Xenakis

Some thoughts on performing Xenakis’ Nuits

“In my music there is all the anguish of my youth, of the resistance (the Greek anti-fascist movement), and the aesthetic problems they posed, together with the street demonstrations or the rarified mysterious noises, the mortal noises of the cold nights of December 1944 in Athens.” I.X.

Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 to a Greek family living in Romania. He went to school in Spetsai and later to Athens to study engineering. The war interrupted this and he joined the Greek anti-fascist Resistance. After the liberation he was severely wounded during the ensuing civil war, but survived to complete his studies. He was then imprisoned by a military tribunal and condemned to death, but escaped to France in 1945 where he joined the atelier of the architect Le Corbusier.

Architecture and engineering continued to play a prominent role in his thinking even as he turned to music and developed a unique technique of shaping sound that was directly comparable to the architectural process of shaping materials in space. These ideas belong to a more widespread musical development, then gaining currency, in which texture and overall perception of shape was provided by a mass of detail which could not be conciously heard, but was nonetheless essential to the realisation of the musical idea. One thinks here also of Ligeti, Penderecki, and to some extent Stockhausen. But Xenakis has remained a figure standing somewhat apart from the mainstream. If this is due to his widely proclaimed application of mathematics and physics to the process of composing music, (it is usually the first thing we read about him,) it has perhaps served to obscure the true impact of the music as music - by which of course it must stand or fall.

Nuits was composed in 1967 (in Bloomington, Indiana while the composer was briefly in residence there) and given its first performance the following year by 12 singers from the French Radio choir under Marcel Couraud - who was also responsible for the 1948 premiere of Messiaen’s Cinq Rechants, another iconic modernist choral work.

The title points us to the statement made by Xenakis about the source of his musical expression, and to the ‘mortal noises of the cold nights’. The word ‘mortal’ needs thought; in modern English it slips by too easily as simply a ‘human being’. But its origin is the word for ‘death’; thus noises of death, noises of the dying, noises of those who kill. The work is dedicated to four political prisoners in Spain, Greece, and Portugal - all countries which then laboured under a fascist dictatorship.

In 1967 the vocal writing of Nuits was something completely new. Microtonal intervals, phonetic syllables rather than words or parts of words, a mixture of wailing and groaning vocal production, harsh accents, clashing groups of rhythmic figures, whistling and short nasal glissandi (all carefully notated), even a so-called ‘nasal pizzicato’, and ‘ataxic clouds’ notated simply in a mass of minute dots. As a technical tour de force and a source of ideas for other composers writing for voices it is no longer unique - already in the 1970s a large number of works were being written that pushed the boundaries of ‘vocal music’ at least as far. But as with electronic music, it is often the pioneer works that retain the most force: works whose techniques are wellsprings of discovery and timely necessity, rather than something already exposed to view to be deployed at leisure.

Much of the detail in Nuits is hard to grasp at first hearing, when the listener will probably be most aware of the physical impact of the work - and this in turn will inevitably be coloured by his or her own experience of extended vocal techniques. But beyond initial exposure to its expressionist affects, the music repays purely ‘musical’ attention.

(If you are not so interested in technical details please skip to section III)

Nuits falls into five sections, each articulated by a distinct set of prominent sonorities. Although Xenakis writes for twelve voices (satb x 3) in twelve separate parts, he mostly uses each of the four voice groups as a self-contained unit. The result is a kind of four-part polyphony of separate voice groups in which each of the groups consists of three strands, and for the most part maintains its group identity throughout.

This layered approach is particularly apparent in the 1st section which opens with the voices keening in sliding microtones, punctuated assymetrically with frequent accents. We hear the sopranos first in their high register, then the basses low in theirs, the tenor and alto groups entering later. What begins as an exchange of voice groups starts to overlap with increasing density, until - just after some longer sustained tones from the tenors - all voices are heard simultaneously and with growing intensity. Though even now the voice groups still have each their own rising and falling dynamics.

As this process reaches a climax we are suddenly launched into a new sound that marks the beginning of the 2nd section. The previous welter of pitches has coalesced onto a unison D (at measure 70) and the syllable “Di” is rhythmically chanted staccato - a stark contrast to the legato of the 1st section. This gradually fans out into microtonal clusters in which triplet, quadruplet, and quintuplet figures are superimposed. We also detect a tendency for the male and female voices to form two contrasting larger groups. Eventually the staccato texture is infiltrated by sustained tones in which the vowels are continuously modified by changing the shape of the mouth cavity (as Stockhausen would call for in Stimmung, composed at almost the exact same time). Again, this process builds to a climax (mm. 120-3) which yields the start of a new section (124).

This 3rd section introduces an array of unusual vocal techniques which enrich the work in ways perhaps unanticipated at the outset. But despite their innovative status, all of them arise from entirely natural elements of vocal utterance, even if their appearance in a piece of concert music was hitherto unheard of. Given in order of their appearance (though their usage overlaps) they are:

(a) 12-note (at first) chords sung staccato-tremolo, pp < ff ending with an accent; then beginning fff, dying to ppp and each voice group falling into a unison.

(b) pairs of voices sing together starting in unison, one voice raises the pitch so as to produce interference beats against the other voice; the number of beats per second is indicated by numerals.

(c) “Teing” as a nasal syllable, marked pizzicato (!) and sung glissando with ‘extinction’ (i.e. disappearing into nothing); an elegant hook drawn above the note shows the direction up or down of the glissando.

