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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