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
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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)
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