Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)

"The artist plays with forms just as the scientist or the believer does. The musician does so in an even more systematic way, since he lives simultaneously in the microcosm of sound and in the macrocosm of the vastest architectures, as if he found himself within a millefeuille made of layers transparent in every sense".

For Xenakis, the bond between music and architecture was always extremely close: with Le Corbusier he designed the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, a mathematically generated structure made up of curved surfaces, meticulously designed to house the celebrated Poème Électronique (a multimedia work comprising projected images chosen by Le Corbusier, and music composed by Edgar Varèse and by Xenakis himself).

Xenakis's famous Polytopes are light-and-sound spectacles, veritable musical "installations", created with the aid of architecture, lighting, laser beams and projected images. Conceived as architectural spectacles that revived the ancient, ideal symbiotic union between architecture and music, they were staged in various locations from 1967 to 1978. Today we can say they carried considerable pioneering weight, having paved the way for the dreamlike, laser-based technological shows that would follow.

Xenakis's love for light and its expressive effects was already evident in the 1967 "Polytope De Montréal", which used twelve hundred electronic flashes (800 white light, 400 coloured) mounted on intersecting metal cable structures that generated the most varied shapes. The lights could switch on every twenty-fifth of a second, and, owing to the persistence of the image on the retina, created for the eye every sort of moving configuration (arabesques, spirals, and so on).

Deeply struck by the visual experience of the 1969-70 Japan World Expo, where he was able to admire the largely technical laser work set up in the gas pavilion by Japanese artist Keiji Usami, Xenakis managed to make use of this technological device in the show "Polytope de Cluny", staged in Paris in 1972. There, the Greek composer used three laser beams for the first time (one krypton laser with a red spectrum, two argon lasers in blue, green and yellow-green), fitted with new devices able to act on the light beam in real time. The result was astonishing: by altering the beam's wavelength, it was possible to create wholly new shapes, "immaterial volumes", combinations of colour endowed with extraordinary physicality. As Maurice Fleuret wrote in his essay "Il Teatro di Xenakis": "This is no longer the 'kinetic painting' once glimpsed, but an authentic kinetic-luminous sculpture, the first of its kind and, to this day, the most complex and accomplished".

It would not be too bold today to acknowledge that the Polytopes gave birth to the modern multimedia technological show, so dear to the (more or less) rock bands of the '70s. The list is long: from Rockets (who were the first to adopt lasers, in December 1977, at Milan's Teatro Lirico) to Kraftwerk (who had already used them during the 1976 "Radio-Activity" tour, though the project was quickly abandoned due to technical problems), from Tangerine Dream with their 1977 North American "Laserium" tour, to Brian Eno and his audio-visual installations; not to mention the likes of Jean-Michel Jarre, Pink Floyd, and even the later generation of mainstream artists — from Michael Jackson to Madonna — with their triumphant stadium tours.

It should be noted that, at the very end of the '60s, rock music — in the midst of the psychedelic boom on the London (Pink Floyd at the UFO Club) and New York (Velvet Underground at the Factory) scenes — had already used stroboscopic shows to create a "druggy", Dionysian, orgiastic dimension: Xenakis's Polytope light shows, on the other hand, moved along quite different aesthetic lines, more philosophical and existential, in which the spectator lucidly contemplated possible futures without any artificially induced psychic alteration.

As Yan Terrier, the installation's technical producer, points out: "Today, at the down of the third millennium, triggering flashes, processing sound material, sequencing laser beams and synchronizing all of it onto music is standard fare for show technology. At that time, however, we had to invent all of it, from the computers tapes for processing relay systems to laser beams sequencers, not to mention servo-controls for sound and the adjustable mirror's systems".

The importance and genesis of "La Legende D'Eer"

Music is not a language. Every piece of music is like a boulder with complex shapes, with grooves and patterns carved on and within it, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways, without ever finding the right or the best answer

(Xenakis's introductory note for the "Diatope" show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1978).

La Légende d'Eer is not Xenakis's most important, significant or revolutionary audio-visual electro-acoustic work – even though it was the first to grasp the physical limits of the human ear's auditory capacity – but among his major tape works it certainly stands out as one of the most communicative and "least" demanding to listen to and watch.

The work was composed between 1977 and 1978 to mark the opening of the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris on 14 June 1978, and was performed for a full three months in a modern shell-shaped installation called "Polytope", designed and built in ten months by Xenakis himself with the help of his colleagues, and set up in Place Beaubourg. As the photo shows, it consisted of a 1,000-square-metre tent of bright red, semi-transparent vinyl, so that the show could also be seen from outside, all of it supported by dazzling lighting effects – around 1,700 lights – along with extremely elaborate laser displays (reduced to four due to excessive costs), red and green beams of light reflecting off 400 mirrors: the first grand, breathtaking multimedia show was taking shape. An early version of the work was performed on 11 February 1978 at the Bochum Planetarium for a local festival, and the version staged at the "Beaubourg" was its final form, later restaged in 1979 in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany.

