IANNIS XENAKIS

 ATREES / NOMOS ALPHA / ST 4 / MORSIMA-AMORSIMA LP

La Voix de Son Maitre / EMI

Groundbreaking avant-garde / experimental album from mathematical-musical genius Iannis Xenakis. French edition pressing.

Some info on the release:  Released back in the late 60's by the french La Voix de Son Maitre - EMI label.

In the works of Iannis Xenakis, terms like "form" and "structure" are not merely metaphors for comparing a time-based art (music) to a material-based one (sculpture, architecture, etc.). Trained as an architect as well as a composer, Xenakis thought of "structure" in literal terms and many of his works are devised to manifest a mathematical idea rather than convey a mood (although, as he might argue, numbers made audible have their own potential for a special kind of expressivity). Reaching his maturity as a composer during the 1950s, Xenakis rejected both the imperceptibility of the processes at work in the serialist music of composers like Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt and the arbitrariness of John Cage's emerging aleatoricism. In his works from this period, Xenakis developed a number of methods for realizing numeric principles through musical forms. These principles can be seen at work in the piece under consideration here, ST/4, composed between 1955 and 1962. Scored for string quartet, ST/4 is one of a number of pieces in Xenakis' "ST" series. The title given here is actually an abbreviation of the piece's full name: ST/4-1, 080262. The ST in the title stands for "stochastic," the term used to describe the probability formulas that generate the tone, timbre, and timing of each musical event. The subsequent numeral 4 indicates the number of performers involved and the numeral 1 indicates that this is the first piece to use a particular generative method. The string of numbers that follow give the date of the piece's completion (February 8, 1962). Other pieces in the "ST" series include ST/10 and ST/48, also from 1962, as well as a handful of pieces that apply similar stochastic principles but forego the unwieldy utilitarian titles (such as Morsima-Amorsima from the same year). By the time Xenakis began composing ST/4, his generative formulas for creating structures had become complex enough and computers readily available enough that he delegated to a computer the generation of the specific note-to-note events within the larger stochastic structures delineated by his calculations. The composer thus identified the parameters within which probability calculations would be made for various musical aspects: instrumentation, pitch, note duration, timbre, attack, and others (And Xenakis was sure to make a wide variety of possibilities available, such as percussive sounds on the body of the instrument, intonational inflections, and other extended techniques). The computer was instructed to generate sound events within the parameters given; the music thus does not delineate a structure, per se, but rather laregely operates at random within a structure. The "boundaries" of the form are not perceived, but rather are the "space" the form contains. This seemingly mechanical process thus has a kind of organic quality in the same way that trees have a given general shape but are infinitely varied in their details of form.

Nomos Alpha is a piece for solo cello composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1965, commissioned by Radio Bremen for cellist Siegfried Palm, and dedicated to mathematicians Aristoxenus of Tarentum, Évariste Galois, and Felix Klein. This piece is an example of a style of music called, by Xenakis, symbolic music – a style of music which makes use of set theory, abstract algebra, and mathematical logic in order to create and analyze musical compositions. Along with symbolic music, Xenakis is known for his development of stochastic music.  During his lifetime, Xenakis was a vocal critic of modern western music, since the development of polyphony for its diminished set of outside-time structures, especially when compared to folk and the Byzantine musical traditions. This perceived incompleteness of western music was the main impetus for the development of symbolic music and for composing Nomos Alpha, his most well known example.

Iannis Xenakis (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist and architect. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models such as applications of set theory, varied use of stochastic processes, game theory, etc., in music, and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music.

Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–4) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis' UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed alone.

Xenakis pioneered electronic, computer music, the application of mathematics, statistics, and physics to music and music theory, and the integration of sound and architecture. He used techniques related to probability theory, stochastic processes, statistics, statistical mechanics, group theory, game theory, set theory, and other branches of mathematics and physics in his compositions. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances. He integrated both with political commentary. He viewed compositions as reification and formal structures of abstract ideas, not as ends, to be later incorporated into families of compositions, "a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions." Specific examples of mathematics, statistics, and physics applied to music composition are the use of the statistical mechanics of gases in Pithoprakta, statistical distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, the normal distribution in ST/10 and Atrées, Markov chains in Analogiques, game theory in Duel and Stratégie, group theory in Nomos Alpha, set theory in Herma and Eonta, and Brownian motion in N'Shima. Xenakis was a contemporary with fellow greek composers Anestis Logothetis, Jani Christou and Kyriakos Sfetsas and was creating in a time that flourished the various sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry, Henk Badings and of course Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Alvin Curran and Toshi Ichiyanagi. At the Shirah Arts Festival in Persepolis, he designed Polytope as a composition specific to the historic site. The following year he was commissioned by the brutal dictator, the Shah of Iran, to compose Nuits, which Xenakis dedicated to political prisoners in protest at the Shah’s atrocities. Composers who have acknowledged being influenced by Xenakis include Krzysztof Penderecki and Toru Takemitsu. On the Nurse with wound list of influences.

Here you can listen to "Nomos Alpha":

Iannis Xenakis - Nomos Alpha (1/2) - YouTube

Video will open in a new window

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Condition: Vinyl lies in excellent- condition, looks very clean and plays with light occasional surface noise, while cover looks like new, graded mint- (see picture).

Tracklist
Atrées En 5 Parties A1 1re Partie Conductor – Konstantin SimonovitchEnsemble – Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris A2 3ème Partie Conductor – Konstantin SimonovitchEnsemble – Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris A3 5ème Partie Conductor – Konstantin SimonovitchEnsemble – Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris A4 2ème Partie Conductor – Konstantin SimonovitchEnsemble – Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris A5 4ème Partie Conductor – Konstantin SimonovitchEnsemble – Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris Morsima-Amorsima A6 Morsima-Amorsima Cello – Paul BoufilDouble Bass – Jacques CazauranLeader – Konstantin SimonovitchPiano – Georges PludermacherViolin – Jean-Claude Bernède ST 4 B1 ST 4 Cello – Paul BoufilEnsemble – Le Quatuor BernèdeViolin [1st] – Jean-Claude BernèdeViolin [2nd] – Jacques PratViolin [Alto] – Bruno Pasquier Nomos Alpha B2 Nomos Alpha Cello – Pierre Penassou

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