1. Diamorphoses (1957)
2. Concret PH (1958)
3. Orient-Occident (1960)
4. Bohor (1962)
5. Hibiki-Hana-Ma (1970)
6. S.709 (1992)

Iannis Xenakis is without a doubt one of the major figures in the development of music in the 20th century. In 1957, he joined Pierre Schaeffer and others at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and it was there that Xenakis composed his early works for electronic tape.

Xenakis' distinct sound is already apparent in 'Diamorphoses' (1957) which incorporates sounds of distant earthquakes, car crashes, jet engines, and other 'noise-like' sounds, and 'Concret PH' (1958), based on the sounds of burning charcoal, which was played along with Varese' 'Poème Electronique' in 1958 in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair (which Xenakis, also an architect, mathematician and engineer, designed). 'Orient-Occident' (1960), commissioned by UNESCO as music for a film by Enrico Fulchignoni, uses the sounds of bowed boxes, bells and metal rods, sounds from the ionosphere, and a speed-altered excerpt from Xenakis' orchestral work 'Pitoprakta' are combined to create a work suggestive of the themes of the film, which tracks the development of civilization. 'Bohor' (1962), was composed mostly with the sounds of Middle Eastern bracelets.

'Hibiki-Hana-Ma' (1970, 'Reverberation-Flower-Interval'), composed for the Osaka World's Fair, was composed with the UPIC system, a graphical input device that Xenakis invented, using recordings of an orchestra, a biwa, and a snare drum. And 'S.709' (1992) is the first of two compositions created with the GENDY-N program at CEMAMu (Centre d'Etudes de Mathematiques et Automatiques Musicales / Center for Studies in Mathematics and Automated Music), Xenakis' research center near Paris.

This music is extraordinary! And the CD is an essential part of history. ---Editorial Review

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1. La Légende d'Eer (The Legend of Eer)   45:26

Electronic Studio Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koln

La Légende d'Eer (1977-1978) was composed when Iannis Xenakis was in the midst of his far-reaching explorations of mythology and philosophy. Variously inspired by Plato's myth of Er in The Republic, Pascal's Pensées, and even an article on supernovas in Scientific American, this piece transcends programmatic considerations and presents a strange, roiling soundscape that dwarfs Xenakis' earlier electro-acoustic efforts in scope and imagination. This astonishing piece begins with an extended passage of penetrating, shrill tones that break up into unevenly staggered and twittering pulses. These gradually widen into thick bands of gliding microtonal clusters and bulging intrusions of processed noise, harsh percussive attacks, and throbbing ostinati that grow in density and intensity, only to thin out by the end in distant, glassy pitches similar to the opening. The cumulative effect is similar to the immense roar of Xenakis' Bohor (1962), a shimmering congeries of metallic and rumbling tones that, for its time, seemed the ultimate expression of cosmic vastness and chaos. More than twice Bohor's length, La Légende is also richer in its materials and more polymorphous in its extended processes. Recommended for adventurous listeners and serious students of musique concrète, this CD poses extreme challenges and offers its rewards only to the most dedicated explorers. --- Blair Sanderson, Rovi

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1. La Légende d'Eer (The Legend of Eer)

Iannis Xenakis – composer, performer

La Légende d'Eer (1977-1978) was composed when Iannis Xenakis was in the midst of his far-reaching explorations of mythology and philosophy. Variously inspired by Plato's myth of Er in The Republic, Pascal's Pensées, and even an article on supernovas in Scientific American, this piece transcends programmatic considerations and presents a strange, roiling soundscape that dwarfs Xenakis' earlier electro-acoustic efforts in scope and imagination. This astonishing piece begins with an extended passage of penetrating, shrill tones that break up into unevenly staggered and twittering pulses. These gradually widen into thick bands of gliding microtonal clusters and bulging intrusions of processed noise, harsh percussive attacks, and throbbing ostinati that grow in density and intensity, only to thin out by the end in distant, glassy pitches similar to the opening. The cumulative effect is similar to the immense roar of Xenakis' Bohor (1962), a shimmering congeries of metallic and rumbling tones that, for its time, seemed the ultimate expression of cosmic vastness and chaos. More than twice Bohor's length, La Légende is also richer in its materials and more polymorphous in its extended processes. Recommended for adventurous listeners and serious students of musique concrète, this CD poses extreme challenges and offers its rewards only to the most dedicated explorers. ---Blair Sanderson, AllMusic Review