In 2005, Mode Records produced, for the first time on film, under the direction of Bruno Raiston, a record of the Paris performance, using original graphic and photographic material from the time. A "poetic" document of rare perfection and magic, this film gives off a visual and sonic force and impact that remain unmatched to this day.

The myth of Er and the "philosophical" meaning of the work

In the telling of the myth of Er, drawn from Book 10 of the Republic, Plato acknowledges for the first time in Western thought the supremacy of human action, thereby effectively marking the defeat of fatalism and metaphysical evil. Man finally becomes the protagonist of History, the architect of his own Destiny: the concept of free will is born.

Xenakis's message, and his choice to draw on this Greek myth, are clear: Cosmos and Man form an indissoluble pair. There is a Universe in which God is absent, and there are only us, human beings. Nothing else. The God of the dice has either been lost, or is simply not considered from a secular standpoint.

Nouritza Matossian, a writer of Armenian descent who wrote the most important critical biography of Xenakis ever published, has linked Er's fate to the composer's own biography, both men having suffered the cruelty of war.

Xenakis often insisted that he had not been inspired by the myth of Er, and to that end he added other very precise cultural references to the work. All texts published in different eras, ranging across the fields of science and philosophy, which were included in the programme handed out to the show's audience:

The myth of Er (from Book 10 of Plato's Republic)

Poimandrès by Hermes Trismegistus

Blaise Pascal: infinity (from the Pensées)

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter: Siebenkàs

Robert P. Kirschner: Supernovas in other galaxies (Scientific American, December 1976)

It's likely that Xenakis wanted to avoid any question, however veiled, tied to politics and to his own past as a fighter in the Greek resistance during the Second World War, when he was badly wounded in a clash with British liberation troops (an incident that cost him his left eye and left a large scar across his face); he preferred instead to "liberate" listening itself, leaving the audience alone with their own sensations and their own sense of wonder.

Xenakis himself said as much: "I gave the generic title 'Légende d'Eer' to these texts because this myth, which paradoxically completes Plato's Republic, incorporates ideas of morality, of destiny, of the physical and the extra-physical, of death, of life, in a system closed in on itself but at the same time deeply poetic for its apocalyptic visions."

No description could be more fitting: to the ear, "Légende d'Eer" unfolds as a fascinating musical cosmogony; to the eye, as an epic technological big bang; and as a whole, as a cold yet romantic interlocking of architecture, mathematics, sound and vision.

Watching the video-show, one gets the distinct sensation of taking part in a primordial, cyclical journey that unfolds with an extremely slow start and closes by returning to the same silent void it began in. For anyone who has never experienced this journey, I'd say it evokes and fuses the music of "Alpha Centauri" by the Tangerine Dream with the finale of "2001: A Space Odyssey": cosmic music for cosmic visions, rendered in electro-acoustic form.

Syncretic musical composition of the work and its "fantastical" analysis

Xenakis's interesting and pioneering use of musical instruments from distant and diverse cultures (African, Japanese, Jewish) produces a clash of sonic clusters (drones) drawn from a range of sources: traditional acoustic instruments, the sound of bricks scraping against each other and against other surfaces, and computerized mathematical functions converted into analog signals (the sound effects are generated by computers programmed by Xenakis using his complex stochastic theories: in short, probabilistic calculations used to control the development of individual musical characters).

What remains astonishing is that, on listening, all this technological ferocity, this cold and cerebral compositional approach, gives rise to music that is so engaging, so lyrical, so human! The musical idea is complex in its convoluted construction, yet to the ear it unfolds as linear and simple as a straight geometric line. Magic within magic.

The sonic material, which slowly builds up all its propulsive, almost martial force, can be divided into six parts: six movements that allow us a "fantastical analysis" of this exploratory journey undertaken by the mythical warrior Er.

Part one: the imperceptible cosmic silence, the birth of a new world and of stellar formations; a desolate soundscape, at once ancient and modern, opens up before the hero. We see a stage space slowly constructing the set of the performance: sketches and formulas somewhere between Euclid and Miró, electro-acoustic signals from emerging worlds or from languages yet to be understood. Everything is already so fascinating, so mysterious. Place Beaubourg wakes up to find itself in a future still waiting to be deciphered.

Part two: (6:34-19:18) the hero contemplates the slow formation of planet Earth. We enter the space of the shell, where red is the dominant color. It feels like living inside an enchanting painting that fuses Kandinsky, Miró and Klee in a geometric abstraction so beautiful it takes your breath away, because the creation of planet Earth truly must have been that spectacular... Hundreds of light bulbs symbolizing stars, already trapped within the curve of space, are scanned by the camera, now up close, now from afar, offering an overall view: the eye and mind of the viewer grow ever more astonished. A sudden cut to beams of light, and the Plato of the legend of Er is finally quoted: "Chaque groupe passait sept jours dans la prairie; puis, le huitième, il devait lever le camp et se mettre en route pour arriver, quatre jours après en un lieu d'ou l'on découvre, s'étendant depuis le haut à travers tout le ciel et toute la terre une lumière droite comme une colonne, fort semblable à l'arc-en-ciel, mais plus brillante et plus pure".

