Podcasts about Iannis Xenakis

Pierre-Michel MengerCollège de FranceAnnée 2023-2024Sociologie du travail créateurColloque - Boulez : l'invention au pouvoir ? Les années 1975-1995 - L'opposition à Boulez, entre ressentiment personnel et contestation d'un modèleSession 5 : Le musicien sur tous les frontsIntervenant :Christian MerlinUniversité de Lille-Nord de FranceColloque organisé pour le centenaire de la naissance de Pierre Boulez par le Pr Pierre-Michel Menger, chaire Sociologie du travail créateur, et Nicolas Donin, professeur de musicologie à l'université de Genève.Avec le soutien de la Fondation du Collège de France et de son grand mécène LVMH.RésuméRien d'étonnant à ce que celui qui s'est construit dans la désobéissance et le refus de l'autorité, ait très tôt vu la sienne contestée. La virulence de l'opposition à Boulez fut à la mesure de l'intransigeance de l'homme et du pouvoir, réel ou fantasmé, qu'on lui prêtait. Nous reviendrons sur les ressorts d'une polarisation de la vie musicale française.Dès les concerts du Domaine musical, fondés en 1954, se dessine une opposition esthétique dont le chef de file le plus actif et brillant est le journaliste du Figaro Bernard Gavoty. L'opposition esthétique s'accompagne d'une opposition institutionnelle : refus de subvention publique au Domaine musical, hostilité du Conseil national de la musique. L'imbrication entre divergences esthétiques, conflit institutionnel et inimitié personnelle culminera dans l'affrontement avec André Jolivet.De lutte entre l'institution (radio, instances gouvernementales) et l'underground (la niche privée du Domaine musical), l'opposition prend dans les années 1960 l'allure d'une lutte au sein-même de l'institution, lorsque, à la suite du ralliement d'André Malraux, Boulez est écouté au ministère, grâce à des relais d'influence comme Gaëtan Picon ou Emile Biasini. Se constitue alors au sein-même du ministère un courant « contre-révolutionnaire », autour de Marcel Landowski. La victoire de celui-ci aboutit en 1966 au départ de Boulez, qui renonce à toute fonction en France.À son retour, dans les années 1970, à l'initiative de Georges Pompidou, l'opposition prend une autre dimension. Jusqu'ici, Boulez contre l'institution, c'était David contre Goliath. Désormais, l'IRCAM, financé par la puissance publique mais aux frontières de l'appareil d'Etat, Boulez ayant posé comme condition de ne pas dépendre directement du ministère, sera non plus dénoncé comme le jouet d'un agitateur culturel à l'influence somme toute circonscrite, mais celui d'un autocrate détenant tous les leviers de la création. L'hostilité ne vient plus seulement de milieux conservateurs attachés à la tonalité, mais aussi d'avant-gardistes s'estimant lésés, comme Iannis Xenakis ou Jean-Claude Eloy.Se rejoignent alors les deux oppositions : celle de l'institution qui entend garder le contrôle de son administration et fustige ce qu'elle considère comme son détournement à des fins personnelles, et celle des anti-modernes, qui prônent un retour à une esthétique plus consonante et dénoncent désormais en Boulez un homme de pouvoir et un compositeur officiel.

E- und U-Musik, elektronische und akustische. Diamorphosis von Iannis Xenakis, Cello Concerto op. 10 von Maria Herz, Serpentine von Peaches, Information needed to create an entire body von Catarina Barbieri, Song for Johnny - in memory of Johnny Dyani von Irène Schweizer und Hamid Drake und Fury, eine Komposition für Kontrabass, von Rebecca Saunders

Un saludo queridos amigos y oyentes. Hoy he consagrado el audio a la sionista utópica Hannah Arendt. Exiliada de Alemania durante el régimen Nacionalsocialista enseñó en la New School for social Research de Nueva York. Criticó no solo los sistemas no democráticos, sino que acabó desencantada con la democracia liberal estadounidense. Según Arendt el antisemitismo, el imperialismo y el totalitarismo han pisoteado la dignidad humana; Hannah se embarca en la tarea de encontrar un nuevo principio político que sea la salvaguarda de la humanidad. 📗ÍNDICE *. Resúmenes. 1. VIDA. 2. OBRAS. 3. "LOS ORÍGENES DEL TOTALITARISMO". 4. LA ACCIÓN HUMANA. AQUÍ https://go.ivoox.com/rf/140832026 puedes escuchar una introducción al Existencialismo. Audio recomendado de la semana: Economía y política liberal de Stuart Mill. puedes escucharlo aquí>>> https://go.ivoox.com/rf/111571946 🎼Música de la época: 📀 Sintonía: Phlegra del compositor rumano de padres griegos Iannis Xenakis, compuesta en 1975 año del fallecimiento de Hannah. 🎨Imagen: Hannah Arendt (Linden-Limmer, 14 de octubre de 1906 - Nueva York, 4 de diciembre de 1975) fue una filósofa, historiadora, politóloga, socióloga, profesora de universidad, escritora​ y teórica política​ alemana. 👍Pulsen un Me Gusta y colaboren a partir de 2,99 €/mes si se lo pueden permitir para asegurar la permanencia del programa ¡Muchas gracias a todos!

Diseñar es interpretar el mundo. Introducir el Sonido en el diseño es un paso importante para tener en cuenta la complejidad multisensorial más allá de lo puramente visual. El diseño puede ser un instrumento para la inclusión, la empatía, en entornos culturales, sociales y económicos para explorar nuevas relaciones entre los seres humanos, con las diferentes que habitan el planeta y con el planeta mismo.Tradicionalmente el sonido ha sido utilizado como complemento en el diseño de objetos para guiar a los usuarios en la interacción con un objeto, como los tonos de confirmación en un microondas o una alarma de advertencia en un móvil.Escucharemos ejemplos de sonidos de objetos cotidianos, diseños sonoros de Brian Eno, ejemplo de sonidos urbanos recogidos por Ricardo Atienza y Monica Sand y obras de Eduardo Polonio, y de Iannis XenakisEscuchar audio

Podcast de Philippe Rahm pour webSYNradio : LA DISSOCIATION DU REEL - Gerard Grisey, Partiels - Tristan Murail, Desintegration - Giacinto Scelsi, Ohoi - Anton Webern, Cinq pièces Op. 10 - Iannis Xenakis, Metastasis - György Ligeti, Atmosphères - Hugues Dufourt, Le Déluge - http://synradio.fr/philippe-rahm-2/

Episode 153 Chapter 14, Musique Concrète in France. Works Recommended from my book, Electronic and Experimental Music  Welcome to the Archive of Electronic Music. This is Thom Holmes. This podcast is produced as a companion to my book, Electronic and Experimental Music, published by Routledge. Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in the text and an associated list of recommended works, also called Listen in the text. They provide listening examples of vintage electronic works featured in the text. The works themselves can be enjoyed without the book and I hope that they stand as a chronological survey of important works in the history of electronic music. Be sure to tune-in to other episodes of the podcast where we explore a wide range of electronic music in many styles and genres, all drawn from my archive of vintage recordings. There is a complete playlist for this episode on the website for the podcast. Playlist: MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE IN FRANCE Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 01:30 00:00 1.     Pierre Schaeffer, “Étude Aux Chemins De Fer ” (1948). Early musique concrète using turntables not magnetic tape. GRM studio (Paris). 02:53 01:36 2.     Pierre Schaeffer, “Étude Violette” (1948). Early musique concrète using turntables not magnetic tape. GRM studio (Paris). 03:25 04:28 3.     Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, “Prosopopée I” from Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949– 50). Early use of magnetic tape for musique concrète GRM studio (Paris). 02:57 07:48 4.     Iannis Xenakis, “Diamorphoses” (1957). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 06:57 10:42 5.     Luc Ferrari, “Visage V” (1958-59). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 10:37 17:38 6.     Mireille Kyrou, “Etude I” (1960). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 05:09 28:12 7.     Philippe Carson, “Turmac” (1961). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 09:43 33:20 8.     Bernard Parmegiani, “Danse” (1961). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 04:08 43:04 9.     Henri Pousseur, “Trois Visages De Liège” (1961). Magnetic tape composition. Composed at the Centre de recherches et de formation musicales de Wallonie (CRFMW) (Belgium). 20:40 47:22 10.   Luc Ferrari, “Hétérozygote” (1963-64). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 26:20 01:08:00 11.   François Bayle, “Vapeur” (1964). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 04:44 01:34:16 12.   Beatriz Ferreyra, “Demeures aquatiques” (1967). Magnetic tape composition. GRM studio (Paris). 07:20 01:39:00                   Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations. Original music by Thom Holmes can be found on iTunes and Bandcamp.

