Iannis Xenakis - Xenakis Percussion Works

Percussion Ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish: Steven Schick

Mode 171-73

Occasionally, a set of liner notes threatens to write me into silence. Salman Rushdie called silence “the ancient language of defeat,” and Steven Schick’s incisive essay speaks to this music more holistically than I ever could; his years of studying and performing it lead, no doubt, to the intelligence, wit and humor these pieces elicit from him. I am a relative newcomer to this body of Xenakis’ work, and in that light, I will offer up a few of my own observations concerning this remarkable set.

I had long ago acquainted myself with Xenakis’ small body of electroacoustic works, their seeming abstraction providing, I thought, some comfortable distance from those manifestations of his muse of a more pervasively confrontational nature. The present set shoved me head-on into the world I’d been avoiding. In this time of the most extreme areas of music and composition, not to mention dynamic levels, vying for prominence on my stereo, sometimes from one moment to the next, I felt I was ready for a study of the contradictory truths Xenakis purveys. I wasn’t. There is something so tragically beautiful about this music, so harrowingly and deeply human in every anguished and celebratory note, that I had to put it away for a while. Nevermind the misunderstood, or unheeded, prophecies of Cassandra, delivered here with heartbreaking conviction by baritone Philip Larson, even though it is one of the most compelling works in the set. The human voice is not necessary for Xenakis to raise listener hackles; just sample “Dmaathen,” written in 1977 for oboe and percussion. Employing a similarly huge range to the voice in “Cassandra,” the oboe also vacillates between sublime abjection and growling hedonism, alternately exuding comfort and rage in stark juxtaposition. Ritualistic rhythmic repetitions often accompany the more beautifully meditative oboe passages, and yet even underneath, they pulse with anticipation; like the end of the dance in Beethoven’s sixth symphony, the storm is looming just over the horizon.

Bottom line: it’s the relentless sense of shift—not the academic transformation that can be heard as Xenakis abandons, or sublimates, Varese’s rhetorical innovations, but the music’s inherent bipolarity—I really wanted to find another word for this—that sets it apart. Ligeti’s Kyrie setting, from the stunning Requiem, achieves similar intensity, but I hear the piece as emotionally monochromatic, despite its admittedly overwhelming dynamic range. Zimmerman’s monumental Die Soldaten inhabits similarly paranoid territory, despite having one of the most extraordinarily vivid depictions of foreplay and sex I’ve ever encountered. Xenakis somehow depicts the third space, where uncertainty and reminiscence collide, spinning observation, thought and perception out of control with the slightest gesture. While Schick hears chronologically driven differences in Xenakis’ compositional approaches, I imagine a continuum fraught with climaxes, jump-cuts and moments of repose (silent or otherwise.)

If I’ve gravitated toward Larson’s contributions, or those of oboist Jacqueline Leclair, it’s only because they stopped me cold on this journey through the three-disc compendium. The entire enterprise is magnificent, from the aforementioned essay to the recordings themselves, which sound superbly live in every environment I’ve created for them. A bit of studio trickery allows the end of “Persephassa” to be heard as notated, a feat which, Schick asserts, would have the percussionists at twenty-five strokes per second; it’s even beyond Red Fish Blue Fish, an obviously well-rehearsed group ready and able to tackle these demanding scores under Schick’s wise direction.

Not for the faint of heart then, but honestly, what music worth repeated listening really is? Another sterling achievement from a label whose devotion to innovative music cannot be questioned, but from whom another set like this is always a reason to celebrate.

~ Marc Medwin