In applying mathematical and physical laws to the composition of music, Iannis Xenakis exposed the implicit connections between science and art -- rooted in theories of statistical probability, his stochastic method revolutionized not only the composition of music but also its performance, exploring the boundaries of sound and space. Born of Greek parentage in Braïla, Romania on May 29, 1922, Xenakis returned to Greece at age ten, later studying engineering at Athens Polytechnic University. He relocated to Paris in 1947, honing his skills as a composer under the tutelage of Honegger, Milhaud and Messiaen, and in 1954 completed his first major work, Metastasis for Orchestra. For over a decade Xenakis also worked with the renowned French architect Le Corbusier, most notably contributing to the design of the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels International Fair.

Xenakis' engineering studies and architectural work directly impacted his musical ideas (and vice versa) -- on the belief that composition develops outside of music, he built upon mathematical and philosophical principles to develop his stochastic theory (adapting the name from "stochos," the Greek word for "goal"). Xenakis explored the inner structural organization of composing, applying theories of statistical probability to discover the interrelationships between organized sound and music; with the advent of computer technology, he translated his findings into programs which created new compositional families. Xenakis broke further ground in his studies of spatial dynamics -- positioning musicians throughout an auditorium according to kinetic principles, he pursued a perfect sonic balance based upon the distribution of sound from a multitude of directions.

Works including 1956's Pithoprakta and 1957's Diamorphoses launched Xenakis to the forefront of the avant-garde, and he continued pushing the envelope with subsequent pieces including 1958's Duel (a composition based on the principles of game theory) and 1962's Bohor (his first major electronic project). As the complex rhythms of ensemble compositions like 1963's Eonta gave way to full-blown orchestral scores including 1969's Oresteia, in the interim Xenakis directed much of his energies towards guiding the Centre d' Études de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu), which he founded at the Sorbonne in 1966. Although his oeuvre includes works for ballet and theater, tape constructions and even vocal music, from the mid-'70s onward the majority of Xenakis' compositions grew from orchestral and instrumental origins. After suffering poor health for some years, Iannis Xenakis died at his home in Paris on February 4, 2001. ---Jason Ankeny, itunes.apple.com

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1. Eonta, for 2 trumpets, 3 trombones & piano: Première Partie
2. Eonta, for 2 trumpets, 3 trombones & piano: Deuxième Partie
3. Metastasis, for 60 musicians (Anastenaria, Part 3)
4. Pithoprakta, for 49 musicians

Paris Contemporary Music Instrumental Ensemble
Konstantin Simonovic – conductor (1,2)

ORTF Philharmonic Orchestra
Jean-Louis Le Roux – conductor (3,4)

This disc contains recordings from the 1960s of three pieces by Iannis Xenakis performed by two French ensembles, the ORTF conducted by Maurie Le Roux on the orchestral works, and the Ensemble Instrumental de Musique Contemporaine de Paris conducted by Konstantin Simonovic on the chamber work. Xenakis is one of the most fascinating of twentieth-century composers. An outsider to the avant-garde establishment whose day job was architecture, his main passion was mathematics. He had no interest in traditional melody or harmony, but rather sought to create music out of the most complicated notions. His teacher Olivier Messiaen spurred him to continue on in this vein, noting that he was doing something no one else had before. Yes, Xenakis' work is rigourously mathematical, but it sounds not cold and dispassionate, but eye-opening and expansive.