The Mikes discuss one of the warhorses of 20th-century music: Iannis Xenakis. Fun debate, pieces we never knew, and of course, loud sounds!

La semana pasada tuvimos el placer de charlar con el compositor José Manuel López y a través de sus obras recientes estuvimos comentando las conexiones entre la música y otras disciplinas científicas y artísticas. Hoy escucharemos su obra "Angle Mort" introduciendo el tema de la conexión entre música y abstracción, música y geometría, música y matemáticas. Tras la obra Angle Mort escucharemos los comentarios que nos hace el compositor. Escucharemos asimismo obras de Ana Bofill, compositora y arquitecta y de Iannis Xenakis, que proponen maneras exquisitas de pensar, a través de sus composiciones, lo métrico, lo geométrico, lo espacial, lo arquitectónico, lo sensorial y lo abstracto.Escuchar audio

La aportación del compositor francés a la historia de la música es el espectralismo—teoría musical que desarrolla junto a Tristan Murail y Hughes Dufourt en torno al Ensamble L'Itineraire—, que se basa en la descomposición espectral del sonido, inclinándose hacia la naturaleza propia del timbre._____Has escuchadoAnubis-Nout. I. Anubis [très précis] (1983). Ernesto Molinari, clarinete contrabajo. Kairos (2005)Le Noir de l'Étoile: pour six percussionistes diposés autour du public, bande magnétique et transmission in situ de signaux astronomiques (1989-1990) / texto de Jean-Pierre Luminet. Les Percussions de Strasbourg. Accord (2004)Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1997-1998). Catherine Dubosc, soprano; Klangforum Wien; Sylvain Cambreling, director. Kairos (2001)_____Selección bibliográficaBAILLET, Jérôme, Gérard Grisey: fondements d'une écriture. L'Harmattan, 2000BROWN, Jeffrey Arlo, The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey: Delirium and Form. University of Rochester Press, 2023CAGNEY, Liam, Gérard Grisey and Spectral Music: Composition in the Information Age. Cambridge University Press, 2023*COHEN-LEVINAS, Danielle , “Gérard Grisey: du spectralisme formalisé au spectralisme historisé”. En: Vingt-cinq ans de création musicale contemporaine. L'Harmattan, 1998COHEN-LEVINAS, Danielle (ed.), Le temps de l'écoute: Gérard Grisey ou la beauté des ombres sonores. L'Harmattan, 2004COSSETTINI, Luca y Angelo Orcalli, Diffractions: analyse de l'œuvre musicale mixte: “Jour, Contre-Jour”de Gérard Grisey. L'Harmattan, 2018FÉRON, François-Xavier, “The Emergence of Spectra in Gérard Grisey's Compositional Process: from Dérives (1973-1974) to Les espaces acoustiques (1974-1985)”. Contemporary Music Review, vol. 30, n.º 5 (2012), pp. 343-375GRISEY, Gérard, Écrits. Editado por Guy Lelong con la colaboración de Anne-Marie Réby. Éditions MF, 2008HASEGAWA, Robert, “Gérard Grisey and The ‘Nature' of Harmony”. Music Analysis, vol. 28, n.º 2-3 (2009), pp. 349-371HENNESSY, Jeffrey J., “Beneath the Skin of Time: Alternative Temporalities in Grisey's Prologue for Solo Viola”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 47, n.º 2 (2009), pp. 36-58*HERVÉ, Jean-Luc, Dans le vertige de la durée: “Vortex Temporum” de Gérard Grisey. L'Harmattan, 2001KRIER, Yves, “Partiels, de Gérard Grisey, manifestation d'une nouvelle esthétique”. Musurgia, vol. 7, n.º 3-4 (2000), pp. 145-172*MOSCOVICH, Viviana, “French Spectral Music: An Introduction”. Tempo, n.º 200 (1997), pp. 21-27*SOLOMOS, Makis (ed.), Iannis Xenakis, Gérard Grisey. La métaphore lumineuse. L'Harmattan, 2003 *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Continuamos con la voz, como instrumento mágico y natural que nos permite comunicarnos, expresar sentimientos, expresar afecto y desde siempre, instrumento artístico por excelencia. Estas multiplicidad de uso de la voz en el arte vocal e instrumental siempre ha sido fuente de inspiración y de evolución de la música y del canto. Escuchamos obras de Andrea Gabrielli, Iannis Xenakis, Spiros Papadopoulos, Susana Jimenez Carmona y Kaija Saariaho.Escuchar audio

