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(idm) Xenakis, architecture, and electronic music

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2000-02-23 11:30josh (idm) Xenakis, architecture, and electronic music
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2000-02-23 11:30josh>oh yeah, and i forgot- Xenakis was an architecht himself! sorry to continue this thread..
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josh
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Wed, 23 Feb 2000 16:30:12 +0500
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(idm) Xenakis, architecture, and electronic music
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quoted 1 line oh yeah, and i forgot- Xenakis was an architecht himself!>oh yeah, and i forgot- Xenakis was an architecht himself!
sorry to continue this thread... Xenakis was whole-heartedly a composer his entire life, but before moving from Greece he earned a few degrees in mathmatics. His major interest was with geometries if I remember correctly. I'm not sure how or why he ended up working in France with the great architect La Corbusier, but he did, and ended up designing. Corbusier encouraged Xenakis to design portions of a large monastery called La Tourette, which is really beautiful by the way. Xenakis used the rhythmic patterns of some composition he was working on to separate the window structures on one facade of the building. if you ever see pictures it's the windows with small separations vs. large sections of unsupported glass which occupy one whole side. I don't think Xenakis worked with Corbusier very long... I think this might have been a way to make some cash in between musical commisions. I can't remember which composition is La Tourette, but I can say, a good place to start with is Kraanerg, the composition helped out by DJ Spooky on Asphodel... The whole pattern equals beats/tones isn't so far away from what Brinkmann is doing with the optical nature of his records. from the Asphodel website: "I originated in 1954 a music constructed from the principle of indeterminism; two years later I named it "stochastic music." The laws of the calculus of probabilities entered composition through musical necessity... But other paths also let to the same stochastic crossroad -- first of all, natural events such as the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are mad out of thousands ofisolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new sonic event. This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mold of time, which itself follows aleatory and stochastic laws. If one then wishes to form a large mass of point-notes, such as string pizzicati, one must know these mathematical laws, which in any case, are no more than a tight and concise expression of a chain of logical reasoning... " Iannis Xenakis, from "Formalized Music," 1955 Be warned that Xenakis's music can be difficult, but he is one of the most rewarding composers of the past 100 years. Unfortunately, much of his music is out of print or hard to get a hold of. Check your local library... lurker status re-ingaged, ~ josh -------------------------------------------------------------------------- J. R. Herr Research Associate Virginia Tech 2005 Derring Hall Blacksburg, Va 24061-0406 jrherr@vt.edu 540-231-5165 (Mycology Lab) 540-231-9402 (Insect Biochemisty Lab) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org