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 effect and that memory that
composers are hoping to get across (I think they’d admit in their
heart of hearts) to an audience, above and beyond the immediate impact
in concert.
The first memory dates from when I was at Indiana University sometime
around 2001. Xenakis taught at IU from 1967 to 1972, and his name is
in a list of every faculty member who ever taught at the school
outside Auer Hall, the main recital hall. (The Indiana University
Press also published his book “Formalized Music: Thought and
Mathematics in Music” in 1971.) A string quartet was going to play
Xenakis’s “Tetras” that night. Before the piece began, the four
members hesitated…and paused. The first violinist tensed up his
face, and the graduate conducting student next to me leaned over and
said, “He looks frightened.” That doesn’t happen too often, and the
difficulty of the piece justified it.
The second is actually from another ICE event, this time at
Northwestern’s annual New Music Marathon (an event that has died out,
RIP) in 2006, I think. Violist Wendy Richman walked out to play a
solo piece, and started right in on it, unlike the
string quartet, but ran aground shortly thereafter. She dropped her
bow, and it fell to the ground. Something happened and it slipped
from her hand. I’d probably remember that regardless of what was
played, but it happened to be Xenakis, so it’s unforgettable.
The third is considerably more recent. I manage the Chicago Symphony’s
record label, CSO Resound, and in a bid to increase our local sales, I
hosted a reception for a group of local retail clerks from Borders and
Reckless Records. They were given comp tickets to that night’s
concert, which featured Edgard Varese’s “Ionisation” and “Ameriques”
on the second half, conducted by Pierre Boulez. (Not too bad, right?)
I picked this concert specifically for this group, reasoning that
anyone who listens to more Radiohead and Arcade Fire is going to get
more from Varese than they will from Mozart and Haydn. One clerk from
Reckless Records told me he was really excited to hear the concert
because of “the Xenakis.” I hated breaking it to him that it was only
Varese, but he was okay with settling for Varese. For a composer to
break through that rock/classical divide is always admirable and
memorable, in my book.
All of this begs the question: What makes the music so memorable that
people remember the events they heard it at? I think it has to do with
the rigor it’s constructed with, rigor that goes beyond the musical
conception composers usually employ. Xenakis’s background as an
architect is well-known, and it’s easy to map a connection between the
two disciplines of music and architecture. They both deal with
proportion, and the discussion can flow from there.
But with Xenakis, you could these extensive mathematical treatises
mapping out precisely how he came to put that G# where he did, and he
supplies the graph paper that shows how he got there. In the end, it’d
be useless if the music didn’t measure up or achieve the goals he set
for it. There’s certainly been enough arid music written down through
history that we don’t need any more. But Xenakis put that rigor in the
use of determining the form of the piece, along with every other
aspect, and the notes came out sounding like…like Xenakis, I
suppose. They sure don’t sound like anyone else’s.
Marc Geelhoed is the CSO Resound coordinator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and former Classical Music Editor for Time Out Chicago. When he’s not lending his brilliance to Xi, he blogs at Deceptively Simple.
by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
“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 from an aural point of view these sound events, made out of a large number of individual sounds, are not separately perceptible… but reunite them again and a new sound is formed which may be perceived in its entirety. It is the same case with the song of the cicadas or the sound of hail or rain, the crashing of waves on the cliffs, the hiss of waves on shingle.” 