Poseedor de un lenguaje propio de Xenakis que conecta arquitectura y música a nivel estructural propone, con la música estocástica, la utilización de estructuras matemáticas en la praxis compositiva. Desarrolla el sistema UPIC y es pionero en el uso del algoritmo en la composición musical.____Has escuchadoLa Légende d'Eer. Nuevo remix en estéreo, a partir de la cinta original de siete canales, realizada del 3 al 4 de junio de 2004 por Gerard Pape. Mode (2005)Metastaseis (1953-1954). SWF Symphony Orchestra; Hans Rosbaud, director. Col Legno (2000)Oresteïa. Les Euménides (1965-1966, rev. 1989). L'Ensemble de Basse-Normandie; Dominique Debart, director; Ensemble Vocal d'Anjou; Robert Weddle, director de coros. Salabert Actuels (1990)Pléïades. Métaux (1978). Les Pléiades; Sylvio Gualda, director. Erato (1992)____Selección bibliográficaBARTHEL-CALVET, Anne-Sylvie, “MÉTASTASSIS-Analyse: un texte inédit de Iannis Xenakis sur Metastasis”. Revue de Musicologie, vol. 89, n.º 1 (2003), pp. 129-187*CASTANET, Pierre Albert, “We Must Open Our Ears and Eyes”: A Philosophical Lesson from the Polymath Iannis Xenakis”. Itamar. Revista de investigación musical: territorios para el arte, n.º 9 (2023), pp. 95-106DI SCIPIO, Agostino, “Compositional Models in Xenakis's Electroacoustic Music”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 36, n.º 2 (1998), pp. 201-243*GIBSON, Benoît, The Instrumental Music of Iannis Xenakis: Theory, Practice, Self-Borrowing. Pendragon Press, 2011HARLEY, James, “The String Quartets of Iannis Xenakis”. Tempo, n.º 203 (1998), pp. 2-10*—, Xenakis. His Life in Music. Routledge, 2004HARLEY, Maria Anna, “Music of Sound and Light: Xenakis's Polytopes”. Leonardo, vol. 31, n.º 1 (1998), pp. 55-65*HILL, Peter, “Xenakis and the Performer”. Tempo, n.º 112 (1975), pp. 17-22*JONES, Evan, “Residue-Class Sets in the Music of Iannis Xenakis: An Analytical Algorithm and a General Intervallic Expression”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 39, n.º 2 (2001), pp. 229-261*KANACH, Sharon, “Xenakis's Hand, or The Visualization of the Creative Process”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 40, n.º 1 (2002), pp. 190-197*KANACH, Sharon (ed.), Performing Xenakis. Pendragon Press, 2010KIOURTSOGLOU, Elisavet, “An Architect Draws Sound and Light: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis's Diatope and La Légende d'Eer (1978)”. Computer Music Journal, vol. 41, n.º 4 (2017), pp. 8-31*LIZ, Ángel, “La alianza artes/ciencias a través de la obra de Iannis Xenakis”. Quodlibet: Revista de Especialización Musical, n.º 39 (2007), pp. 98-114*LUQUE, Sergio, “The Stochastic Synthesis of Iannis Xenakis”. Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 19 (2009), pp. 77-84*MÂCHE, François-Bernard, Portrait(s) de Iannis Xenakis. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2002MARCO ARAGÓN, Tomás, “Xenakis o la implacabilidad de la idea”. En: Jesús Villa Rojo (coord.), Músicas actuales: ideas básicas para una teoría. Ikeder, 2008*NAKIPBEKOVA, Alfia (ed.), Exploring Xenakis: Performance, Practice, Philosophy. Vernon Press, 2019PAPE, Gérard, Iannis Xenakis and the Ethics of Absolute Originality. UTEURP, 2023PARDO, Salgado, “El sonido cinemático. Iannis Xenakis”. En: Begoña López Herranz (coord.), Campos interdisciplinares de la musicología: V Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Musicología (Barcelona, 25-28 de octubre de 2000). Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2002*PECK, Robert W., “Toward an Interpretation of Xenakis's Nomos Alpha”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 41, n.º 1 (2003), pp. 66-118*REYNOLDS, Roger, “Xenakis:… Tireless Renewal at Every Instant, at Every Death…”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 41, n.º 1 (2003), pp. 4-64*REYNOLDS, Roger y Karen Reynolds, Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House. Routledge, 2022SERRA, Marie-Hélène, “Stochastic Composition and Stochastic Timbre: GENDY3 by Iannis Xenakis”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 31, n.º 1 (1993), pp. 236-257*SOLOMOS, Makis, Iannis Xenakis. P. O. Éditions, 1996—, “El universo de la sonoridad en Xenakis”. Quodlibet: Revista de Especialización Musical, n.º 10 (1998), pp. 3-18*—, “The Unity of Xenakis's Instrumental and Electroacoustic Music: The Case for ‘Brownian Movements'”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 39, n.º 1 (2001), pp. 244-254*—, “De l'apollinien et du dionysiaque dans les écrits de Xenakis”. En: Formel, informel: musique-philosophie. Editado por Makis Solomos, Antonia Soulez y Horacio Vaggione. L'Harmattan, 2003SOLOMOS, Makis (ed.), Iannis Xenakis: la musique électroacoustique. L'Harmattan, 2015SOUSTER, Tim, “Xenakis's Nuits”. Tempo, n.º 85 (1968), pp. 5-18*STERKEN, Sven, “Towards a Space-Time Art: Iannis Xenakis's Polytopes”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 39, n.º 2 (2001), pp. 262-273*VARGA, Bálint A., Conversations with Iannis Xenakis. Faber and Faber, 1996XENAKIS, Iannis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Pendragon Press, 1992—, Música de la arquitectura. Akal, 2009*XENAKIS, Iannis et al., “Xenakis on Xenakis”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 25, n.º 1-2 (1987), pp. 16-63*XENAKIS, Iannis y Bálint András Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis. Faber and Faber, 1996 *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Hasta bien entrado el siglo XX, las ideas musicales se exponen de acuerdo con un desarrollo ordenado según una estructura previamente estudiada, escrita o planteada. Mediado el siglo, algunos compositores se acogen a una tendencia que deja margen al indeterminismo, la flexibilidad y el azar._____Has escuchadoAngelica Music. Exercise 10 (1973-1974) / Christian Wolff. Apartment House; Christian Wolff, melódica. I Dischi di Angelica (2015)Aus den sieben Tagen. Liaison (1968) / Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ensemble Musique Vivante; Diego Masson, director. Harmonia Mundi (1988)HPSCHD. Solo VII: For Harpsichord & Computer-Generated Sound Tapes (1967) / John Cage y Lejaren Hiller. Jukka Tiensuu, clave. Ondine (1999)Pithoprakta (1956) / Iannis Xenakis. Orchestre philharmonique du Luxembourg; Arturo Tamayo, director. Timpani (2008)_____Selección bibliográficaADORNO, Theodor W., “Vers une musique informelle”. En: Escritos Musicales I-III, vol. 16. Akal, 2006*BEHRMAN, David, “What Indeterminate Notation Determines”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 3, n.º 2 (1965), pp. 58-73*BOULEZ, Pierre, “Alea”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 3, n.º 1 (1964), pp. 42-53*CARDEW, Cornelius, Scratch Music. The MIT Press, 1974CHARLES, Daniel, “L'interprète et le hasard”. Musique en Jeu, n.º 3 (1971), pp. 45-51*DELIÈGE, Célestin, “Indétermination et improvisation”. IRASM, vol. 2 (1971), pp. 155-191HARBINSON, William G., “Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez's Third Sonata”. Tempo, n.º 169 (1989), pp. 16-20*JENSEN, Marc G., “John Cage, Chance Operations, and the Chaos Game: Cage and the I Ching”. The Musical Times, vol. 150, n.º 1907 (2009), pp. 97-102*MEDINA, Ángel, “Apuntes sobre la recepción de la música abierta en España”. Anuario Musical, n.º 51 (1996), pp. 217-232*MORO VALLINA, Daniel, “Aleatoriedad y flexibilidad en la vanguardia musical española”. Actas do I Encontro Iberoamericano de Jovens Musicólogos (2012), pp. 236-248: [PDF]NIETO, Velia, “La forma abierta en la música del siglo XX”. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, vol. 30, n.º 92 (2008), pp. 191-203O'GRADY, Terence J., “Aesthetic Value in Indeterminate Music”. The Musical Quarterly, vol. 67, n.º 3 (1981), pp. 366-381*PEYROU, Mariano, Oídos que no ven. Taurus, 2022POLO PUJADAS, Magda y Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny, Pensamiento y música a cuatro manos: la creatividad musical en los siglos XX y XXI. Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2015*REYNOLDS, Roger, “Indeterminacy: Some Considerations”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 4, n.º 1 (1965), pp. 136-140*TRENKAMP, Anne, “The Concept of Alea in Boulez's Constellation-Miroir”. Music & Letters, vol. 57, n.º 1 (1976), pp. 1-10* *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Garsioji japonų pianistė Aki Takahashi (g. 1944) drąsiai imasi naujosios stilistikos kompozicijų, interpretacijas paversdama tiesiog etaloninėmis. Laidoje pristatomi jos skambinami du 20 amžiaus novatoriai – italas Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) ir graikas Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). Mąsli ir įtaigi Scelsi fortepijoninė muzika gana netikėtai papildo jo gerokai radikalesnių kamerinių ir orkestrinių kompozicijų pasaulį. Ekstremaliai komplikuota, užburiančios energijos ir išradingumo Xenakio pianistika žymi tolimiausias gyvo atlikimo ribas.Laidos autoriai Šarūnas Nakas ir Mindaugas Urbaitis

