Xenakis, Iannis

[MrGongGong]

To return to the original question about Xenakis without the nonsense of the "but it's not music" brigade (of one )

This article

Rob Weale. “Discovering How Accessible Electroacoustic Music Can Be: the Intention/Reception project”. Organised Sound 11(2), 2006: 189-200.
Cambridge University Press

Which can be downloaded from the EARS site

http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/spip.php?page=articleEars&id_article=3597

has some interesting things to say about how one listens to unfamiliar musics
and what the effect of different information can be on the listening experience

[Beef Oven]

Oh go on
My Daughter is at the Lucier gigs in Scotland today and yesterday
she would wipe the floor with some of us

It is a serious question though

MissGongGong partaking of Oren Ambarchi

Do you have a serious answer then?

[MrGongGong]

Do you have a serious answer then?

Yes I do

Music is contextual

The Wind machine in RVW's Antarctic Symphony IS music
what makes something music is the context rather than the nature of the sound
the nightingale in the Pines of Rome is also music by context
was it music before it was recorded ? or
does it become music by being played in a concert hall ?
BUT
are all the sounds outside the concert hall notmusic ?
surely not as i've just heard someone busking on the tube and that IS music

Music IS relative .............. the myth that somehow "contemporary " music and art are somehow "conspiracies" is simply that , a myth
no one is trying to fool you

you don't have to like Xenakis BUT to dismiss it as "noise" and therefore notmusic is ignorant and stupid
there IS a direct line between Beethoven and Xenakis , most 10 year olds can hear that straight away , try listening to a late Beethoven quartet then one by Xenakis (or Ligeti for that matter) ...........

[Beef Oven]

Yes I do

Music is contextual

The Wind machine in RVW's Antarctic Symphony IS music
what makes something music is the context rather than the nature of the sound
the nightingale in the Pines of Rome is also music by context
was it music before it was recorded ? or
does it become music by being played in a concert hall ?
BUT
are all the sounds outside the concert hall notmusic ?
surely not as i've just heard someone busking on the tube and that IS music

Music IS relative .............. the myth that somehow "contemporary " music and art are somehow "conspiracies" is simply that , a myth
no one is trying to fool you

you don't have to like Xenakis BUT to dismiss it as "noise" and therefore notmusic is ignorant and stupid
there IS a direct line between Beethoven and Xenakis , most 10 year olds can hear that straight away , try listening to a late Beethoven quartet then one by Xenakis (or Ligeti for that matter) ...........

Coincidently, I did play a late LvB 4tet and Ligeti SQ#2 today and I quite agree, though I couldn't explain.

Music is indeed relative (yes that crap my daughter listens to is music too).

Yes, it's all about context. The 'extra-musical noises' used by Rautavaara, Raffy van Wilhelms and others become music when put into a composition or performance, but notmusic (love your accidental coining of that term) before.

You've described well enough, but I was unreasonably asking for a definition.

[Dave2002]

Oh go on
My Daughter is at the Lucier gigs in Scotland today and yesterday
she would wipe the floor with some of us

It is a serious question though

http://local.stv.tv/glasgow/going-ou...-at-tectonics/

[MrGongGong]

Coincidently, I did play a late LvB 4tet and Ligeti SQ#2 today and I quite agree, though I couldn't explain.

Music is indeed relative (yes that crap my daughter listens to is music too).

Yes, it's all about context. The 'extra-musical noises' used by Rautavaara, Raffy van Wilhelms and others become music when put into a composition or performance, but notmusic (love your accidental coining of that term) before.

You've described well enough, but I was unreasonably asking for a definition.

Not accidental
but this is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EQzR1c4j7k

and I don't think you were unreasonable at all

When folk start on the ENC riff (new clothes and all that etc ) it's a bit like Godwins law IMV
(hope the member for Amber Valley enjoyed Desert Island Discs this week )

[teamsaint]

So THAT is what you lot do after Match of the Day is finished !!

I am currently working my way through/enjoying Schumann's complete Piano music.

I'm not really sure that lots of it any easier/more accessible/immediate(probably not a good thing)/whatever than some of the Xenakis that I have listened to over the weekend.

But both of them make me think in similar ways about what I am hearing, and that is (just) one of the things I am looking for in music.

This thread should be sponsored by some exotic continental liqueur IMO. In a good way.

