Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis

"Xenakis, prophet of insensibility" (Milan Kundera)


"European music is based on the artificial sound of the note and the (tone) scale; it opposes the brutal and objective sonority of the world. As a result of an unbreakable convention European music is obliged from the beginning to express a subjectivity. It seems to fight the sonority of the outside world, like a sensitive being resisting the insensitivity of the universe. European civilization (from the year thousand on) is one of the only civilizations accompanied by a huge and dazzling history of music. This civilization - with its adoration of the suffering of Jezus, its courtly love, its cult of the bourgeois family, its patriotic passions - shaped the sentimental man. Music has played an integral and decisive part in the ongoing process of sentimentalization. But it can happen at a certain moment (in the life of a person or of a civilization) that sentimentalitybecomes unmasked as ‘the supra-structure of a brutality’. This was the moment at which music appeared to me as the ear deafening noise of the emotions, while the sound-world in the works of Xenakis became beauty; beauty purified of the dirt, purified of sentimental barbary. To be a ‘prophet of insensibility’ Joyce could remain novelist; Xenakis had to step out of music. Xenakis opposes the whole of the European history of music. His point of departure is elsewhere; not in an artificial sound isolated from nature in order to express a subjectivity, but in an earthly ‘objective’ sound, in a mass of sound which does not rise from the human heart, but which approaches us from the outside, like raindrops or the voice of wind."

M. Kundera, Prophète de l’Insensibilité, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 1981, Paris

Olivier Messiaen - Chronochromie

Image via Wikipedia

 Chronochromie, by Olivier Messiaen, composed 1959-60

Chronochromie part 1:




Chronochromie part 2 :


                                                                                                             Chronchromie part 3

About Chronochromie:
To Messiaen, harmony meant color, and music was colored time. Completed in 1960, Chronochromie (The color of time) was his first work for large orchestra, minus the solo piano and Ondes Martenot, since the Turangalila-Symphonie of 1948. Chronochromie reflects Messiaen's particular passions of that period, which included birdsongs, mountains (the French Alps), and the manipulation of musical durations. In much the same way birds sing in the continuous present and mountains remain stationary and unyielding, the musical time of Chronochromie exists within a frame rather than a flow. Therefore, repetition and stasis become more important than progression or development.


Chronochromie is cast in seven large, block-like structures whose durations are carefully controlled by a mathematical formula of thirty-two durations. Within this web of durations and its many permutations, Messiaen places bird calls from France, Sweden, Mexico, and Japan. These calls are most often heard in the percussion and woodwinds. Messiaen depicts mountains through the resonant, low hum of bassoons and tuba, huge chords that represent rocks, and quieter sounds that depict streams, foam, and droplets. The full orchestra is heard only in the introduction and the coda. Otherwise, Messiaen blends smaller instrumental combinations within the ensemble. In essence, Chronochromie is an impressionistic tone-painting of a natural world without people, where birds and mountains exist within a cage of motionless time.


In Chronochromie, Messiaen has also forged a relationship between his scale of thirty-two durations and the scale of pitches. The durational scheme, or "mode of limited permutation," is a direct corollary to his pitch-related "modes of limited transposition" as detailed in his famous treatise Technique de mon langage musical (The Technique of my Musical Language). Messiaen was particularly enamored of the "charm of impossibilities" inherent in both these systems -- of the fact that after a certain number of rotations or transpositions, these symmetrical modes inevitably return to their point of departure. Furthermore, Messiaen "colors" the durational scheme through melody, harmony, and timbre. For instance, the melodic shapes of the birdsongs are often used to "color in," or make perceptible, a larger durational scheme.


The sixth section, entitled Epode, contains one of the most striking passages in Messiaen's oeuvre. This uninterrupted outcrying of eighteen simultaneous bird songs by the strings lasts over four minutes, and caused a commotion at the work's premiere in Donaueschingen. Messiaen uncages, if not unleashes, the birdsongs from any underlying rhythmic or harmonic framework in this stunning, kaleidoscopic maze of sound. The 4/8 time signature that appears in the score is there merely to keep the conductor and performers together.