La historia de la música no depara un lugar de importancia a esta manifestación sonora hasta 1913, año del manifiesto de Russolo que preconiza los intonarumori o máquinas de ruido. Mucho más tarde despierta el ruidismo en Japón y en la escena del rock alternativo._____Has escuchadoAn Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music. Third A-Chronology 1952-2004 / Peter Rehberg (Pita). Sub Rosa (2004)Doing by not doing: [Iannis Xenakis. Persepolis + Remixes. Edition I] / Zbigniew Karkowski. Asphodel (2002)Acid Bath, Drip Bones: [Ju-Jikan: 10 Hours of Sound from Japan] / Pain Jerk. 23five; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002)“Luigi Russolo, Intonarumoris, 1913”. YouTube Vídeo. Publicado por david rato, 1 de julio de 2012: [Vídeo]Minazo Volume 1. Voices from the Sea / Merzbow (Masami Akita). Important Records (2006)_____Selección bibliográficaARIZA, Javier, “El ruidismo en el cine. La expansión del universo acústico en imágenes”. En: El sonido de la velocidad: cine y música electrónica. Editado por Pablo G. Polite y Sergi Sánchez Martí. Alpha Decay, 2011ATTALI, Jacques, Ruidos: ensayo sobre la economía política de la música. Traducción de Federico Álvarez. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1995ATTON, Chris, “Fan Discourse and the Construction of Noise Music as a Genre”. Journal of Popular  Music Studies, vol. 23, n.º 3 (2011), pp. 324-342BAILEY, Thomas Bey William, Micro-Bionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century. Creation Books, 2009*BIJSTERVELD, Karin, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. The MIT Press, 2008BROWN, Barclay, “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 20, n.º 1-2 (1981), pp. 31-48*CUSICK, Suzanne, “‘You Are in a Place That Is Out of the World…': Music in the Detention Camps of the Global War on Terror”. Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 2 (2008), pp. 1-26*DEMERS, Joanna, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford University Press, 2010*DOLAN, Daniel, “Cultural Noise: Amplified Sound, Freedom of Expression and Privacy Rights in Japan”. International Journal of Communication, vol. 2 (2008), pp. 662-690FRIEDL, Reinhold, “Some Sadomasochistic Aspects of Musical Pleasure”. Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 12 (2002), pp. 29-30*GODDARD, Michael, Benjamin Halligan y Nicola Spelman (eds.), Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. Bloomsbury, 2013GRAHAM, Stephen, “Noise as Concept, History, and Scene”. En: Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music. University of Michigan Press, 2016HEGARTY, Paul, Noise/music: a History. Continuum, 2007*ILES, Anthony et al., Ruido y capitalismo. Arteleku, 2011*KAHN, Douglas, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. The MIT Press, 1999*KELLEY, Caleb, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. The MIT Press, 2009NOVAK, David, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Duke University Press, 2013ROSELL, Oriol, Un cortocircuito formidable: de los Kinks a Merzbow: un continuum del ruido. Alpha Decay, 2024*ROSS, Alex, El ruido eterno: escuchar al siglo XX a través de su música. Seix Barral, 2010*SCHWARTZ, Hillel, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. Zone, 2011SIM, Stuart, Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise. Edinburgh University Press, 2007VENN, Edward, “Rethinking Russolo”. Tempo, vol. 64, n.º 251 (2010), pp. 8-16*VOEGELIN, Salome, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. Continuum, 2010* *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Die Solowerke für Klavier «Herma» und «Mists», dazu das Cembalostück «Khoaï» von Iannis Xenakis: Das ist Musik wie ein Klangstrudel, voller brodelnder Energie – durchaus überfordernd für die Interpretin, aber mitreissend für das Publikum, dessen Ohren dennoch weder frustriert noch betäubt werden. Die Pianistin Asia Ahmetjanova und die Musikwissenschaftlerin Doris Lanz diskutieren über verschiedene Möglichkeiten, wie man mit diesen archaischen Urkräften umgehen könnte.

La existencia de ejecutantes musicales que no son compositores, o lo son pero prefieren consagrarse a interpretar, resulta crucial en la Historia de la Música. Gracias a esos encargos de los que se beneficia su desempeño, han hecho más grande la obra de los grandes compositores._____Has escuchadoImmer: pour violoncelle seul (1996) / Pascal Dusapin. Sonia Wieder-Atherton, violonchelo. RCA (2001)Plainsound Glissando Modulation: Raga in Just Intonation for Violin and Double Bass, op. 49 (2006-2007) / Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Helge Slaatto, violín; Frank Reinecke, contrabajo. NEOS (2009)Ryoanji: For Contrabass and Tape (1983) / John Cage. Stefano Scodanibbio, contrabajo. WERGO (2009)st/4: for string quartet (1955-1962) / Iannis Xenakis. Arditti String Quartet. Montaigne (2003)Wunderblock (Nebenstück II): pour accordéon et orchestre (2005) / Gérard Pesson. Teodoro Anzellotti, acordeón. Aeon (2009)_____Selección bibliográficaCLARKE, Eric F. y Mark Doffman, Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music. Oxford University Press, 2017COOK, Nicholas, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford University Press, 2013COUROUX, Marc, “Evryali and the Exploding of the Interface: From Virtuosity to Antivirtuosity and Beyond”. Contemporary Music Review, vol. 21, n.º 2-3 (2002), pp. 53-67DUNCAN, Stuart Paul, “Re-Complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘New Complexity'”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 48, n.º 1 (2010), pp. 136-172*FLENDER, Reinhard David, Freie Ensembles für Neue Musik in Deutschland eine Studie des Instituts für kulturelle Innovationsforschung an der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. Schott, 2007HILL, Peter, “Xenakis and the Performer”. Tempo, n.º 112 (1975), pp. 17-22*HOWARD, Philip, “‘Evryali': Beyond the Surface (What I Learned from ‘Evryali' by Performing It)”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 42, n.º 2 (2004), pp. 144-157*LAWSON, Colin y Robin Stowell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Musical Performance. Cambridge University Press, 2012*MABRY, Sharon, Exploring Twentieth-Century Vocal Music. Oxford University Press, 2010*MADURELL, François, L'ensemble Ars Nova: Une contribution au pluralisme esthétique dans la musique contemporaine, 1963-1987. L'Harmattan, 2003MCPHERSON, Gary E. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance. Volume 1. Oxford University Press, 2022*—, The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance. Volume 2. Oxford University Press, 2022*PACE, Ian, “Notation, Time and the Performer's Relationship to the Score in Contemporary Music”. En: Unfolding Time: Studies in Temporality in Twentieth Century Music. Editado por Darla Crispin. Leuven University Press, 2009SILVERTHORNE, Diane V. (ed.), Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: The Musicalisation of Art. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021*WEISBERG, Arthur, Performing Twentieth-Century Music: A Handbook for Conductors and Instrumentalists. Yale University Press, 1993*WRIGHT, David C. H., “The London Sinfonietta 1968-2004: A Perspective. Twentieth-Century Music, vol. 2, n.º 1 (2005), pp. 109-136 *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Der Warschauer Herbst ist das bedeutendste internationale Festival für zeitgenössische Musik in Osteuropa. «Rzeczy brzmiace», «klingende Dinge» ist das harmlos anmutende Motto der 66. Ausgabe von 2023.  Im reichhaltigen Programm fanden sich aber eine äusserst breite ästhetische und formale Diversität sowie einige Kühnheiten. Eine Reportage. Knapp zwei Wochen vor der Parlamentswahl war die politische Stimmung aufgeheizt, aber der Warschauer Herbst unter der Hauptleitung des Komponisten Jerzy Kornowicz meisterte den heiklen Balanceakt zwischen Stimulus und Provokation. Das neuntägige Festival zeigte sich unbeirrt modern, vielfältig und auch thematisch am Puls der Zeit. Werke von arrivierten Grössen wie Bernhard Lang oder Chaya Czernowin waren genauso zu erleben wie solche der jungen polnischen und internationalen Komponier-Generation. Und auch die Liste der Interpret:innen war illuster und sehr breit gefächert: Sie reichte vom Klangforum Wien über die Warschauer Philharmoniker bis zum Radical Polish Ansambl und dem Nadar Ensemble. Das Festival zog ein derart junges Publikum in die über die ganze Stadt verteilten Spielstätten, dass manch andere Veranstalter durchaus mit etwas Neid nach Warschau blicken dürften. Diese junge Generation interessierte sich für neue Klänge wie für gesellschaftliche Themen. Und diese wurden auch aufgegriffen und reflektiert: Karol Nepelski etwa präsentierte «Zona» über die Situation an der Grenze zu Weissrussland, oder Nina Fukuoka ein Ensemblestück inklusive KI-Filmtechnik. Tagsüber gab es Klang- und Videoinstallationen im Czapski-Palast, und der niederländische Klangkünstler Hans van Koolwijk improvisierte in der ehemaligen Festung Fort Sokolnicki. Die Kleinen staunten über Agata Zubels Hologramm-Kinderoper «U?miech bez kota», und spätabends zog es die Grossen auch mal ins hippe «Pardon, To Tu», wo man Craftbeer zu Klavierstücken von Iannis Xenakis trinken konnte. Erstausstrahlung: 04.10.2023

