IANNIS XENAKIS GREEK AVANT-GARDE NOMOS GAMMA LP FRANCE ERATO-EXPERIMENTAL-RARE

Description: IANNIS XENAKIS TERRETEKTORH / NOMOS GAMMA LP Erato Groundbreaking avant-garde / experimental album from mathematical-musical genius Iannis Xenakis. French edition pressing. Some info on the release: Released back in the late 60's by the french Erato label. After the initial impact of his first orchestral scores (Metastaseis and Pithoprakta), which turned the modern music world on its ear in the mid-1950s, Iannis Xenakis turned to other concerns. He worked on developing a theoretical basis for his mathematical approach to composition, worked in the electroacoustic studio at Radio-France, and wrote some chamber and stage works. In 1966, however, his attention was drawn back to the orchestra and he penned a second set of pretty remarkable scores. Terretektorh, the first of these, was commissioned for the new contemporary music festival in Royan, a picturesque French town on the Atlantic just north of Bordeaux. Those were heady days, when festival organizers were not shy of allowing a composer like Xenakis take the orchestra and scatter all the players around and throughout the audience. In his words, he wanted to create a "Sonotron: an accelerator of sonorous particles." Indeed, the opening three minutes of the piece centers on a single note, passing it around the musicians to create a swirling effect that is impossible to achieve electronically (unless you have 88 channels of sound, perhaps!). Terretektorh shows more concern for harmonic organization than the earlier, iconoclastic Pithoprakta, with its scatterings of knocking sounds and massed effects. Still, the concentration is decidedly on texture and movement, with narrow lines being bundled with a number of others in the same register to create a rawer sonic intensity that still has some basis in melody. Xenakis concentrates on the high and low registers, as did Varèse before him, and adds some unusual sound effects into the mix as well. Each player of the orchestra, in addition to his or her own instrument, is required at various times to play from an arsenal of percussion instruments, including woodblocks, whips, maracas, and siren-whistles. These sounds are spread around the orchestra, creating "flames" of sound (sirens), or "clouds" of noise-like textures. For perhaps the first time, members of the audience could hear the orchestra from the "inside;" it may not always have been comfortable (imagine being seated directly in front of a trombone!), but it certainly would have been exhilarating! Nomos Gamma is a large, ambitious work for orchestra that follows on from Terretektorh (1966), both of them commissioned for the newly established Royan Festival. Both pieces distribute the members of the orchestra throughout the audience, inviting the listener right inside the ensemble. Nomos Gamma also follows on from Nomos Alpha, for solo cello, again from 1966, in the composer's application of certain new mathematical principles to the compositional process. After spending several years implementing probabilities into his formal procedures, Xenakis turned to deterministic, combinatorial tools. In essence, sequences of different combinations of a range of musical elements or parameters are combined to form the compositional design. Nomos Alpha was the first result of this new approach to musical architecture, and Nomos Gamma was the next (there are sketches for a Nomos Beta, but the piece never saw the light beyond the composer's papers). As a follow-up to Terretektorh, which had caused such a sensation at its 1966 premiere in Royan, Nomos Gamma is both more careful in its construction and more audacious in expression. Whereas the earlier piece focused almost entirely on texture and the effect of sonic motion, the later piece includes straightforwardly melodic elements and a more block-like construction. The effect of hearing a three-part, microtonal melodic texture from within the middle of the instruments is still, of course, an entirely different, and much more visceral, experience than hearing it from afar. Xenakis makes great use, too, of teemingly dense string textures, which many layers of different kinds of sonorities occurring simultaneously. These are intercut with other, more compressed textures, with all the strings playing glassy, sustained harmonics, for example. The brass and woodwinds are, perhaps for the first time in his output, treated as equal to the strings, with dense clusters battling against plaintive melodic passages. Each of the five main sections of the piece is dominated by one of the orchestral instrumental groups: I. woodwinds; II. brass; III. woodwinds; IV. strings; V. percussion. The final section would be positively dizzying to hear in concert. The eight percussionists, placed around the perimeter of the orchestral-audience space, pass drum rolls around, one to another, at an incredible clip. Where Terretektorh wound the musical energy up at the beginning by passing a sustained unison pitch around the orchestra, Nomos Gamma cranks itself up at the end, spinning off like a crazed top, ending with a final outburst by all of the percussionists together. Iannis Xenakis (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist and architect. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models such as applications of set theory, varied use of stochastic processes, game theory, etc., in music, and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music. Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–4) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis' UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed alone. Xenakis pioneered electronic, computer music, the application of mathematics, statistics, and physics to music and music theory, and the integration of sound and architecture. He used techniques related to probability theory, stochastic processes, statistics, statistical mechanics, group theory, game theory, set theory, and other branches of mathematics and physics in his compositions. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances. He integrated both with political commentary. He viewed compositions as reification and formal structures of abstract ideas, not as ends, to be later incorporated into families of compositions, "a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions." Specific examples of mathematics, statistics, and physics applied to music composition are the use of the statistical mechanics of gases in Pithoprakta, statistical distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, the normal distribution in ST/10 and Atrées, Markov chains in Analogiques, game theory in Duel and Stratégie, group theory in Nomos Alpha, set theory in Herma and Eonta, and Brownian motion in N'Shima. Xenakis was a contemporary with fellow greek composers Anestis Logothetis, Jani Christou and Kyriakos Sfetsas and was creating in a time that flourished the various sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry, Henk Badings and of course Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Alvin Curran and Toshi Ichiyanagi. At the Shirah Arts Festival in Persepolis, he designed Polytope as a composition specific to the historic site. The following year he was commissioned by the brutal dictator, the Shah of Iran, to compose Nuits, which Xenakis dedicated to political prisoners in protest at the Shah’s atrocities. Composers who have acknowledged being influenced by Xenakis include Krzysztof Penderecki and Toru Takemitsu. On the Nurse with wound list of influences. Iannis Xenakis - "Terretektorh" für Orchester - Cresc... Biennale für Moderne Musik - YouTube Video will open in a new window Using the eBay App? Paste link into a browser window: [isdntekvideo] Condition: Vinyl lies in very good+ condition, has many light "hairlines" but plays nicely with occasional crackle. Cover lies in excellent condition, with light age wear (see picture). Tracklist A Terretektorh 14:49 B Nomos Gamma 15:25 SHIPPING & PAYMENT Shipping: Shipping for this LP is 16$ airmail in Europe / rest of the world (without tracking number) -for tracking number = registered mail see below +3$-. I ship worlwide (that includes Russian Federation, China, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania, South Africa, if you're from one of those countries and would like to bid, please contact me and i will add you to my permitted buyer's list). Registered mail: +3$ Insurance: optional Combined shipping: BIG discounts Payment: Paypal Packaging: I am a collector too and i know

Price: 30 USD

Location: Athens

End Time: 2024-11-13T15:50:10.000Z

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