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Iannis Xenakis Komboï (1981) Oliver Frick New Work (world premiere) Florian Hölscher: Harpsichord Boris Müller: Percussion “It is my conviction that we will not achieve universalism through religion, emotion, or tradition but through the natural sciences (…). Scientific thinking offers me an instrument with which I can realize my ideas of nonscientific origin. And these ideas are products of certain intuitions and visions.” Iannis Xenakis, born on May 29, 1922, in Braila, Romania, of Greek parents and became a French citizen . This overarching, bridge-building aspect of his life seems to have crucially influenced his creative thought: from the rich folk music of the lower Danube region and the Byzantine influences with which he was familiar during the first ten years of his life by way of the Orthodox cultural sphere in Greece, to which his family returned in 1932. There he joined the resistance in the 1940s, seriously injured his face on January 1, 1945, and was later sentenced to death in absentia. His music image of the world ultimately extended to the cultural universality of Paris, where Xenakis lived from 1947 onward. Xenakis had begun to study at the polytechnic university while still in Athens (he received his engineering degree in 1947); from 1948 to 1960 he worked as an assistant to Le Corbusier, taking part in architectural projects such as the La Tourette monastery and designing himself the Philips Pavilion for the World’s Fair in Brussels—based on the calculations used in his composition Metastasis (1954, premiered in Donaueschingen in 1955). In Paris he attended the conservatory from 1950 to 1953, studying with Olivier Messiaen, and also studied in Gravesano with Hermann Scherchen. At this time a genuine scientific and technical approach began to develop as the basis for his compositional thinking, above all an approach using stochastic findings (probability theory), with mathematical theories of performance and integrated theories (“musique stochastique,” “musique stratégique,” “musique symbolique”). Xenakis saw scientifically expressed formulas as an opportunity to create a universalist approach to composition. Accordingly, in 1966 he founded the Équipe de mathématique et d'automatique musicales (EMAMU). Since 1972 it has been known as CEMAMU (Centre d’Études de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales). A parallel institute was created at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1967: a center for mathematical and automatic music, where Xenakis was professor for mathematical and mechanical music. Xenakis was also one of the cofounders of IRCAM in Paris, though he unexpectedly ceased his work there in 1981. CEMAMU developed its own computer system called UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMU), which made it possible to compose music directly by drawing. This closed the circle between the activities of the architect and the composer that did justice to Xenakis’s ambition to universalist creativity. Xenakis died on February 4, 2001, in Paris. It is astonishing to realize, but despite the scientific and mathematical basis of all Xenakis’s compositions from the mid-1950s onward, this aspect essentially plays no role whatsoever when hearing his works. The music sounds as if it were invented spontaneously, as if it were plunging into mythical forms of consciousness, while also taking into account such fundamental topoi of musical expression as intensifications, sculptural shaping of sound, “bodily” rhythms, and so on. Xenakis was already moving away from serial approaches in the 1950s; from the outset he set out on his own path, as could be heard unmistakably right away in the characteristic, signal-like initial glissando of the orchestral work Metastasis. In that work Xenakis established the groundwork for forms of “composition with sound” (continued in Pithoprakta, 1956) of the stort that would become common compositional practice beginning in the 1960s. Electronic experiments followed, for example, in Diamorphoses (1957), Concret PH (1958), or Orient—Occident (1960); nevertheless, his main focus was always on the instrumental sound, his patterns of movement, stochastic fields of pitch-sound structures, and spatial movements. These reflections were developed further, for example, in the orchestral work Terretektorh for eighty-eighty instrumentalists distributed in space (1965–66), in Nomos Gamma for ninety-eight instrumentalists (1967/68), and in the large-scale staged work Oresteia for mixed choir, children’s choir, and chamber orchestra (1966), in which Xenakis experimented with complex forms of musical texture in interplay with vocal and instrumental parts. Seemingly archaic rhythmical structures that depend on uniform pulsation play a central role not only in his compositions for the ballet— Kraanerg for Tape and Orchestra (1968) and Antikhton (1971)—but also percussion works like Persephassa for six percussionists (1969), Psappha (1975), and Pléiades also for six percussionists (1979). Xenakis’s further development is marked by a trend to a simplification of structures, and perhaps even of the musical content. Examples would include the radio composition Pour la paix for mixed choir, narrators, and tape (1981), an antiwar piece produced by technical means, as well as compositions that seem to be derived directly from the musical gesture, such as Gmeeoorh for organ (1974), Tetras for string quartet (1983), Naama for electronically amplified harpsichord (1984), Alax for three instrumental groups (1985), Horos for orchestra (1986), Keqrops for piano and orchestra (1986), and the orchestral composition Ata (1987), which seems to be emphatically structured around the sound impulse, “a kind of dis-location of the senses” (Xenakis). In all these works, which continue to be based on calculated mathematical considerations, one senses a kind of primordial pull toward direct sensation of the sound right up to the pain threshold. This intimacy is characteristic of Xenakis’s style. Oliver Frick was born in Stuttgart in 1973. From 1997 to 2002 he studied at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart (music theory and new media with Matthias Hermann and composition with Marco Stroppa from 2000 onward). He followed that in 1002–3 with studies at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse in Paris (composition with Frédéric Durieux, orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie, new technologies with Tom Mays). Since 2003 he has continued his composition studies with Mathias Spahlinger at the Musikhochschule Freiburg im Breisgau. Oliver Frick’s compositions have been performed in Germany, France, and Japan. |
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