"Metastasis" (1953-1954) is probably Xenakis' best-known piece, and his first mature work. It is a piece of great proportions, 61 instrumentalists playing 61 different parts. The opening is stunning, gradually each of the strings enters sustaining a single note, creating a massive wall of sound before some strings go astray to other notes and pizzicato playing and the rest of the orchestra shows up. Closely related to the composer's design of the Couvent de la Tourette near Lyons, much of the dynamics of this first portion is based on the Fibonacci sequence, with nearly every decision in the work, from the structures of intervals to the length of dynamics and tones. The second section is more traditional, as the bulk of the orchestral forces remain silent with some strings playing a contrapuntal passage with drumrolls in the background and the occasional spotting of brass. Even though this is an AAD recording, the sound quality is superb, with next to no hiss and wonderful dynamics. "Metastasis" sounds way better here than the SWF-Symphony Orchestra/Hans Rosbaud recording on Col legno, the other big historical performance of the work.

"Pithoprakta" (1955-1956) was Xenakis' follow-up to "Metastasis", and sets off on a new course that was to concern the composer for several years. Gone is the inspiration of the Fibonacci sequence, and instead Xenakis creates music of *probabilities*. As a result, the music sounds less focused (think of Lutoslawski's "hesitant" music on steroids), but ultimately richer in timbre and rhythm. The piece's opening consists of the string players knocking on the bodies of their instruments, only the first in a series of explorations of texture, rich with pizzicato, glissandi, trombones sounding, and even woodblock percussion. Even though this is arguably random music, there's such a pulse of life here that even conservative listeners might find themselves won over. A similar piece is "Eonta" for piano and brass quintet (1963), influenced by the ST series of small probabilistic compositions Xenakis had made in the previous years, but written more freely. The piano part is very stochastic, creating music which is remarkable in sound to Boulez's second piano sonata even though it is not serial. The brass interrupt the piano's course from time to time, and exhibit microtonal sounds that contrast with the fixed pitches of the piano. This is the only piece on the disc I don't enjoy, for it is overlong and the instrumentation doesn't work, especially when it comes right after the grandeur of Xenakis' writing for orchestra.

If one wants an introduction to the entire breadth of Xenakis' career, the recent Col legno disc ("Orchestral Works and Chamber Music") is probably the best choice, but for fantastic performances of Xenakis' riotously original early works look here. --- Christopher Culver, amazon.com

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1. Persepolis

Composed 26.08.1971, Persépolis, Festival de Shiraz (Iran), for 8 channel electronic tape.
Tape realized at Studio Acusti, Paris.

Continuous version, without interruption between part I and part II, realized in June 1999 and mixed to stereo 8 channel in April 2000 at the “Studio für Elektronische Musik des Instituts für Neue Musik der Staatlichen Hochschule für Musik Freiburg im Breisgau”, Germany.

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1 Mélanges 	8:48 	
2 Métaux 	13:21 	
3 Claviers 	10:20 	
4 Peaux 	11:11

Les Percussions De Strasbourg
Vibraphones, Marimbas, Xylophones Yamaha, 
Percussion [Instruments à Percussion "rhythmes Et Sons"]:
Christian Hamouy, Claude Ricou, Gabriel Bouchet, Georges Van Gucht, 
Jean-Pierre Bedoyan, Keiko Nakamura (2)

The term the Pleiades normally refers to the cluster of sparkling stars in the right shoulder of the Taurus constellation. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Pleiades are visible only in winter. With a telescope dozens of stars can be seen, of which only six can be picked out by the naked eye as well as a slight milky mist in the same area. According to Greek mythology, this cluster of stars represents the seven sisters or Pleiades, servants of Artemis, Goddess of the Moon. One of the sisters, Electra, was said to have disappeared in the form of a comet, tormented with sorrow after the siege and destruction of the city of Troy built by her son Dardanus, victim of the famous ruse of the Wooden Horse of Troy. The whiteness and the mist in which the Pleiades appear is said to be the result of the tears wept by the six sisters abandoned by Electra.

