Iannis Xenakis and the Ethics of Absolute Originality

By Gérard Pape

Iannis Xenakis is one of the major composers of the 20th century. His influence is immense, because of his radicalism, his aesthetic, and the intransigence of his musical compositions. As an eternal immigrant, as he defined himself, he always refused to settle in any artistic, philosophical or human comfort. Throughout his life, leaving for new

• Language: English
• Publisher: UTEURP
• Release date: Feb 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9782958528331

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Iannis Xenakis and the Ethics of Absolute Originality

Gérard Pape

Iannis Xenakis and the Ethics of Absolute Originality

Copyright © 2023 by UTEURP

All rights reserved.

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Book Cover:

portrait of Iannis Xenakis by Kurt Carpenter

First edition 2023

This book is part of the Creation collection.

ISBN : 978-2-9585283-3-1

Contents

Foreword

Freedom From Belonging I

Freedom From Belonging II

Freedom From Understanding Too Much

Freedom From Freedom

Freedom From Being in Fixed Space and Time I

Freedom From Being in Fixed Space and Time II

Freedom From Tradition I

Freedom From Tradition II

Freedom From Oneself I

Freedom From Oneself II

Afterwords

Landmarks

Cover

Foreword

In 1986, I read an article in the Computer Music Journal by Henning Löhner about Iannis Xenakis’s computer music instrument UPIC. Although I didn’t know it at the time, reading this article would change my whole life.

I had started in the 1980s to compose computer music. I set up a home studio in my house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The 1980s was the beginning of the use of personal computers in home studios for composers. I had a Macintosh computer with very little memory and no hard disk at all. My first programs allowed me to record and edit sounds and to sequence electronic sounds using the MIDI protocol. In deciding which electronic sounds to work with, I was particularly interested to discover which features of analog electronic music, which I had studied and practiced in courses at the University of Michigan, carried over into the digital domain. The programs that were available at that time were Pro Tools and SoftSynth, both made by the Digidesign company of the United States. While Pro Tools allowed the recording and editing of acoustical sounds, SoftSynth used the additive synthesis paradigm and tried to simulate some features of analog synthesizers. The Yamaha company offered the famous DX7 frequency modulation synthesizer and by the middle of the 1980s some other Yamaha FM synthesis modules included preset sounds also created using the FM algorithm. Soon thereafter, the first samplers appeared and with them the possibility to simulate instrumental sounds or concrete sounds such as noises. I added the Yamaha CX5M sound module as well as the Emulator III sampler to my own home studio. I was sequencing electronic FM sounds as well as sampled sounds in one of my first computer music compositions, La Tristesse de la Lune, based on a poem by Charles Baudelaire. Software such as Mark of the Unicorn’s Professional Composer and Digital Performer allowed me to notate the vocal part as well as record and sequence the electronic and sampled sounds.

If I hadn’t read the article about UPIC, more than likely I would have continued to make pieces similar to this early work as the result was simple to obtain and attractive to the ear. Yet, I was dissatisfied with the sonic result of this approach to computer music because what had attracted me to concrete and electronic music was a certain sonic freedom. When I listened to such pieces as Xenakis’s Concret PH, or other of his early electro-acoustic pieces such as Bohor, I found that the sound material was unrecognizable as to its origin, without exact pitch, rich in noise content, creating unpredictable masses of sound with internal rhythms that bore no apparent connection to the type of rhythms one finds in instrumental music. Already it seemed to me that the home studio of the 1980s was designed not for sonic exploration, but for making popular music at home. This was the paradigm that motivated companies to develop digital synthesizers and samplers.

In the middle 1980s, I came across the Fairlight CMI IIx which was a digital sampler that had the unusual feature of being able to draw some dimensions of the sound such as the amplitude envelope. This allowed the user to shape the sample so as to have an amplitude envelope that would allow a custom drawn attack, decay, sustain and release curve. This drawing feature seemed to restore some of what was attractive in the analog synthesis paradigm with regard to the VCA, that is, the capacity to program the evolution of the volume in time. Being able to draw the envelope was simple and intuitive in the Fairlight because one drew the envelope with a light pen on a screen. Still, while this sampler had this added feature, the model of sound synthesis didn’t include the possibilities to draw other dimensions of the sound.

