Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: E' morto Iannis Xenakis

Domenica scorsa è morto a Parigi Iannis Xenakis
Tra i ricordi musicali indelebili nella mia memoria c' è un concerto
de Les Percoussions de Strasbourg tenuto all' inzio degli anni '70,
credo, all' Auditorium San Leone Magno di Roma per la IUC.
In programma uno strabiliante pezzo "stereofonico" di Xenakis ke
coinvolgeva alcune centinaia di strumenti a percussione diversi:
nessuna idea di cosa poteva essere? Difficilmente riusciro a ritrovare
il programma...
LUX

 propria scuola stilistica.
me lo ricordo diversi anni fa, ospite di Settembre Musica:
elegante e profondo come la sua musica.
Quell'anno gli era stata dedicata l'edizione:
ricordo un percussionista straordinario
che suonava proprio in una discoteca (il Big Club)
una sua composizione.
Un vero peccato la sua perdita.
Riposi in pace.
--
Tissaferne
-----------------
"Uom, se tu grande o vil? Muori, e 'l saprai"
[Vittorio Alfieri]

di ritorno da Parigi
Perfettamente d'accordo.
Mi dispiace molto per la scomparsa del maestro. E per l'umiliazione -
che la divinita' gli ha dato - di soccombere per lo stesso male
(altrove ho letto Alzheimer) che Colui diede anche a Reagan (in quel
caso, pero', prima che lo elegggessero).
Schillogeno
------------------
"Well, i'm the slime from your video
 Oozin' along on your living room floor
 I am the slime from your video
 can't stop the slime, people, look it me go"
 Frank Zappa, 1973
 NB: Per scrivermi togliete accaacca finali al mio username.

nessuna idea di cosa poteva essere?
probabilmente "Pléiades", che lo stesso gruppo ha anche inciso.
notevoli anche i pezzi (sempre per sole percussioni) registradi da
"Demoé" per la Stradivarius
T