Edit: works seems quite unappealing when there is all this stuff to listen to and discuss.

[Bryn]

Is the wind machine in RVW's Antarctic Symphony music ?

I take it that you intended that as a trick question, for every schoolboy knows that the Antarctic Symphony is by that Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CBE. The work with a somewhat similar title by Ralph Vaughan Williams is Sinfonia Antartica.

[ahinton]

I take it that you intended that as a trick question, for every schoolboy knows that the Antarctic Symphony is by that Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CBE. The work with a somewhat similar title by Ralph Vaughan Williams is Sinfonia Antartica.

...which he was apparently going to call Sinfonia Antarctica until very shortly before its première - see correspondence with Roy Douglas (who's still around to confirm it, despite having been born in 1907)...

Mon Dieu! "Xenakis for dummies" - and in less than 50 posts we're already talking about Vaughan Williams...

[Richard Barrett]

But not all sound is music.

That's what you need to understand.

I'm sure those of us who have spent most of our lives trying to understand such things are very grateful for the admirably concise education we receive at your hands, Simon, many thanks.

I am convinced that "music" is principally a way of listening. On Saturday night, for example, I was out in the Brandenburg countryside listening to and recording frogs. I could hear their sounds as a biological/ecological phenomenon (three species which I could tentatively identify, maybe more, engaged in preparations for mating), or as a musical phenomenon (three layers of sound distinguished by timbre, rate of emission, pitch-register, rhythm; one of these layers - the European fire-bellied toad? - producing a microtonal polyphony of hoots rather like owls' calls). In the latter case it seems to me that the act of listening "musically" (encouraged in this case by darkness, tranquil atmosphere, solitude...) makes the sounds music. It seems to me that nothing is gained by drawing a line between "music" and "non-music" that is supposed to hold for all listeners in all situations, apart from a spurious and narrow-minded kind of neatness which ignores the (potential) richness of human experience.

[doversoul1]

I am convinced that "music" is principally a way of listening. On Saturday night, for example, I was out in the Brandenburg countryside listening to and recording frogs. I could hear their sounds as a biological/ecological phenomenon (three species which I could tentatively identify, maybe more, engaged in preparations for mating), or as a musical phenomenon (three layers of sound distinguished by timbre, rate of emission, pitch-register, rhythm; one of these layers - the European fire-bellied toad? - producing a microtonal polyphony of hoots rather like owls' calls). In the latter case it seems to me that the act of listening "musically" (encouraged in this case by darkness, tranquil atmosphere, solitude...) makes the sounds music. It seems to me that nothing is gained by drawing a line between "music" and "non-music" that is supposed to hold for all listeners in all situations, apart from a spurious and narrow-minded kind of neatness which ignores the (potential) richness of human experience.

Ah, I thought one thing you cannot argue about music is that it is manmade, and in most cases with an intention. Frogs’ croaking, bird songs, wind and rain or any ‘noise’ for that matter can be heard as music but that’s because we have manmade music to go by. I think the question of drawing the line between music and non-music comes in when it is used in, or presented as, composed music and not the sound as it is.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You can draw a line from Ockeghem right through to Philip Moore, and despite the vast range of difference between their work, there is a continuity. They are part of a continuum that includes many creative functions, and perhaps even mental attitudes to audience and motivation, without which I argue that music cannot exist honestly.

The idea that all modern compositions are on this same continuum is, to my mind, a nonsense.

To use an analogy to better explain, I hope, consider railways. From the very first ideas about them, through Rocket, Mallard, the Deltics and the Bullet trans of Japan right up to whatever is the latest in such travel, there have been fundamentals pervading all the various designs. Stephenson would gape at Branson's Pendolinos, but he would nonetheless recognise the function and the achievement - they both do what they are meant to so, albeit in an astonishingly different way, and they all have the same basic methodology - wheels running on pre-laid tracks.

But show him a nuclear submarine and tell him it's a kind of railway - no way. That it's a form of transport, is undoubted. That it's a railway - never.

And that's the difference between, as you mentioned, Palestrina, Mozart and Xenakis. If you had said Palestrina, Mozart and Shostakovitch - or even switched genre and substituted Fleetwood Mac instead of Shost - you'd have been absolutely right. But Xenakis isn't on the same continuum. He's HMS Ambush to Rocket, Mallard and Royal Scots Grey! As are people like, of course, Berio and Stockhausen.