Iannis Xenakis (born in 1922) composed "Pléïades" over the years 1978 -79 on a commission from the City of Strasbourg. This piece was played for the first time by the Percussions de Strasbourg at a concert with the Ballet du Rhin on 3 May 1979. The title Pléïades refers to the six members of the Percussions de Strasbourg. But for Xenakis, the reference to the multiplicity of existence seems to be more important. The very essence of this piece rests on the fact that it cannot be limited to one simple definition. "Pléïades" is already full of very rich sounds. The instruments used range from keyboards to various percussion instruments including the "sixxen" - a percussion instrument specially created for this composition.

The piece is divided into four parts whose titles refer to the materials from which the instruments are made and to the sounds that the latter produce. Listening to the sixxen immediately makes us think of the Indonesian gamelan, in particular those from Bali, and of the instruments used in festive music in Japan, of Mediterranean church bells and Alpine cowbells. The richness of the sixxen’s timbre is in a way the expression of the different types of life led by Man and of which the metals are an integral part. Whilst giving absolute freedom to the concept of a multiplicity of existence, Xenakis has succeeded in imposing a rule of diversity and unity in the temporal structure of his quest for the creation of a single, unique composition.

The only source of these polyrythmics is the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, recurrence, faithful, pseudo-faithful and unfaithful copying. --- percussionsdestrasbourg.com

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1- Terretektorh
2- Nomos Gamma

Orchestre Philharmonique LO.R.T.F.
Charles Bruck – conductor

After the initial impact of his first orchestral scores (Metastaseis and Pithoprakta), which turned the modern music world on its ear in the mid-1950s, Iannis Xenakis turned to other concerns. He worked on developing a theoretical basis for his mathematical approach to composition, worked in the electroacoustic studio at Radio-France, and wrote some chamber and stage works. In 1966, however, his attention was drawn back to the orchestra and he penned a second set of pretty remarkable scores. Terretektorh, the first of these, was commissioned for the new contemporary music festival in Royan, a picturesque French town on the Atlantic just north of Bordeaux. Those were heady days, when festival organizers were not shy of allowing a composer like Xenakis take the orchestra and scatter all the players around and throughout the audience. In his words, he wanted to create a "Sonotron: an accelerator of sonorous particles." Indeed, the opening three minutes of the piece centers on a single note, passing it around the musicians to create a swirling effect that is impossible to achieve electronically (unless you have 88 channels of sound, perhaps!). Terretektorh shows more concern for harmonic organization than the earlier, iconoclastic Pithoprakta, with its scatterings of knocking sounds and massed effects. Still, the concentration is decidedly on texture and movement, with narrow lines being bundled with a number of others in the same register to create a rawer sonic intensity that still has some basis in melody. Xenakis concentrates on the high and low registers, as did Varèse before him, and adds some unusual sound effects into the mix as well. Each player of the orchestra, in addition to his or her own instrument, is required at various times to play from an arsenal of percussion instruments, including woodblocks, whips, maracas, and siren-whistles. These sounds are spread around the orchestra, creating "flames" of sound (sirens), or "clouds" of noise-like textures. For perhaps the first time, members of the audience could hear the orchestra from the "inside;" it may not always have been comfortable (imagine being seated directly in front of a trombone!), but it certainly would have been exhilarating!

