“Xenakis‘ music falls into 2 categories; somewhat interesting, or so utterly and violently grating and loathsome that it makes you want to drive a stake through the heart of the person located most conveniently nearby.”

- ICE violinist David Bowlin

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Excerpt: Bohor (1962), one of Xenakis’ earliest electronic works

When I first heard Xenakis, I didn’t like it very much.  It took repeated listenings over a number of years coupled with an accumulated exposure to strange music before I came to appreciate and eventually enjoy Iannis Xenakis’ music.  His vision is incredibly strong, and I agree with Steve Schick’s comment that Xenakis “hits you where it counts.”  However, this comment is precisely what made me think about the previous idea of exposure in considering the present-day props or lack of props credited to a composer.  How widespread is the appreciation for Xenakis’ music? Although I don’t believe that someone requires a Bachelor’s
or Master’s in Music to appreciate Xenakis, I do think that repeated exposure to a particular composer’s music is key to enjoying it; Xenakis’ music puts
this demand to the listener.  I realize that ICE’s contribution to this goal is part of a larger shape of events, and hopefully these concerts will not be the first
but will be the third or fourth time people are hearing Xenakis, and thereby increasing the chance of survival for this great music.

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 of the Arditti quartet and a powerhouse new music violist. He worked with Xenakis on many occasions and recorded Embellie on the Montaigne label. Garth offered several valuable pieces of technical advice, also dispensing some of the errata he and Xenakis had discovered during their work together. He did confide that Xenakis was much more concerned about overall sound and movement than he was about something so piddling as notes, so Garth admitted he himself has gone back and forth about some of the inconsistencies in the part since he recorded it. The most memorable thing he shared, though, was Xenakis’s concept of sound. It is a description I will never forget. When I asked about vibrato, he replied that Xenakis insisted on “ABSOLUTELY NONE EVER!” But the non-vibrato sound Garth cultivated on the recording was not cold, or transparent, or like anything I had ever heard before, really–especially within the fortes and fortissimos Xenakis was so fond of. The goal, Garth wrote, is to be “absolutely straight and pure and strong like sculpted marble – and take no prisoners!” With this description of marble, I envisioned huge pillars of sound. Monoliths. I absolutely fell in love with this image and knew it was exactly how the beginning of “Embellie” should sound.

As I walked onstage at Northwestern for my “maiden voyage” performance, I zeroed in on these images. I placed my part on the stand, taking a moment to look at the words I had scrawled at the top of the page. “Solid. Singular.” I wanted the audience’s first impression of the piece to be one of fierce and uncompromising strength. So I did everything I try to get my students to do when we’re working on sound: planted my feet, relaxed my knees, and imagined my sound channeling up through my legs and the rest of my body. I relaxed the smaller muscles in my fingers, wrist, and arms, and created the sound by using the larger muscles in my back. (In the interest of full disclosure, I think I probably told myself “balls to the wall.”)

“C—-D—F3/4#-G–C–G—-F3/4#—-………”

ca-clunk…..clunk…clunk…

My bow spilled out of aforementioned “relaxed small muscles”–I swear, THAT part of me was relaxed!–and clattered to Pick-Staiger’s floor. There were a few gasps, some giggles–and the unforgettable looks on my parents’ and grandpa’s faces. Ah yes, I looked straight at the people who had driven nearly 2 hours to see this concert, only to see me drop the gorgeous Hill bow they had bought for me only a few years earlier.

I laughed nervously and observed the audience, my heart and mind racing. What was I supposed to do? Hundreds of eyes looked at me expectantly. All I could do was be gracious and graceful… and start over.

With an apologetic smile, I looked at them again.

“Excuse me.”

“C—-D—F3/4#-G–C–G—-F3/4#—-………”

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 – was an engineer by training, and he created a compositional technique based on abstruse mathematical theories. Whether this gives his works their forbidding, almost angry sensibility is hard to know, but time seems not to have softened their sturm und drang.

His music also packs a visceral punch, as Thursday’s “Composer Portrait” at the Gardner Museum by the International Contemporary Ensemble amply demonstrated. “He’ll hit you right where it counts,” quipped guest percussionist and conductor Steven Schick before launching into the solo percussion piece “Psappha,” in which a complex rhythm devolves into single, thunderous beats separated by long stretches of silence, before gradually reassembling itself into a flurry of motion and sound.

In the aptly named “Akanthos” (”Thorns”), Xenakis pushes the idea of treating the voice as an instrument to its limit. A soprano sings, speaks, and vocalizes wordless syllables against a noisy instrumental backdrop that includes glissandi, quarter tones, and strings played on the bridge. Despite the constant shifts in color and texture, the music seemed to emanate from and return to a single note, giving it an oddly unified feel.

“Palimpsest” is a kind of mini-piano concerto. It was the most complex piece of the evening, presenting a tangle of intersecting lines and rhythms that came almost too fast for the ears and brain to process them. The work takes its title from a manuscript that has been erased and written over; true to the image, some of the music had to be experienced in memory, as new information arrived to cover it over.

The closing work, “Échange,” sounded like the accompaniment to some strange, ancient ritual. It began in long, drawn-out sonorities for a solo bass clarinet, echoed by the ensemble in low, thickly dissonant sonorities. A lengthy cadenza leads to a vigorous, brightly scored section, and the piece ends in mechanistic, hammered repetitions of a single, jarring chord.

Whereas other entries in the “Composer Portraits” have left a listener hungering for more, it was hard to escape the impression that one concert of Xenakis goes a long way. But that was certainly no fault of the performers. The ICE played with astonishing polish and intensity, and all the soloists – soprano Tony Arnold in “Akanthos,” pianist Cory Smythe in “Palimpsest” and clarinetist Joshua Rubin in “Échange” – were excellent. Schick guided those three works with a deep understanding of this composer’s demanding, esoteric voice.