Pierre Boulez voltooide in 1949 enkele delen van het Livre pour quatuor (1949-1959), de eerste streng seriële muziek voor strijkkwartet. Zo er cerebrale muziek bestaat, dan is in deze kwartetmuziek daarvan de essentie vastgelegd. De Griekse-Franse componist Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) meende in diezelfde jaren dat het serialisme van Boulez voor een mathematicus kinderspel. Zoals een […]

A la fin des années 1950, Pierre Schaeffer et Iannis Xenakis se sont échangé de multiples lettres. Le premier avait fondé une dizaine d'années plus tôt la 'musique concrète'. Le second venait de réaliser Concret PH pour le pavillon Philips de l'exposition universelle de Bruxelles. Deux compositeurs qui partageaient le point commun d'avoir été formé à Polytechnique, qui avaient certainement une grande conscience de l'importance de l'autre, mais qui n'avaient pas la même conception des rapports entre musique et science. Metaclassique accueille deux témoins : Jacqueline Schaeffer qui a été la compagne de Pierre Schaeffer de 1959 jusqu'à sa mort, en 1995, et Mâkhi Xenakis, la fille de Iannis Xenakis, mais aussi deux musicologues qui se sont intéressés à l'un et l'autre des compositeurs : côté Xenakis, Pierre Carré et côté Schaeffer, Nicolas Debade. Une émission produite et réalisée par David Christoffel. Photo Iannis Xenakis par Laszlo Ruszka/INA via Getty Images Photo Pierre Schaeffer par Ulf Andersen/Getty Images Merci pour votre écoute Par Ouïe-Dire c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 22h à 23h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes de Par Ouïe-Dire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/272 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Manuel Rivero nos habla de Iannis Xenakis y de una tesis sobre cómo la música y la arquitectura se emparentan a través de la matemática

durée : 00:11:00 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Philippe Garbit - Par Serge Jouhet - Avec Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Henry de Waroquier et Iannis Xenakis - 1ère diffusion : 12/04/1958 France III Nationale - invités : Alberto Giacometti Sculpteur; Iannis Xenakis Compositeur et architecte français d'origine grecque (1922 à Braila, Roumanie – 2001 à Paris); André Masson Économiste, directeur d'études à l'EHESS

La evolución del conocimiento y del arte en el siglo XX nos ha dado obras y reflexiones que continúan siendo de inspiración para nosotros con obras e ideas en las que podemos volver para encontrar nuevos estímulos, mirarlos desde distintas perspectivas que siempre nos ayudarán a desvelar algo del presente que estamos viviendo. Hoy nos centramos en la trayectoria de tres autores: Edgard Varese, John Cage y Iannis Xenakis que transformaron no solamente la música sino que a través de la música plantearon una manera de estar en el mundo, de escuchar y de interpretar el entorno. Junto a fragmentos de obras de estos autores escucharemos la voz de Julio Martínez Calzón Ingeniero de Caminos, especializado en puentes y estructuras que desafortunadamente nos dejó el pasado 26 de septiembre. Se trata de un fragmento del audio extraído de un documental dedicado a Xenakis en el que se recoge la compleja contribución artística, científica y técnica del compositor.Escuchar audio

Collaborating with a 16-voice choir Von Oswald delves into the interplay between the human voice and electronic synthesis. https://www.theransomnote.com/music/premiere-moritz-von-oswald-luminoso-tresor/ In the realm of Moritz Van Oswald's delight, Luminoso at Tresor, a surreal flight, Twinkling stars in the techno night, Where beats and dreams take their curious height. Electronic wizard, with a hat so tall, His tunes enchant, and the walls do crawl, Through the dancefloor, we heed the call, Luminoso's magic, we surrender to all. In the land of nonsense, we find our way, Where melodies and rhythms start to sway, Moritz Van Oswald leads the play, In Luminoso's world, we'll forever stay. Moritz von Oswald's album “Silencio” due out on Tresor Records, November 10th, 2023, is an exploration of the differences and similarities between human and artificial sound. Collaborating with a 16-voice choir he delves into the space between these sounds, drawing inspiration from composers like Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti, and Iannis Xenakis. Combining elements of repetition and reduction, reminiscent of techno and minimalism it showcases the interplay between the human voice and electronic synthesis. The compositions for “Silencio” were created using classic synthesizers in von Oswald's Berlin studio and then transcribed for the choir by Finnish composer Jarkko Riihimäki. Out Nov 10. Listen below and pre-order here: @tresorberlin

Architectural sound, understandings of freedom, and how do we end? The composer, improviser and performer discusses three important albums.Lucie's picks:Iannis Xenakis – La L​é​gende d'EerPauline Oliveros – The Tuning MeditationChristian Wolff – Changing The SystemLucie's recent solo album, Cave Acoustics, is out now via the labels mappa and Skupina. Lucie's website is here. Follow them on Instagram.Donate to Crucial Listening on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/cruciallistening

"Pretentious" and "ridiculous," those are some of the terms typical audiences call Avant Garde art. Are these artists trying to open up our minds with the absurd and bizarre or is it simply self-aggrandizement? We discuss a recent concert of composer Iannis Xenakis to explore these and other questions. Mentioned:  Wild up ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wildup/⁠ The War on Music by ⁠John Mauceri⁠ Album of the day: Iannis Xenakis, ⁠Metastaseis⁠ ┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈ Brushes and Keys: ⁠⁠instagram.com/BrushesAndKeys⁠⁠ ⁠⁠twitter.com/BrushesAndKeys⁠⁠ youtube.com/@BrushesAndKeys Austin Wintory: ⁠⁠instagram.com/a.wintory⁠ ⁠⁠twitter.com/awintory⁠⁠ Angela Bermudez: ⁠⁠instagram.com/angelabermudeza⁠⁠ ⁠⁠twitter.com/angelabermudeza⁠⁠ Canvas Bermintory:⁠ ⁠instagram.com/canvasbermintory⁠⁠ Email us!⁠ ⁠brushesandkeys@gmail.com⁠⁠ ┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

A casual discussion about Shostakovich by two Bruckner enthusiasts (Jason and Sébastien). A graduate from the Royal Conservatory of Liège in Belgium (1st prize organ, 1st prize harmony, 1st prize history of music, 1st prize musical analysis); Sébastien Letocart is a self-taught composer, who has built his musical equally by studying ancient music (i.e. Josquin Desprez, William Byrd, Tomas Luis Vitoria, Roland de Lassus, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Claudio Monteverdi, Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Sebastian Bach), practicing it (organ, harpsichord and singing) as well as analyzing the great scores of the Classical Symphony (Haydn, Mozart), the Romantic (Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Bruckner), the Post-romantic (Debussy, Roussel, R.Strauss, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen) and the symphonic repertoire of the first half of the 20th century (Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bax, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton, Honegger, Martinu, Varèse). He is also highly interested in the music of the last sixty years, his preferences are going from György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis or Esa-Pekka Salonen to Einar Englund, Aulis Sallinen, Emil Tabakov, Kalevi Aho, Vagn Holmboe, John Adams, Sir Malcolm Arnold or Sir Andrzej Panufnik. He is also greatly attracted by chamber music, especially by the refined writing that the string quartet demands and by Béla Bartók's six String Quartets which are the nec plus ultra of the genre. More info about Letocart here: https://www.sites.google.com/site/letocartsebastien/Home-english Lecture/Rehearsal of Shostakovich 8 that Letocart brought up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snpK0q47YgA First music excerpt is Shostakovich 4, last moments of the finale, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung with the Philadelphia Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXXiB0Lce5g Second music excerpt is the ending of the finale of Shostakovich 5, conducted by Mariss Jansons at the Wiener Philharmoniker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKeFOij6J7A&t=2641s Third music excerpt is the most popular movement of Shostakovich 8, conducted by Gergiev at the Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFesZ-jxRw Fourth music excerpt is the Scherzo from Shostakovich 10, conducted by Haitink at the London Philharmonic Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FRH22KRsU0 Final music at the end of the episode is Shostakovich's 5th string quartet performed by Dudok Kwartet in Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsWTDiPixcU

