Xenakis - Aïs

This is the halfway point in my blog, post number 26. Hooray. Let's celebrate. I'll put out a buffet, you bring along some WKDs and a few bottles of Mad Dog 20/20.

Seeing as this is such a "special" occasion, I thought I'd better post a particularly special piece of music. Well at least I think it is.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) wasn't a composer that I thought would ever feature in a blog about music inspired by birds. He was one of the dominant figures in modernist music for about four decades until his death, and I reckon that in two-hundred years' time, it will be Xenakis who is listed amongst the handful of composers who were the greatest of those born in the first few decades of the last century, the composers that history filters into being the best representatives of what classical music was about in the second half of the twentieth century.

Xenakis studied composition with Mr Bird-music Olivier Messiaen, so when I was putting together a list of music to feature in this blog, I thought I'd better check out some of the people Messiaen taught. But Xenakis writing music about birds? No chance.

Have a read of an encyclopedia entry and Xenakis will be listed as a composer that used "stochastic" processes in his music. Nobody involved in music actually knows what that means. A lot pretend they understand what it means ("it's about maths and numbers and physics theories and stuff"), but they don't. It doesn't actually matter that nobody understands what stochastic music is, what matters is that it worked for Xenakis. It's like the Higgs boson - just allow yourself to be amazed by it, even though you have absolutely no idea what it is or what the Large Hadron Collider does.

You'll also read that Xenakis wrote two groundbreaking pieces of stochastic music: Metastaseis and Pithoprakta, both early works that Xenakis wrote in the mid-50s. It's unlikely that any other pieces will be mentioned. That's a massive shame, because they're pretty poor pieces to select out of the whole of Xenakis's output (over 140 pieces), and in no way indicative of just how effing good Xenakis became.

During WW2, Xenakis was part of the Greek resistance, first fighting against the Germans and then, after the Germans were defeated, Xenakis fought against the British, who also tried to suppress the resistance. In January 1945 Xenakis was hit by a shell from a Sherman tank, losing his left eye, smashing his jaw to pieces and tearing off a big chunk of his face. In a book of conversations made with the journalist Balint Andras Varga, Xenakis explained that despite being battered by a shell, he'd also blown up a few tanks himself. He was pretty nails was Xenakis.

He eventually sneaked out of Greece for Italy, obtaining false papers and changing his name to Konstantin Kastrounis, before moving on to Paris. It was here that he got a job working for the architect 'Le Corbusier' (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and ended up helping to design new-world-order buildings, even monasteries like the Couvent de la Tourette.

A building that would make Prince Charles vomit?

The most famous project that Xenakis was involved in was the Philips Pavilion, designed and built for Expo 58 in Brussels.

After studying with Messiaen (who said that Xenakis was one of the most extraordinary men he'd ever known, "a hero like no other") and leaving Le Corbusier's studio, he eventually established himself as a full-time composer, and in the last couple of decades of his life he was up there as one of the most sought after composers on the planet. Whilst so many of the more extreme composers of his generation were tamed as they got older, Xenakis never backed off from writing music which is, at times, the aural equivalent of having a nail gun repeatedly fired into your forehead. But in a good way. A really good way.

But Xenakis writing music about birds? Never.

So back to the start of the year when I was knocking up my list of blogposts, and I was amazed to find that not only was Aïs (1979) based on birdsong, but also about a species from probably my favourite family of birds. No Nightingales or Cuckoos or generic birdy trilling from Xenakis, nope - Xenakis decided to write a piece based on the nocturnal screaming calls of Scopoli's Shearwaters.

SCOPOLI'S SHEARWATERS!







In the same book of conversations that I mentioned above, Xenakis talks about the background to Aïs, and describes being on holiday in Corsica with his wife, where he spent the time canoeing along the coast and wild camping on small islands. He talks about one night when he heard screaming sounds and how he started panicking that a load of Corsicans were slaughtering each other. Then he remembered that he'd heard the same sounds when he was younger on a deserted island in the Aegean Sea, and finally he worked out that they were birds.

"It's a kind of seagull or petrel found in the Mediterranean. It has a brownish colour and never rests on the rocks but floats on the sea and fishes during the day. Some times at night they gather above their nests on the seashore or the rocks, fly around and give out cries which sound as if children were being assassinated... In ancient times these birds were used for divination: when they flew to the left the augury was bad, when they flew to the right it was good."

Xenakis's description suggests they're not actually gulls or petrels (as in storm-petrels), but shearwaters. Out of the three shearwaters that occur in the Mediterranean, Balearic Shearwater doesn't breed in Corsica or the Aegean, but Scopoli's and Yelkouan Shearwaters do. After listening to the music and comparing it to recordings from Xeno-Canto, and also in the incredible Petrels Night and Day by Magnus Robb (possibly the best bird book I've ever read), I think it has to be Scopoli's.

The shearwaters are imitated by an amplified baritone singer, who also growls and yells his way through texts by Homer and Sappho - Aïs was the name used in Greek poetry for Hades, the domain of the dead. Before clicking on play below, you need to knock back a shot (bottle?) of absinthe and then strap yourself in. Here we go - Scopoli's Shearwaters in Aïs by Iannis Xenakis ...

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Bartok's music of the night

Béla Bartók's most well known use of birdsong features in the second movement of his 3rd Piano Concerto, but he also wrote at least two more pieces where birdsong is used - the third movement from the String Quartet no.4 and a movement from the piano suite Out of Doors. There are other pieces where he hints at birdsong and calls, but not as obviously as in these pieces.