It would not surprise me to be told that I'd made a "category error" - it would follow in a long and undistinguished line of such - but, as I'm sure you must be aware, your own railway analogy isn't really very useful. The differences between the Rocket and the Mallard are concerned with improvements to the design, and I do not believe that there are equivalent improvements in the histories of Western Classical Music: I don't believe that Mendelssohn is an "improvement" on Bach, nor that Bach is a "better" composer than Dunstable, nor that Schoenberg is better than Brahms. (Nor the other way - that Brahms is better than Schoenberg, nor Dunstable than Bach - I do think they're all better than Mendelssohn, but that's possibly beside the point.)

The railway analogy works best, perhaps, if you take the Rocket as the equivalent of Haydn's Op1 and the Mallard (or whatever) paired with his Op76: there is there a line of progression from the supremely competent to the sublimely astonishing. Well, except that I've never experienced any rail travel comparable with what Haydn's later Quartets offer. Your analogy, I feel, might be better suited to the idea of "Transport" - getting from Matlock to Birmingham by foot in the 15th Century, by horse in the 17th, by rail in the 19th, by car in the 20th: they're all to do with getting from Matlock to Birmingham, but in ways that the 15th Century pedestrian would've found astonishing. But this analogy also suggests a sense of "improvement" that I don't think is appropriate.

I don't believe that there is a single "line" from Okeghem to anyone composing today: there's a veritable spaghetti junction of lines and routes, which intermingle and diverse in richly productive ways. How about:
Beethoven - Berlioz - Mussorgsky - Debussy - Stravinsky - Varese - Xenakis (- Birtwistle - Ferneyhough - Barrett - Cassidy)?
Or:
Beethoven - Alkan - Liszt - Busoni - Sorabji - Stevenson - Hinton?
Or:
Beethoven - Schumann - Brahms - Schoenberg - Webern - Scelsi - Feldman - Nono - Sciarrino - Saunders?

It's not as simple as such bald statements, of course, (that Barrett can produce such astonishing Music working with Evan Parker, who has his own lines of tradition shows the inadequacies clearly) - but the idea of lines (or "trees") of tradition rather than "a line" is much more helpful in coming to terms with the "place" of the "radical" New Music in the contexts of the Western Classical Tradition(s).

I should also add ('tho' I don't think it's necessary to do so by now) that all the composers I've mentioned (even Mendelssohn) have thrilled, moved, inspired and comforted me innumerable times, and I rejoice in it all.

[amateur51]

There are times when I might wonder that myself, but the one that I had in mind was that of the OP; at least I feel reasonably confident that "al" is not me (but then who knows for certain, really?...)...

Just checking ... thanks!

[Flosshilde]

Ah, I thought one thing you cannot argue about music is that it is manmade, and in most cases with an intention. Frogs’ croaking, bird songs, wind and rain or any ‘noise’ for that matter can be heard as music but that’s because we have manmade music to go by. I think the question of drawing the line between music and non-music comes in when it is used in, or presented as, composed music and not the sound as it is.

The sounds animals make are not the same as the accidental sounds wind makes. My understanding is that birds compose their songs just as we 'compose' our sentences from words, or sounds with specific meanings (to us). Bird song is 'composed' with intentions - identification, alarm, establishing territory, courtship. And even, perhaps, for fun.

[Richard Barrett]

Frogs’ croaking, bird songs, wind and rain or any ‘noise’ for that matter can be heard as music but that’s because we have manmade music to go by.

That's a chicken-and-egg situation, though, isn't it? "Manmade" music comes from somewhere, that is to say it has evolved from something. Natural ecosystems (see Bernie Krause's fascinating book The Great Animal Orchestra) each evolve their own "orchestration" with the constituent creatures distinguishing their sounds by timing, timbre, pitch-range, repetitiveness etc. etc. in such a way that each sound reaches its intended hearer even through the most dense and complex sound-texture - and of course human musical activity would have emerged in the context of such sonic environments. I would say therefore that in evolutionary terms (and in purely sonic terms too) there's a continuity, rather than a hard and fast break, between "manmade music" and the sounds made by other species. Whether or not that's the case, I think your idea of something being music if it's presented and/or intended as music is too limiting.