Synopsis Many 20th century composers were scarred by the violence and turmoil of their times—but none quite so literally as the Greek composer, engineer, and architect Iannis Xenakis, who died at the age of 78 on today's date in the year 2001. In the early 1940s, Xenakis was a member of the Communist resistance in Greece, fighting first the German occupation, then, as the war ended, the British. In 1945, when Xenakis was 23, his face was horribly disfigured by a shell fragment fired by a British tank, resulting in the loss of one of his eyes. Two years later he was forced to flee to Paris. As he himself laconically put it: "In Greece, the Resistance lost, so I left. In France, the Resistance won." Xenakis wanted to write music, but earned his living as an architect and engineer in Paris at Le Courbusier's studio. Xenakis designed and was involved in major architectural projects for Le Courbusier, including the famous Philips pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. As a composer, Xenakis wrote highly original music that was meticulously ordered according to mathematical and scientific principles, but sounded intensely emotional, almost primeval. His music might even be described as "Pre-Socratic," as Xenakis seemed to echo the theories of the early Greek thinker Pythagoras, who saw a relationship between music, mathematics, and religion. Music Played in Today's Program Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) Opening of A Colone New London Chamber Choir; Critical Band; James Wood, conductor. Hyperion 66980 Huuem-Duhey Edna Michell, violin; Michael Kanka, cello Angel 57179

Composer Dobrinka Tabakova talks to Tom Service about her artist residency at The Hallé in Manchester. She discusses her love of melody, the thrill of writing for youth orchestra, the importance of understanding the character of the musicians she writes for, and how meeting composer Iannis Xenakis when she was 14 shaped her musical path. Tom visits the site of the new Shireland City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Academy in West Bromwich, which opens in September 2023. As the first state school in the country to be established in collaboration with an orchestra, the academy is built around a central performance space which will also be open as a venue in evenings and throughout the year for the wider Sandwell community and beyond. Tom takes a tour of the site with CBSO Chief Executive Stephen Maddock, Principal Designate David Green and architect Claire Mantle to find out more. Emily MacGregor joins Tom to talk about her new book ‘Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity and the Sound of 1933' which explores how symphonies in Europe and America reflect and shape the politics of their time, and how they resonate with us today. The book looks at symphonies by composers such as Kurt Weill, Hans Pfitzner, Roy Harris and Florence Price which were written or premiered in 1933 – a year in which Hitler came to power in Germany and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. We explore the past, present and future of immersive performances with David Owen Norris who takes us on a whistle-stop tour of how composers and musicians have played with sound and space throughout the centuries. Tom also visits the d&b Audiotechnik demo facility in Stroud to find out about the latest technology being used to create immersive audio performances in halls, theatres and opera houses across the world.

El artista griego Iannis Xenakis ha sido una de las figuras más personales e influyente del arte de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Ingeniero de formación, ha dejado una innovadora obra como músico y arquitecto, en la que la aplicación de modelos matemáticos le permitió lograr nuevos lenguajes artísticos. Sus conocidos politopos, propuestas innovadoras de espectáculos de fusión de luz y sonido en dialogo con grandes espacios únicos, que realizó para escenarios tan impactantes como Persépolis en 1971 o Micenas en 1978, son un claro precedente del actual concepto de instalación artística y espectáculo performativo. En 2022 se cumple el centenario de su nacimiento y Documentos RNE se acerca a su figura con el espacio Xenakis, la alianza entre arte y ciencia, de Ana Vega Toscano. El documental sonoro parte de la propia visión del artista a través de una recreación biográfica realizada con fragmentos de entrevistas recogidas en el libro Conversations with Xenakis, del húngaro Bálint András Varga. Igualmente se rescata su propia voz del Archivo de RTVE, gracias a una entrevista realizada al compositor en su estudio de París en el año 1986. Se cuenta también con la participación de la arquitecta Susana Moreno, coordinadora del grado de Fundamentos de la Arquitectura de la Universidad Europea de Madrid y autora del libro Arquitectura y Música en el siglo XX; y del compositor Adolfo Núñez, fundador y director del Laboratorio de Informática y Electrónica Musical del INAEM y profesor de la UAM y de la Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía. Xenakis, que nació en 1922 en la localidad rumana de Ballin, vivió en carne propia la crudeza de la Segunda Guerra Mundial; acontecimientos que inspiraron muchas de sus obras posteriores. Formado en la Universidad de Atenas como ingeniero, en 1947 tuvo que exiliarse de Grecia. Terminó recalando en París donde comenzó a trabajar en el estudio de Le Corbusier, una de las figuras más destacadas de la arquitectura del siglo XX, mientras continuaba con su formación musical, iniciada ya en Grecia. En 1955, el estreno de su obra musical, Metátasis, en el festival de música de Donaueschingen, le reveló como una de las personalidades más originales del panorama compositivo. En paralelo inició su andadura como arquitecto, con obras como el convento de La Tourette. Momento álgido en su carrera sería el famoso Pabellón Philips, creado para la exposición de Bruselas de 1958, donde también presentó una pionera obra electroacústica, Concret PH. Toda su obra, ya sea musical, arquitectónica o performativa, se encuentra entrelazada por su ideario humanista, que le llevó a formular una importante obra teórica en numerosos artículos y libros, como es el caso de Músicas formalizadas. Precursor de la utilización de la informática y los ordenadores como herramienta de ayuda a su creación, supo aunar arte y ciencia como dos caras de una misma moneda, dos formas de conocimiento indisolublemente unidas en el hombre. Escuchar audio

Since the 90s, Weasel Walter has been a prolific and influential force in the worlds of no wave, free jazz, metal, and modern composition. An iconoclastic drummer, guitarist, composer, and improviser, Weasel has led the Flying Luttenbachers, and Cellular Chaos, as well as countless other, more collaborative projects. We talk about Iannis Xenakis, Natasha Leggero, ignorant death metal, and being a musical lifer.

Blue, 42. Hut. In this 42nd episode of Flavortone, Alec and Nick delve into the analytic imaginaries of Fantasy Football. Having recently joined a friendly fantasy league, they reflect on recent W's and L's and the characteristic fantasy sport experience of a speculative, detemporized form of spectatorship. The discussion revives a favorite Flavortone question — “How are sports NOT like music?” — in considering the role of chance, ephemerality and stochastic models of probability in the aesthetic experience and in the forms of sport and avant-garde music. Discussion includes gestalt psychology, James Tenney's “Meta+Hodos,” the stochastic compositions of Iannis Xenakis, the debate between Cage and Feldman over indeterminacy vs. ephemerality, narrative contingency in Dungeons and Dragons, Jacques Attali's notion of Ritual, the new Alex G record and more.

Exilé, révolutionnaire, ingénieur, architecte et compositeur. À l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance de Xenakis, la Philharmonie de Paris célèbre toutes les facettes de l'artiste.