(d) the syllable “Kuit”, marked “by whistling” - it is of course possible to sound a “k” as a beginning articulation of a whistle, and the act of quickly forming the two vowels produces an upwards glissando; the net effect is a forest of birds.

(e) the return of (c) but now using five different vowel-syllables (Deing, Teing, Ding, Doing, and Duing) at first individually, but then in a cluster of tuttis, with various rhythms and syllable combinations.

The begining of the 4th section (at m. 169) is marked by the return of “normal voice”. All phrases are sung with a constant modulation of pitch, some legato, others with a continous tremolo-staccato. Then (at m. 179) Xenakis introduces what he calls “ataxic clouds” (ataxic = freely disordered) using the syllable “Tsi”, “very sharp and dry”, sometimes loud, sometimes whispering. A little later this process divides the singers into two large groups, between male voices (ataxic clouds) and female voices singing a wailing legato. This breaks off quite suddenly and is followed by three tutti outbursts (mm. 205-213), each one separated by a pause. The first two of these are declamation on a unison C; the third is a wild 11-note chord with 11 different syllables, and three different rhythmic patterns.

Then the 5th section begins (at m.214), recognisably a return to the opening material, though laid out differently, and infused with noticeable scale patterns. Later a sequence of longer sustained tones begins - each voice group now clearly operating by itself - and the work concludes with a low bass tremolo F ¾ sharp, ending in a short cough!

III

The problems facing performers of modernist vocal pieces like Nuits are not really different from those encountered in more conventional music, but they are exacerbated by the music’s manifest difficulty and by the unfamiliarity of its rhetoric. However, it is not the problems - in themselves - that are the ‘problem’, but rather the effect they have on the performers: which is to alienate them from the music as gesture, by focusing so much attention on the music as text (see below, Notes). The process of deciphering that text and the greater degree of unfamiliar technical challenges in getting the music off the page and, literally, into the air all serve to postpone the satisfactory realisation of the musical result. It is harder both to grasp what the result should be and harder, therefore, to move purposefully towards that result. Sometimes satisfaction is postponed so far into the future that one loses patience with the whole thing or, sensing this outcome, chooses not to begin. But Nuits is worth it.

This is not meant as an adversarial criticism of modernist works. It’s simply an attempt to articulate the problems facing the performer so that a way may be found of making and maintaining contact with the musical gesture - in spite of the musical text if need be. Indeed, the gesture is what makes sense of the text, even though it is the text that first informs us what the gesture is. This paradox is one that faces all performers of unfamilar music (including very early music) and even exists when the music is quite conventional in style.

The preceding account of Nuits cannot lay claim to be called an analysis, but neither (I hope) is it merely a description. I see it rather as a report of my encounter with the work as a performer - in my case, as a conductor preparing to rehearse it.

The analysis which a conductor needs is not quite the same as the analysis which a theoretician aims at (whether musicologist, theorist, or composer), though inevitably there will be many issues of equal concern to both.

As performer my primary interest lies with the physical nature of the sound which the work makes. And while this clearly embraces the work’s structure and manner of preceding from note to note, and its so-called ideas or motifs, other issues also press for attention. Therefore I examine the technical methods of producing the sound, both to understand as exactly and fully as possible the processes employed, and to gauge the difficulties that may be involved and how best to deal with them.

By no means does this preclude or render irrelevant any more scientific analysis of the compositional process - far from it - but it places the intellectual approach firmly at the service of performance - with all its imperfections and temporal distractions - because it is of course only in performance that a piece of music can begin to realise its destiny.

How then to go about it? The singers must first discover how to sing microtonal intervals without losing sense of where exactly the pitches are. This is hard simply because our ears are so firmly trained to the piano with its equal semitones. Left alone, voices will naturally revert to a kind of Just Intonation (though it depends of course on what music they are singing), and there are colouristic and ornamental devices which singers use, especially when singing solo, that embrace microtones, albeit fleetingly or ‘unofficially’. But encouraging though these thoughts are, it is quite different to sing a music that permanently deploys microtones without favouring any of these as the ‘real’ pitches, and which proceeds for the most part without any sense of a central pitch. Microtonal singing is naturally suited to monophony where a modal centre operates; but in complex polyphony it both widens the sound spectrum and serves to liberate one from normal singing - it has to! - and nudges the singer towards a new (and perhaps hitherto unsuspected) sense of vocal style and expression. It is exhilarating to perform and listen to, and certainly worth all the hard work of getting it ready in the first place.

Notes

The musical text: is the musical score, an object in which musical sounds are depicted through the medium of notation. This is not to be confused with the verbal text, the words that are to be sung. This may (as in Nuits) be reduced to syllables and phonemes, but the essential nature of the verbal text is linguistic. It means that the presence of the performers can be articulated as much by language and their ability to utter it, as by music. It also means that there are significant elements in the work that operate outside the sphere of music, elements that normally existed before the music came to be composed, and whose form and meaning will have helped determine the form and meaning of the music.

Gesture: not just a theme or texture or characteristic motif, but rather the whole thrust of what the music is doing; both its overall shape and mood, and the moment to moment interaction of all the details.

Rhetoric: in vocal music I am thinking primarily of the triangular relationship between words, music/performer, and audience; and what pose the music adopts to convey the words to the audience.

Modernist: it is possible now to define modernism as a musical style located in history, and as something distinct from much of the new music that is current. Modernist music is still being composed, but its heyday is over, at least for the time being. And to avoid entering here into further descriptions and arguments, I hope the reader can agree that modernism means above all the music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti, Nono, Kagel, Carter, and Xenakis.