on the town. Taken uniquely [...]
December 30, 2008 – 9:37 pm
The percussion music of Iannis Xenakis defines contemporary percussion music just as the Bach Cello Suites defined and reified the classical cello repertoire. But Xenakis himself can seem maddeningly un-definable. In contrasting views, he is painted as either a logician or a magician.