And then the spectacle shifts from static to elegantly mobile, thanks to the flawless interplay of laser beams intersecting in space, and the second quotation is ready, from the "Poimandrès" of Hermes Trismegistus: "Il en jaillissait un cri d'appel, sans articulation, tel que je le comparais à une voix de feu, cependant que, sortant de la lumière... un Verbe saint vint couvrir la Nature et un feu sans mélange s'élanca hors de la nature humide en haut vers la région sublime".

At minute 18:24, the Eye of Mother Earth finally appears in the full blinding force of its formation: my God, what a sight! The cosmic musical hum grows ever more intense, roaring as deafeningly as a swarm of bees driven mad by the loss of their queen.

Part three: (19:19-25:00) the hero witnesses the stabilization of the planet. The blinding white of the Eye of Mother Earth dominates this part of the tale: "Le Christ poursuivit 'J'ai parcouru les mondes, je me suis elance vers les soleils, avec les voies lactées j'ai traverse les espaces déserts du ciel mais il n'est point de Dieu. Je suis descendu aussi loin que l'existence projette ses ombres, et j'ai plongé mes regards dans les gouffres, et j'ai crié: Père, où es-tu? Mais je n'ai entendu que la tempete éternelle que nul ne gouverne et l'arc-en-ciel luisant formé par les etres se dressait au-dessus de l'abime et s'y èpanchait goutte à goutte' (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, "Siebenkàs"). The Eye of Mother Earth is now complete, spherical, and seems to give birth within itself to cells undergoing mitosis: life itself, pulsing.

A new quote appears on screen: "Dans les premièrs phases de l'explosion la distribution generale de l'energie de l'étoile correspond étroitement à la distribution continue qui caractérise un corps noir théorique à la température de 12.000 Kelvin. Dans le cas du SN 1970g le rayon était de 3×10(14) centrimètres, soit un rayon aussi grand que celui de l'orbite d'Uranus. Une fois connu le rayon de la supernova, il est possible de dèterminer sa luminosité absolue calculée était de 10(42) ergs par seconde ; un trillion de fois celle du soleil… Pendant les 30 jours qui suivent l'explosion initiale, le rayon del la surface a partir de laquelle est émise la lumiere visible s'accroit a la vitesse presque constante de 5.000 km par seconde. A' la fin de cette période, la photosphère de l'étoile, c'est -à-dire sa surface visible atteint un rayon de 2×10(18) centimètres, un rayon beacoup pluè grand que celui de notre systeme solaire" (Robert P. Kirschner, "Supernovas in other galaxies").

Fourth part: (min 25:00-32:54) is the most deafening moment of dronic noise. Impossible electronic whirlwinds crash down: is it perhaps the hero fighting against ancestral demons? The laser beams trace increasingly abstract and hazy geometries, with planes and dissolves that caress each other harmoniously: while on one hand we can note the constant rise in sonic intensity, on the other it's clear that we never witness abrupt visual changes, only strange plays of light that recall cellular chromatin in its phases of condensation and decondensation.

Fifth part: (min 32:55-40:16) is a transitional phase, with the cosmic noise stabilizing at its peak level before beginning its decline. The cosmic drone here is truly at the height of its power, weaving a spell and carrying the ear down truly shamanic paths. Other sinister sounds emerge from the din. New "mitotic spindles" take shape, standing out against the final quote: "Qu'est -ce que l'homme dans la nature? Un néant à l'égard de l'infini, un tout à l'égard du néant , un milieu entre rien en tout… incapable de voir le néant d'où il est englouti" (Blaise Pascal, "L'infinito").

Sixth part: we witness the appearance of mysterious sounds, called "pel. Basque" and "bridge sounds": pointillistic, neoplastic sounds representing order and harmony on the Mondrian — in this case Paris Boogie-Woogie — leading to the cupio dissolvi of the final silence.

The black screen remains, with the last, almost imperceptible sonic glitches. Er remains somewhere, and so do we, just as stunned and drained by such formal aesthetic perfection. The show that Bruno Rastoin reconstructs from the surviving footage of the original performance manages to recreate that magical balance where beauty and harmony intertwine with darkness and apocalyptic visions: a panorama that soothes and unsettles in equal measure. Leaving us, in the end, with the cosmos, its beauty, the mystery of unsolved mysteries.

Bibliographic and video references:

AA. VV. – Xenakis Edited by Enzo Restagno, EDT, Torino (1988)

Alessandra Capanna – Iannis Xenakis – Architect of Light and Sound. Multimedia Architecture Laboratory, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

Iannis Xenakis, Vol. 5 – La Légende d'Eer: Electroacoustic Work for 7-channel tape. A film by Bruno Rastoin. 96 khz/24-bit PCM stereo, 5.1 Surround Sound, DTS (Mode Records 148).

Thanks to Matteo Losi for proofreading the text and for his invaluable bibliographic support.

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