Dal "New York Times"
February 5, 2001
Iannis Xenakis, Composer Who Built Music on Mathematics, Dies at 78
By PAUL GRIFFITHS
annis Xenakis, the Greek-French composer who often used highly sophisticated
scientific and mathematical theories to arrive at music of primitive power,
died yesterday at his home in Paris. He was 78.
He had been in poor health for several years and lapsed into a coma several
days ago, said Charles Zacharie Bornstein, a conductor who has championed
his music.
By training, Mr. Xenakis was an engineer and architect; his musical
education came late. This enabled him largely to ignore conventional
techniques of composition. He rejected the idea of intuitive or unreasoning
randomness in composition, for example, and by constructing his works on
laws and formulas of the physical sciences, he sought to control his music
at every instant. He once said, "This is my definition of an artist, or of a
man: to control."
At first he depended on the use of mathematical models of disorder. By using
calculations derived from, say, the numbers of different-sized pebbles on a
shore, Mr. Xenakis could determine the pitches of notes or their placements
in time. In this way he could create music with chaotic inner detail but a
decisive shape or impulse. Typical examples of such partly randomized
effects in a Xenakis composition might include a bundle of nonaligned upward
slides on orchestral strings.
Once computers became available to him in the early 1960's, Mr. Xenakis was
able to work much faster. And however far removed he was from the tradition
of Western classical music, he inevitably began to create a tradition of his
own in composing so abundantly.
Iannis Xenakis (pronounced YAHN-nis zen-NAHK-ess) was born into a prosperous
family of Greek origin on May 29, 1922, in the Romanian town of Braila. His
mother died when he was 6, and he was sent to the Greek island of Spetsai to
be educated at a British-style boarding school.
His musical studies began at the age of 12, and even then he intended to
study both science and music. In 1938 he moved to Athens to prepare for
admission to the Polytechnic School, where he enrolled in 1940 and graduated
in 1947 as a civil engineer.
He lived in Athens during the Italian and German occupations of World War
II. For much of this time he was a member of the Communist resistance, which
was directed at first against the Germans and Italians and then, when they
were defeated, against the British. In 1945 he was struck by a shell
fragment from a British tank and lost an eye and part of his cheek, leaving
the left side of his face deeply scarred.
"In Greece, the resistance lost, so I left in 1947," he once recalled. He
moved to Paris ("In France, the resistance won"), where he found a job in
architecture at Le Corbusier's studio. He was there from 1947 to 1959, and
contributed to some of the studio's most important projects, including the
pavilion for the Philips electronics company at the 1958 World's Fair in
Brussels. He always maintained that the Philips Pavilion was entirely his
own design, and certainly its simple but strikingly original geometry of
curves and planes is worked out on principles very similar to those he had
used in his first published composition, "Metastasis" for orchestra
(1953-4).
"Metastasis" came at the end of a period in which he studied with some of
the leading composers in Paris. But he was a mature student, and perhaps all
he could learn at this stage was how to avoid banality.
His alternative was the extraordinary busy textures and clean shapes of
"Metastasis." He showed this score to the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who
became a fervent supporter. The first performance of "Metastasis," however,
was led by Hans Rosbaud at the 1955 festival in Donaueschingen, Germany, one
of the important meeting places of the European musical avant-garde.
"Metastasis," largely built on glissandi of rising volume that could recall
an airplane rising during takeoff, caused a sensation. Many young composers
were impressed by Mr. Xenakis's sense of music as pure sound, but other
musicians, notably Pierre Boulez, detected a lack of craftsmanship. Mr.
Boulez was eventually persuaded to commission a score from Mr. Xenakis for
his Domaine Musical concerts in 1963. He was rewarded by one of Mr.
Xenakis's strongest pieces, "Eonta" for brass quintet and piano. But the
antipathy between the two remained.
Mr. Xenakis did not lack champions, however. Mr. Scherchen conducted the
premiere of "Pithoprakta" for trombones, percussion and strings in 1957 and
the premiere of "Achoripsis" for small orchestra the next year. A little
later Gunther Schuller gave the composer his first American performance.
George Balanchine stiched together two of his scores to create the ballet
"Metastasis and Pithoprakta."
Like other of his works, "Metastasis" and "Pithoprakta" were regulated by
Poisson's Law of Large Numbers, which implies that the more numerous the
phenomena, the more they tend toward a determinate end - as in flipping a
coin. "I have tried to inject determinism into what we call chance," said
Mr. Xenakis, who used the scientific word "stochastic" to give a name to
this idea of probability in music.
As the 1950's drew to an end, Mr. Xenakis started working in the electronic
music studio of French radio, producing "Concret PH" for the Philips
Pavilion. In 1961 he visited Tokyo for the first time and met the pianist
Yuji Takahashi, for whom he wrote "Herma," a work of cascading complexity
for solo piano. In 1963 came his first trip to the United States, to teach
at Tanglewood.
A Ford Foundation scholarship enabled him to spend 1964-65 in Berlin, and in
1966 he founded his own studio in Paris, the Équipe de Mathématique et
Automatique Musicales.
After that he focused his activities on Paris, while returning to the Greek
islands for summer holidays and traveling the world to lecture and attend
performances.
His work with electronic music continued, notably in "Bohor" (1962) and in
various projects combining electronic sound with laser projections. One of
these was "Polytope de Cluny" (1972), devised for the Roman bathhouse in
Paris. It was a good match. Rugged in construction, his music went well with
ruins.
In other works, he combined his music with literary ruins - texts from the
Greek plays or other classical sources. One powerful example is "Ais" for
amplified baritone, percussion and orchestra (1979), on lines from Homer and
Sappho. Another piece in the same mode, "The Goddess Athena" (1992), for
baritone and chamber ensemble, was performed late last month by the Met
Chamber Ensemble at Weill Recital Hall. But Mr. Xenakis could also create a
feeling of ancient drama, ceremony and intensity when using voices without
words, as in "Nuits" for chorus (1967).
That same feeling often persisted in the instrumental works that form the
bulk of Mr. Xenakis's output: solo pieces of extreme virtuosity, chamber
music, compositions for the standard modern-music ensemble and works for
symphony orchestra.
Percussionists enjoyed Mr. Xenakis's music for its vitality and drama, and
the solo pieces "Psappha" (1975) and "Rebonds" (1988), as well as the sextet
"Pleiades" (1978), became classics of the genre. His last work was a piece
for percussion and ensemble, "O-mega" (1997).
Mr. Xenakis became a French citizen and married a Frenchwoman, the writer
Françoise Xenakis, who had been decorated for saving the lives of resistance
fighters. He is survived by his wife and by his daughter, Mâhki.
He wrote several books and essays on mathematics, architecture, town
planning and music. These writings show how deeply he based his music on
mathematics and logic.
He rejected criticism that he wrote "a species of desensitized music." Asked
once if he composed without sentiment, he answered: "Yes, if you mean that
kind of traditional sentimental effusion of sadness, gaiety or joy. I don't
think that this is really admissible. In my music there is all the agony of
my youth, of the resistance," as well as "the occasional mysterious, deathly
sounds of those cold nights of December '44 in Athens."
"From this," he added, "was born my conception of the massing of sound
events."