Iannis Xenakis’s Architectural Sound

Scholars often speak of musical architecture, but it is very rare for an architect to become a composer. Iannis Xenakis, born in Romania to Greek parents, rose to become chief assistant to Le Corbusier before abandoning his craft to devote his creative energies to music. On Tuesday evening, Miller Theatre presented his only opera, “Oresteia.”The program lists the date of this multimedia piece as 1992, but actually the music was written as incidental background to a protracted production of the Aeschylus House of Atreus trilogy mounted in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1966. One hears the ’60s in every measure. Xenakis, like Frenchman Edgard Varese, had begun to develop a cohesive musical system based on probabilistic mathematics and stochastic method, literally composing with slide rule and T square.The Greeks had a word for it. “Mousike” meant not only music, but also poetry, dance, and elementary education. The ancients recognized that the art of reaching the center of human emotion through language was similar to the methods employed in music. Just as poetry has its musical devices, such as alliteration and onomatopoeia, music has its poetic ones, including modulation, repetition, and the creation and manipulation of tonal color. In this fine production, director Luca Veggetti promulgates the concept of total theater or, as the Columbia folks insist, theatre.The opera from the standard repertoire that comes to mind is not, surprisingly, “Elektra,” but rather “The Rape of Lucretia” by Benjamin Britten. Xenakis spends a great deal of energy creating what he conjectures to be an ancient sound in much the same way that Britten replicates the sonority of the cithara. In fact, Xenakis has his narrator pluck a psaltery, an evocation of the ancient lyre.This production consists of a women’s and a men’s chorus occupying the perimeter of the stage, a dance troupe in the center, and a small instrumental ensemble mounted on a platform. There is only one singer, but many duets. Wilbur Pauley, identified as a bass but singing primarily in the baritone range, employs his competent, if not particularly resonant, voice to move the story along, all the while breaking into falsetto at the drop of a hat, a transition that wears rather thin over time. There is also a children’s chorus that emerges out of the audience for the finale.The instrumentalists perform this remarkable music with aplomb. Although it can be very dissonant, even exploring the verboten world of the quarter-tone, the underlying mathematics of it all ensures a rather comforting logic for the ear. Certainly the hardest-working man in the show is solo percussionist David Schotzko, who not only has to play virtually constantly on all types of plastic and cowhide, but also accompanies the recitative by establishing scale patterns with mallet instruments and, in his spare time, even conducts the children. Every flam and paradiddle seemed to be in place, especially important in a work that relies so heavily on atavistic rhythm.Dance is a big element in this performance, although I would not presume to attempt to evaluate it. As a naïf, however, I will state that the kinesis did make the story much clearer to me than did the sung text. The sold-out crowd just loved this effort, which was oddly compelling in an incessant drumming, wolf howling, outdoor, giant puppet sort of way.

Iannis Xenakis’s Architectural Sound

Iannis Xenakis’s Architectural Sound

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