Xenakis Alive

AGF (aka Antye Greie-Ripatti) is a digital songwriter, sound artist, curator, composer, poet, feminist, and activist connecting sounds with memory. In her second collaboration with the Onassis Stegi, following “Arachnesound,” she brings along with her some remarkable musicians of the contemporary experimental and electronic scene. Building an unstructured poem about the life and work of Iannis Xenakis, after a commission by the Onassis Stegi, AGF presents this poem as the central musical theme and exhibits it in a hybrid format, both as a live and a video-recorded event.

Paul Goutmann, an academic and electronic and experimental music composer, presents two of Xenakis’s most important works: “Orient-Occident” and “Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède”. “Orient-Occident” was composed as a score for a 1960’s film by Enrico Fulchignoni; an UNESCO commission for an exhibition of the same title at the Cernuschi Museum in Paris, the film presents sculptures and other objects from Asia, Europe, and Egypt, emphasizing the relationship between the East (the Orient) and the West (the Occident). The film’s music follows the evolution of its narrative, which recounts the transition from one civilization to another, from Prehistory to the times of Alexander the Great. Xenakis did not compose an illustrative music, but certain sonorities are very suggestive – such as the intensely reverberated atmosphere that characterizes the end evokes the late civilizations of Antiquity, marked by a certain sensuality. In another example, according to one of the composer’s interviews, in order to underline the beauty of a statue of an Egyptian woman, Xenakis tried to simulate the sound of sighs by rubbing a piece of cardboard. Following the film’s screening, Xenakis had the idea to transform the score into purely electroacoustic music, and he did so by cutting several of its parts – in particular, those including Asian music or those including sounds that were too figurative – thus reducing the total duration from 20’12’’ to 10’56’’). Arguably because he had little time to compose the piece, Xenakis drew several sounds from the library of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (therefore sounds that we encounter in other works by different musique concrete composers). As a result, the piece sounds less Xenakian than other electroacoustic works of his; however, this is not at all the case with the mix and the overall form, which are very characteristic of Xenakis. The original version is written for two tracks, but tonight will be a performance of a four-track version created at the GRM in 1969.

“Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède” was composed for the inauguration of the International Kite Exhibition in Osaka. “Unari” are Japanese kites. But why Andromeda? “It's about a space journey in the distant future to the Andromeda galaxy, with episodes taking place during the crossing of sidereal spaces”, Xenakis tells us. For once, it is not mathematical formulas or images borrowed from physics that interest him, but the pure poetry of science fiction... The sounds of the piece were composed on UPIC, a synthesizer invented by Xenakis and a typically Xenakian tool, which allows the drawing of (microcompositional) sound curves and (macrocompositional) musical forms alike. The tape is stereo, but Xenakis specifies that it should be performed through multiple diagonally connected speakers. Hence the version of this concert which – following the premiere of its performance at the planetarium of the Cité des sciences in Paris – experiments with a more extensive spatialization.

Electronic and experimental music sound artist Panos Alexiadis presents “Hollow Shell,” which is an acoustic translation of the visual ideology of Iannis Xenakis’s “The Cosmic City.” The population concentration of millions of inhabitants in hyperbolic rotating megastructures of 5,000 meters high, with their own climatic regulations, where the soil is automatically cultivated over vast areas and “new techniques of material transport with rapid movements in horizontal and vertical directions” are used, where the fear of war no longer exists, would function as an evolutionary one-way street for humanity. It would ultimately bring populations into contact with “the vast space of the sky and stars, turning man towards the universe and its human colonies”.

For the realization of the project, extensive use was made, among other things, of “granular synthesis”, a method of sound processing in which sounds are divided into “tiny grains” and then rearranged to form new ones. Iannis Xenakis introduced it in its early form in 1959. The evolution of granular synthesis over the years established it as an important tool in electronic sound, destined to push it even further.

The tribute of the composer and performer Pan Daijing will focus on fragments of her sound work that were formerly embedded in her live exhibitions. For the first time these sound pieces are being presented outside of its original context. Within these multi-faceted environments, the creation of sheltering, harbouring spaces is enabled through sonic architectural intervention – much in the same way her music enables the emergence of moments of remembrance for the listener to dwell in. She continues exploring the psycho-acoustic phenomena within the sphere of music concrete and the philosophy of improvisation, while breaking ground for a reconfiguring of the spatial and emotional relationship with the listener.

– Makis Solomos

21:00 - Doors open

21:30 - Iannis Xenakis | Orient Occident (spatialized by Paul Goutmann)

21:45 - Panos Alexiadis Live

22:15 - Iannis Xenakis | Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède (spatialized by Paul Goutmann)

22:30 - AGF Live

23:15 - Pan Daijing Live