These are both good examples of Bartók's night music, a particular musical character that he used over and over again in slow movements in pieces composed in the last twenty years of his life. It's music that unfolds very slowly, with slow shifting harmony, there's a weird sense of unease underpinning everything, with constant interjections, said to be the sounds of birds, insects and other animals.


String Quartet no.4

Bartók wrote this in the summer of 1928. It's in five movements, four of them manic, with a violent energy that comes to a complete standstill in the central third movement - where a Nightingale (or at least I presume it is) starts to sing on the first violin - before firing off into the fourth movement and back to the relentless energy.

This is one of my very favourite pieces of music - it is totally mindblowing, so you'd better like it, or I'll be livid. Do yourselves a massive favour and listen to it all. But I understand that you're busy (Hollyoaks, Holby City, Judge Rinder, Homes Under the Hammer, etc...) so if you can't spare 22 minutes, then first of all, shame on you, but secondly, you can skip to the 3rd movement which starts at 08:42. The Nightingale starts to sing at 11:13.

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Out of Doors

This is a suite of five short pieces for solo piano written in 1926, the fourth movement is titled Musiques Nocturnes (starts at 6:06 in the clip below). The pulse is maintained all the way through by a constant chromatic blur of four notes played with the left hand, and above that, the right hand throws in fragments of birdsong, and also cicadas and supposedly the calls of Fire-bellied Toad (known in Hungary as the Unka Frog). It's hard to say what the bird is, but repetitive song structure could point to a Song Thrush, although you also get a hint of the machine gun repetition, which suggests it's just another bloody Nightingale.

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Delius - Sea Drift

The middle of June in the northern hemisphere - the start of an ornithological graveyard for a few weeks, as birds vanish, either hidden behind leaves or looking after young. Although in Britain, June can also be the time when something viciously rare turns up, usually something small, very attractive and from the east. Like a Cretzschmar's Bunting on Bardsey Island in Wales.

But on the whole, June ain't too great for birds. Unless you're interested in annoying birds at their nest, which you shouldn't be, because it's illegal.
 
Frederick Delius (1862-1934) wrote a great piece about nesting Mockingbirds, Sea Drift, which he finished in 1904. It's a setting of Walt Whitman's poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, from Whitman's collection Leaves of Grass. It's about a boy walking along the beach at Paumanok, in Long Island, New York. He finds a Mockingbird nest and starts to study it, until one day the female vanishes. There's a great analysis of the poem HERE.

The performance below is from the opening night of the BBC Proms in 2012. Enjoy.

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Respighi - The Pines of Rome

I've already written about the first ever recording of a bird, made by Ludwig Koch in 1889, HERE. It's generally agreed that the first time a recording of a bird was used in a piece of music was in 1924, in The Pines of Rome by the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936). In the third piece from the set of four, Respighi depicts a nocturnal visit to the pines on Janiculum Hill, and puts in a real recording of a Nightingale at the very end - a live orchestra is joined by the recorded bird.

I'm not sure about who / when / where the Nightingale was recorded, but Respighi did suggest that in a performance, the recording of the bird should be played on a Brunswick Panatrope, which I think would have been a brand new invention at the time. Nowadays, performances use modern technology like the cassette player and mini-discs.

Brunswick Panatrope

Every time time I listen to this, I always think that the sudden arrival of a genuine Nightingale from out of the orchestra is really powerful and actually quite moving. Not everyone agrees - this piece has been a long time source of controversy amongst people who like to find things to wind themselves up over. Respighi has been criticised for sickbag over-sentimentality. Did he lack the musical imagination to depict a Nightingale using the orchestra? And best of all, there are suggestions that by using a machine to replace a living creature, Respighi's Nightingale is symptomatic of the totalitarian Fascism of Mussolini's Italy. Obviously. So there you go.

There's no rush - don't worry, your Findus Crispy Pancakes have got ages until they start to burn - so take the time to watch all of this. Trust me, it's really good (other than a few people in the audience dying from some lung disorder). But if you can smell burning, then the Nightingale starts to sing at 5:50.

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Couperin - Pièces de clavecin

Here are two Nightingales, a startled Linnet and some singing warblers, in the third book of keyboard pieces (Pièces de clavecin) written in 1722 by François Couperin (1668-1733). The books are divided into suites, or ordres, and these bird pieces make up the first four of the seven pieces from the 14th ordre. I nearly put in another piece by Couperin called the Dodo, then I found out that 'dodo' is a word that kids and parents use in France for going to sleep. I suppose I could have just lied. Anyway ...

Leading on from last week, Olivier Messiaen said, "I think that Couperin, given what he wrote, never heard a Nightingale, but this takes away nothing from the charm of the piece." That's not actually true, because Couperin does attempt to create the effect of the most well known part of a Nightingale's song - the machine gun repeated notes - which Couperin imitates on the keyboard with accelerating trills at ends of sections. But the Linnet and warblers are written in a generic bird-style.

- Le Rossignol en amour (the Nightingale in love)
- La Linotte éffarouchée (the startled Linnet) 3:14
- Les Fauvéttes plaintives (the plaintive song of the warblers) 4:59
- Le Rossignol vainqueur (the vanquished Nightingale) 10:00

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