Un 29 de mayo hace cien años nacía el compositor griego Iannis Xenakis. Ingeniero de formación, Xenakis revolucionó el panorama musical de la segunda mitad del siglo XX con un enfoque único que ponía las matemáticas en el centro del proceso compositivo como nunca se había hecho hasta entonces. Desde su pieza Metastasis (1953/54), cuyo glissando inicial marcaría una época, publica la revista Scherzo, Xenakis no dejó de profundizar en nuevas formas de control para modular la masa y densidad del edificio sonoro, usando la teoría de probabilidades y creando la que se conoce como “música estocástica”. La teoría de juegos, la teoría de grupos o el álgebra de Boole son algunas de las herramientas que Xenakis empleó en sus partituras, aunque la abstracta y sofisticada formulación matemática convive en su música con un concepto primigenio del sonido, una contundencia y una expresividad que hablan de manera directa a cualquier tipo de oyente. Porque, como él mismo decía, “la música es la expresión de las visiones del universo, de sus olas, de sus árboles, de sus hombres, al igual que las teorías fundamentales de la física moderna, de la lógica abstracta y del álgebra". Hoy escucharemos la primera composición electroacústica de Xenakis, Diamorphoses.

Synopsis It was on today's date in 1913 that Igor Stravinsky's ballet “The Rite of Spring” premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, provoking catcalls and fisticuffs from some in the audience. Most scholars suggest it was the ungainly, deliberately primitive choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, more than Stravinsky's score, that provoked the most negative response. Pierre Monteux's concert performance—without the dancing—at the Casino de Paris the following Spring marked the start of the score's success as pure music. On that occasion, Stravinsky was carried in triumph from the hall on the shoulders of his admirers. Shortly before his death in 1929, Sergei Diaghilev, who had commissioned Stravinsky's score, was enthusiastically quoting a review in the London Times that suggested (perhaps ironically) that the “Rite of Spring” would be for the 20th century what Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was for the 19th. Well, that has rather turned out to be the case, in fact, and by 2013, a piece of orchestral music that in 1913 was considered almost unplayable is routinely programmed as a classic orchestral showpiece. One New York Times critic even wrote “… now everybody knows “The Rite.” [It's] an audition piece that every music student practices, so that now any conservatory orchestra can give a fleet and spiffy performance of what used to stump their elders, and professional orchestras can play it in their sleep, and often do…” Music Played in Today's Program Igor Stravinsky — The Rite of Spring (Cleveland Orchestra; Pierre Boulez, cond.) DG 435 769 On This Day Births 1860 - Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, in Camprodón; 1873 - Estonian composer Rudolf Tobias, in Kaina on Haiiumaa Island; 1897 - Austrian composer Eric Wolfgang Korngold, in Brno; 1922 - Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, in Braila, Roumania; 1948 - English composer Michael Berkley, in London; He is the son of English composer, Sir Lennox Berkeley (1903-89); Deaths 1910 - Russian composer Mily Balakirev, age 73, in St. Petersburg (Julian date: May 16); 1911 - British lyricist Sir William S. Gilbert (of "Gilbert & Sullivan" fame), age 74, from a heart attack after rescuing a drowning woman, at Harrow Weald, England; 1935 - Czech composer Josef Suk, age 61, in Benesov; 1951 - Czech composer Josef Bohuslav Foerster, age 91, in Vestec, near Stará Boleslav; Premieres 1901 - Paderewski: "Manru," in Dresden; Also staged at the Metropolitan Opera in 1902; 1905 - Scriabin: Symphony No. 3 ("'Divine Poem"), in Paris, Arthur Nikisch conducting; 1913 - Stravinsky: "Le Sacre du printemps" (The Rite of Spring), in Paris, by Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, Pierre Monteux conducting; 1954 - Cowell: Symphony No. 11 ("Seven Rituals"), by the Louisville Orchestra, Robert S. Whitney conducting; 1970 - Rautavaara: Piano Concerto, in Helsinki, with composer as soloist, and the Finnish Radio Symphony, Paavo Berglund conducting; Others 1873 - American premiere of Brahms's Serenade No. 1 in D, at Steinway Hall, by the New York Symphony, Theodore Thomas conducting; 1963 - The New York Philharmonic "Promenade" concert series is inaugurated. Links and Resources On Igor Stravinsky More on "The Rite of Spring" Video of recreated original 1913 choreography for "The Rite of Spring"

Sikiaridi, Elisabethwww.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, FazitDirekter Link zur Audiodatei

Episode 56: Interview with Mâkhi XENAKIS and James HARLEY on the 100th anniversary of Iannis XENAKIS’ birth.   Produced with support from the Research Fund, College of Arts, University of Guelph.

Are you obsessed with early electronic music?? We started a private group for people like you. https://www.facebook.com/groups/cosmictapemusicclub/ Thanks for joining us for Episode 11 of the Cosmic Tape Music Club Podcast! Join your hosts Jacqueline and Augustus of the experimental pop band The Galaxy Electric as they get cosmic on the topic of Iannis Xenakis. Thought of by many as the godfather of granular synthesis. He was a multifaceted fellow who's ,perhaps, biggest achievement happened to be in the field of architecture when he was commissioned to design what became the Phillips Pavilion for a world's fair style event called Expo '58 in Brussels.    Personal Music section: Moon Worm - Beyond the Clones https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&d=n&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3GOEzD_vjDKznZv4h4Un77eU7Sf2vPhFjDmpJpjS2oc8GjvZ25stlnNw0&v=aulODhks8CU Frozen Pins - 0netwo0netwo https://0netwo0netwo.bandcamp.com/releases   Cool Podcasts: Source of Uncertainty: A Buchla podcast 4U https://sourceofuncertainty.audio Join Hosts and Group Members Robert and Kyle as they talk about all things Buchla Electronic Instruments

durée : 00:24:48 - Xenakis Keqrops, musique concertante - par : Anne-Charlotte Rémond - Dans cet épisode de Musicopolis, Anne-Charlotte Rémond revient sur la création de Keqrops du compositeur Iannis Xenakis. - réalisé par : Claire Lagarde

Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; Greek: Γιάννης "Ιάννης" Κλέαρχου Ξενάκης, pronounced [ˈʝanis kseˈnacis]; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalised citizen of France eighteen years later.[1] Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.

In this episode, we discuss the music of the late Iannis Xenakis, a widely performed 20th century composer who's 100th birthday was just celebrated in Paris with an exhibition and multiple concerts. Xenakis, whose experimental use of mathematics and architecture in composing music anticipated so much of the 21st century and whose musical scores can be baffling to even the most seasoned interpreter wrote a work for pipe organ that still to this day, stretches the capabilities of the performer and the organ itself. We first sit down with organist Suanne Kujala was chosen to perform this work at the recent celebrations in Paris. This notoriously difficult piece by Xenakis continues to challenge countless performers around the world since its publication in 1974. Our second guest, Eun-Joo Ju is an organist at Presbyterian Home, and Kenilworth Union Church in Illinois; her keen interest in this work, led to her choosing it as the subject for her thesis studies     You can check out our patreon at www.patreon.com/futurestops 

Mum meets the Beatles, live environment failures, waves of transformative energy. The composer of experimental and electroacoustic music discusses three important albums.Yiorgis' picks:The Beatles – 20 Greatest HitsIannis Xenakis – La Légende d'EerSwans – The Glowing ManYiorgis' latest album, Fons et Origo, is out now via miclithuania. Check it out here. His website is over here.Donate to Crucial Listening on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/cruciallistening

durée : 00:06:20 - Classic & Co - par : Anna Sigalevitch - Ce week-end, la Philharmonie de Paris une série de concerts au compositeur, la Cité de la musique une exposition jusqu'au 26 juin, et les éditions Actes Sud publie une nouvelle édition, revue et augmentée, du livre que sa fille, Mâkhi Xenakis, lui a consacré.