Nomos Gamma is a large, ambitious work for orchestra that follows on from Terretektorh (1966), both of them commissioned for the newly established Royan Festival. Both pieces distribute the members of the orchestra throughout the audience, inviting the listener right inside the ensemble. Nomos Gamma also follows on from Nomos Alpha, for solo cello, again from 1966, in the composer's application of certain new mathematical principles to the compositional process. After spending several years implementing probabilities into his formal procedures, Xenakis turned to deterministic, combinatorial tools. In essence, sequences of different combinations of a range of musical elements or parameters are combined to form the compositional design. Nomos Alpha was the first result of this new approach to musical architecture, and Nomos Gamma was the next (there are sketches for a Nomos Beta, but the piece never saw the light beyond the composer's papers). As a follow-up to Terretektorh, which had caused such a sensation at its 1966 premiere in Royan, Nomos Gamma is both more careful in its construction and more audacious in expression. Whereas the earlier piece focused almost entirely on texture and the effect of sonic motion, the later piece includes straightforwardly melodic elements and a more block-like construction. The effect of hearing a three-part, microtonal melodic texture from within the middle of the instruments is still, of course, an entirely different, and much more visceral, experience than hearing it from afar. Xenakis makes great use, too, of teemingly dense string textures, which many layers of different kinds of sonorities occurring simultaneously. These are intercut with other, more compressed textures, with all the strings playing glassy, sustained harmonics, for example. The brass and woodwinds are, perhaps for the first time in his output, treated as equal to the strings, with dense clusters battling against plaintive melodic passages. Each of the five main sections of the piece is dominated by one of the orchestral instrumental groups: I. woodwinds; II. brass; III. woodwinds; IV. strings; V. percussion. The final section would be positively dizzying to hear in concert. The eight percussionists, placed around the perimeter of the orchestral-audience space, pass drum rolls around, one to another, at an incredible clip. Where Terretektorh wound the musical energy up at the beginning by passing a sustained unison pitch around the orchestra, Nomos Gamma cranks itself up at the end, spinning off like a crazed top, ending with a final outburst by all of the percussionists together. The experience must have been inspiring; Xenakis would try it again the following year in Persephassa, for six percussionists, also directed to encircle the audience (and wind them up!). --- James Harley, Rovi

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1 	Syrmos  for 18 strings  (1959)	12:04
    Cello – Cecile Tacier, Maike Reisener Double Bass – Caroline Menke, John Eckhardt 
    Violin – Andreas Paff, Florian Mausbach, Hyun-Jung Kim, Kamila Namyslowska, Susanne Zapf

2 	Aroura for 12 strings (1971) 	11:05
    Cello – Inga Raab

3 	Voile for 20 strings  (1995) 	5:06
    Cello – Inga Raab, Ruslan VilenskyDouble Bass – John EckhardtViolin – Andreas Paff, Wolfgang Bender

4 	Theraps for solo contrabass  (1975-76) 		13:45
    Double Bass – John Eckhardt

5 	Analogique A+B  for 9 strings & tape  (1959) 	6:46
    Cello – Inga Raab, Ruslan VilenskyDouble Bass – John Eckhardt, Tobias Grove

6 	Ittidra  for string sextet  (1996)		(8:42)
    Viola – Sophie Bansac

Ensemble Resonanz
Johannes Kalitzke – conductor

This CD brings together all of Xenakis' chamber music for strings for the first time (with the exception of the string quartets). The music spans almost 30 years.

- These visceral, sonically bold works explore the many possibilities of writing for strings, including howling glissandi, clustered pizzicatos and tremelos, the clatter of bouncing bows, and a rich palette of dynamics and color.

- The anarchic character of Syrmos alienated Xenakis from the traditional as well as the Darmstadt avant-garde of the 1950s, where it was felt that this music paid no heed to conventional harmony, counterpoint and musical theories -- and even required players to "do violence" to their instruments!

- Performances are by Ensemble Resonanz, one of Germany's leading string ensembles. They are devoted to works of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as juxtaposing these with a specialty to early music.

Unlike most of his avant-garde contemporaries, Iannis Xenakis did not avoid using strings. And, as Michael Struck-Schloen points out in his informative booklet-note, string timbre provided a direct aural equivalent to the graphic depictions of sound Xenakis used as an alternative to conventional notation. The precedure is vividly demonstrated by Syrmos (1959), with the listner compelled to find a path through dense but exhilarating thickets of tone. It could have been written last year, let alone half a century ago - whereas Analogique A+B (1959) feels wholly of its time, with neither the string component nor its electronic transformation arresting enough to make the amalgram more than a technical exercise.