In the article in the Computer Music Journal, I saw that Xenakis’s UPIC had as its primary feature that one drew not only the amplitude envelope, as in the Fairlight, but all dimensions of the sound from micro to macro. Here was a composer’s take on sound synthesis, where, by drawing the microform as well as the macro-form of the sound, one was not only creating sounds, but compositional forms and textures. My reaction to reading this article was to want to try out this machine and to meet its inventor.

Later in 1986, I attended the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) in Champaign-Urbana at the University of Illinois where Iannis Xenakis was invited as the keynote speaker and guest composer. On this occasion, I was able to hear for the first time Xenakis’s UPIC composition Mycenae Alpha as well as to meet the composer. We agreed after this meeting that I would come to Paris to visit Xenakis’s CEMAMu center so as to have a demonstration of the UPIC as well as to have some chance to work on it.

In 1987, I flew to Paris and passed several days at the CEMAMu as well as at Jean-Claude Eloy’s creation studio, the CIAMI, both of which had UPIC systems that I could work on. By the end of my residencies at these two centers, I was convinced that the UPIC was the computer music instrument for me. I ordered a UPIC system for my home studio which was delivered in 1989.

For this occasion, Xenakis himself came to Ann Arbor, Michigan, not only to see the installation of the first UPIC system in the Americas, but also to be the guest of my festival called TWICE which was named in honor of the great multimedia festival of the 1960s called ONCE. For this occasion, there were three Xenakis concerts, including chamber orchestra pieces, string quartets, piano quintet, as well as UPIC pieces.

For the next two years, several Michigan composers, in addition to myself, composed works for the UPIC in my studio. Nonetheless, the time that I had passed in Paris had created in me a desire to work closely with Xenakis. It was only in 1991 that I was told that the CEMAMu and the French Ministry of Culture were wanting to hire a new director for Les Ateliers UPIC, which was the second center founded by Xenakis for receiving composers who wanted to work on the UPIC system in order to compose new works. I was invited to apply for this directorship and I was chosen.

I moved to Paris in September 1991 and found that the UPIC was undergoing a major upgrade. The engineers of CEMAMu had created a real-time version of UPIC where one didn’t have to wait for the calculation of UPIC pages and where the interface had become greatly simplified by virtue of using the Windows operating system. What remained the same as before in the UPIC was the centrality of a drawing board interface that allowed the composer to draw waveforms, envelopes, and score pages. The composer could play back the same score page at different speeds, that is, different durations without changing the pitch, and even to play the page backwards or forwards at different speeds and durations. Timbres assigned to individual drawings, or arcs, that made up a score page, could be either hand drawn waveforms or short waveforms extracted from samples. The UPIC system offered a combination of additive synthesis and frequency modulation.

Thus, what attracted me to the UPIC system and to working with Xenakis by directing his Ateliers UPIC was the idea that composing computer music could be done with no presets at all. The UPIC system only offered a simple sine wave as preset and nothing else. All the rest had to be invented and chosen by the composer’s free imagination. At first, it seemed very easy. No programming was required, minimum technical skills were required. Even children and amateurs were offered the chance to have access to computer music via the UPIC system. Xenakis had invented the easiest and the most difficult computer music instrument at once. What to draw? How to compose the music? What sounds to work with? Anything was possible, and yet, nothing was obvious. It soon occurred to me that the freedom that Xenakis was offering with UPIC system was only superficially an easy one. The history of the UPIC system goes back to Xenakis’s first major work: Metastaseis.

In the early 1950s, Xenakis was working with the celebrated architect, Le Corbusier. Before embarking on Metastaseis, the early pieces of Xenakis show us that, if he had wanted, he could have become the Greek Bartók. These early works seemed to be inspired by Greek folkloric music much in the way that Béla Bartók was inspired by Hungarian folkloric music. There is an enormous rupture in the