Born in Donetsk (Ukraine), Dina Pysarenko is a pianist, accompanist at the National Tchaikovsky Music Academy of Ukraine, soloist of the Ukho Ensemble Kyiv and a laureate of the Levko Revutsky Award (2014) as well as the 6th International S. Prokofiev Competition (Saint-Petersburg, 2013). While still studying at the Donetsk Specialized Music School for gifted children, Dina was twice a laureate of the International Competition in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz in Kyiv. She graduated with Honours from Sergey Prokofiev Donetsk State Music Academy in 2009, where she studied with Prof. Lidiya Adamenko. Eager to embrace various styles in her repertoire, Dina devotes particular attention to contemporary music: since 2006 she has premiered a number of pieces by living composers, such as Yevhen Petrychenko, Serhiy Piliutykov, Alexandra Karastoyanova-Hermentin and Oleksiy Voytenko, performing at important Ukrainian festivals such as KyivMusicFest, GogolFEST, Donbas Modern Music Academy, etc.Together with Ukho Ensemble Kyiv under the baton of Luigi Gaggero, she has given the Ukrainian premieres of several important pieces of the 20th and 21st centuries, including À propos du concert de la semaine dernière by Samuel Andreyev, ...quasi una fantasia... by György Kurtág, Kammerkonzert by Klaus-Steffen Mahnkopf, and the Piano concerto of György Ligeti. Dina participated in a conducting masterclass held by maestro Luigi Gaggero with the Ukho Ensemble Kyiv, making her debut as a conduc- tor with Intégrales by Edgard Varèse (2016) and Epicycle by Iannis Xenakis (2018).Since 2009, Dina Pysarenko has accompanied the class of Prof. Valeriy Ivko, one of the founders the of Ukrainian domra school. In the 2013/14 season she was accompanist at the Anatolii Solovyanenko Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. She has also participated in three opera productions staged in the National Opera of Ukraine by Ukho agency and directed by Luigi Gaggero: Limbus-Limbo by Stefano Gervasoni (2016), Pane, sale, sabbia by Carmine Emmanuele Cella (2017), and Luci mie traditrici by Salvatore Sciarrino (2018). This interview was recorded on March 9th, 2022. SUPPORT THIS PODCASTPatreonDonorboxORDER SAMUEL ANDREYEV'S NEWEST RELEASEIridescent NotationLINKSYouTube channelOfficial WebsiteTwitterInstagramEdition Impronta, publisher of Samuel Andreyev's scoresEPISODE CREDITSPost production: Marek IwaszkiewiczPodcast artwork photograph © 2019 Philippe StirnweissSupport the show (http://www.patreon.com/samuelandreyev)

William Winant is a percussionist who describes himself as a technician of the sacred. Spin Magazine describes him as "the avant-elite's go-to percussionist for more than 35 years". In 2014, William was nominated for a Grammy.  He has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich and Musicians, Yo-Yo Ma, Frederic Rzewski, Ursula Oppens, Joan LaBarbara, Annea Lockwood, Joelle Leandre, Oingo Boingo, Mr. Bungle, Sonic Youth, and the Kronos String Quartet.

Mâkhi Xenakis, artiste plasticienne, est l'invitée du 10ème épisode de Femmes artistes / Artistes femmes le podcast.   Avec elle, nous avons parlé de son parcours de fille d'artiste devenue artiste malgré tout, des obstacles qui ont forgé sa personnalité à la fois forte et profondément vulnérable. Elle, qui a du s'opposer pour laisser son âme d'artiste - et d'amoureuse fidèle -  se déployer, malgré la volonté de ses parents, et plus particulièrement de Iannis Xenakis, son père.   Au fils de ses rencontres, de David (son mari) à Louise Bourgeois, en passant par Joan Mitchell, Mâkhi raconte son histoire d'artiste, de femme et mère durant les années 90. Tandis que la rivalité inter-artistes et le patriarcat bat son plein, dans le monde de l'art contemporain...  On parle aussi des folles, qui ont fini par cramer en enfer, des hystériques, de Charcot, de l'anxiété de Louise Bourgeois, d'Antigone, des araignées, du syndrome de l'imposteur, et de la dépression.     Pendant cet entretien, nous avons aussi évoqué :  Les artistes qui inspirent son travail  Louise Bourgeois, Françoise Petrovitch, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Mitchell   Références littéraires  Les folles d'Enfer, par Mâkhi Xenakis, Éditions Actes Sud   Antigone     Oeuvre décrite en intro de l'épisode : Les folles d'enfer. Sculpture exposée dans le jardin de la Pitié Salpetriere en 2014.   Le site internet de Mâkhi Xenakis : www.makhi-xenakis.com  Ses œuvres figurent pour certaines dans les collections publiques du Centre Pompidou, à la Maison Rouge, la manufacture des Gobelins, etc.     D'ici là, suivez-moi sur la page instagram du podcast @artistesfemmeslepodcast et sur mon fil twitter @adakafel.  Femmes artistes / Artistes femmes est un podcast entièrement indépendant créé et produit par Ada Kafel. Ada Kafel est artiste peintre et maman d'un petit garçon. On peut voir son travail sur son site internet https://www.adakafel.com/ ou sa page instagram @a_felka.  Musique d'introduction : Leonie Pernet, Butterfly feat. Malik Djoudi  Musique de fin : Brahms, sonate pour violoncelle et piano, Jacqueline du Pre au violoncelle, Daniel Barenboim au piano        

Alec and Nick present a “Theory of the Byoing Sound,” exploring the primacy of the dynamic, paradigmatic “byoing,” “boing,” and “bya-yoing” sound in experimental music. What exactly is it about this sound that makes it so prevalent? This episode accounts for a narrative of sound originating in primordial phonetic language formation, to scientific studies in physics and sound spatialization, to contemporary and post-industrial music. The conversation loosely situates the byoing as challenge to consistency as its seen in the world through the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Arnold Schoenberg, SOPHIE, Maryanne Amacher, and more.  Opening theme music by Xander Seren. Closing music by Max Eilbacher & Duncan Moore live at Green House, Cleveland 12/07/19

Alec and Nick make a first foray into a gastro-acoustic, audio-culinary, flavor-phonic approach to listening and talking about music. In the spirit of Dégustation ("tasting menu") and experimenting with what music can be, this episode samples and discusses various music in culinary terms, and various foods from the perspective of sound. This menu includes Oysters on Half Shell, Souvlaki, Iannis Xenakis, Wold, Witecka Friedemann, the Black Velvet Cocktail, the “You Pick Two” Special, Evanescence, The Gentle People, the Sour Cream & Onion Chip, Ambrosia Salad, Pierre Boulez, and Peter Evans. This will be a semi-regular sub-series on the Flavortone podcast. Opening, closing theme music by Xander Seren.

  ★ Support the show by becoming a patron: https://www.patreon.com/atpercussion​ ★ Follow us on:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/atperc​ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atpercussion/​ PodBean: https://atpercussion.podbean.com/​ Hosts: Casey Cangelosi, Ben Charles, and Ksenija Komljenović, Karli Viña Intro music by Reese Maultsby - reesemaultsby.com Watch here  Listen below 0:12 introduction 1:46 today in history: birth of Alice Cooper, death of Iannis Xenakis and Karen Carpenter 4:51 Welcome Sam Solomon! 6:14 Sam's new book, The Hitchhiker Etudes 16:20 John Cage's 27' 10.554” 22:20 Iannis Xenakis's Omega 24:13 Juilliard Percussion Seminar online 28:25 chamber music online 32:53 NYT article: The San Francisco Symphony Plunges Into a New World, about Nico Muhly's world premiere with the San Francisco Symphony under Esa-Pekka Salonen 40:20 What will we learn from pandemic experiences? 43:20 Sam's older book, Advanced Rhythmic Studies 43:43 counting systems (1-e-and-a, etc.) 49:26 Sam's book, How to Write for Percussion 1:00:18 percussion specialist vs. totalist 1:03:20 Facebook Question from Adam Silverman: How is it possible that you consistently appeared each year at both sides of the Tanglewood panoramic photograph?

Percussionist William Winant has played with everyone from John Cage to John Zorn, Sonic Youth to Mr Bungle, Steve Reich to Iannis Xenakis. If anyone can be described as the Zelig of experimental music, it's Willie. For this talk, the maestro swings by to talk about his path from a teenager playing trap kit in Los Angeles to performing at the Ojai Festival with Pierre Boulez. We also talk his work as a college instructor, studying gamelan in Indonesia, the recording of “Disco Volante” and a whole lot more. An essential talk with a technician of the sacred.