One of Xenakis's achievements was in evoking a recognizable (thought never traditional) sonic context, against which sound could express itself in directly musical terms. Thus we get the Homeric landscape of Arouta (1971) with its heightened interaction between violent gestures and an even more intense silence, and the transcendental virtuosity of Theraps (1976) - its succession of powerful images redefining the double-bass persona. While not lacking impact, the final piece reflects the creative impasses Xenakis arguably had reached by his last decade. The pungent chordal sonorities of Voiles (1995) and intricate layers of sound compromising Ittidra (1996) feel arrested in time: defiant more out of desperation than conviction.

Much to respond to, then, in these assured performances by Ensemble Resonanz (John Eckhardt a bassist of stature), recorded with an ideal combination of clarity and spaciousness. How about a second disc of string music to feature Shaar, Xenakis's masterpiece in the medium? --- Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone, September 2006

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for children's chorus, mixed chorus (minimum 18 female and 18 male voices or multiples) also playing musical accessories, and instrumental ensemble consisting of piccolo, oboe, Eb clarinet, bass clarinet, tuba, 2 percussionists and 'cello.

1. Agamemnon
2. Kassandra (1987)
for baritone (also playing psalterion) and percussion
3. Agamemnon
4. les Choephores
5. les Euménides

6. APPENDIX: La Déesse Athéna (1992) (intended for inclusion in later performances of Oresteďa,
 though not included on current CD recording)
for baritone, percussion and ensemble

Spiros Sakkas - baritone
Sylvio Gualda - percussion
Choeur du Département Musical de l'Université de Strasbourg
Maîtrise de Colmar
Ensemble Vocal d'Anjou
Ensemble de Basse-Normandie
Dominique Debart - conductor
Robert Weddle - conductor

Philip Larson - bass-baritone (Appendix)
Timothy Adams - percussion (Appendix)
Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic (Appendix)
Juan Pablo Izquierdo - conductor (Appendix)

The origins of Iannis Xenakis’ Oresteïa are almost more remarkable than the music itself, a truly bizarre “only in the USA” sort of story. Sometime in the 1960s the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan discovered that its name was not derived from some Native American language, but rather from Greek. Filled with pride at its newfound ethnic association, the town decided to hold a Greek festival capped by performances of The Birds and Oresteïa in a Greek-style amphitheater constructed on the local university baseball field. They hired an authentic Greek director and also agreed to engage the services of an authentic Greek composer to write the incidental score. Xenakis, in turn, fired with enthusiasm for the project, wrote more than an hour and a half of music for the production, which by all accounts was a huge success. In order to salvage the work for concert performance, Xenakis later prepared a cantata lasting around 50 minutes, adding in the mid-1980s the movement “Kassandra”–and here we have the result.

Okay, so it’s not exactly as easy to listen to as Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, another cantata that grew out of, shall we say, populist roots (in this case a film score), but anyone who thinks that Xenakis is unapproachable might hear Oresteïa and reconsider this hasty judgment. What gives this music its strange fascination is the combination of generally tonal, chant-like vocal elements with primitive sounding (but actually very technically sophisticated) instrumental interludes. In this respect we’re not so far away from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the vocal works of Varèse, or (perish the thought) the later settings of Greek drama by Carl Orff. You can hear this very clearly in the second movement, Kassandra, with its delirious writing for percussion and high baritone, as well as in the chanting of the chorus in Les Choephores. The stylized instrumental writing, often monophonic and permeated with strange percussion sounds and extremes of pitch (both high and low), adds to the impression of primal starkness, and how well it suits the drama!

So where’s the snake in this particular avant-garde Eden? Here it is: Montaigne can’t find room in its cheap and flimsy paper package for the texts. You would think by now that any record company with even a shred of pride would understand that it’s worth it to charge a few pennies more to let people serious about music understand what all of the screaming’s about. Sure, we know the story (Agamemnon, Elektra, Klytemnestra–it’s all been done before); but much as Xenakis disliked merely descriptive music, his settings go hand in hand with the words, and to miss them is to miss much of the music’s point, however fascinating and evocative it may be as pure sound. So what could have served as an ideal introduction (in this very fine and well recorded performance) to a fascinating and original composer winds up being just another specialty item for the already converted. God, what a pity! ---David Hurwitz, classicstoday.com

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