Reinhold Friedl, Thomas Grill, Nikolaus Urbanek, Michelle Ziegler   This volume is the result of a symposium at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) in May 2022 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis. It focuses on the electroacoustic work of the Greek-French composer. Taking advantage of the possibilities at mdw, …

Xenakis’s Œuvre as a Theoretical Challenge Nikolaus Urbanek   Even though the catalogue of electroacoustic works represents only a small part of Xenakis’s extensive œuvre, it is nonetheless a very central group of works, to which eminent music-historical significance must be attributed in various respects.1 As he was not bound by instrumental limitations and traditional performance conventions, Xenakis had the …

Laura Zattra Introduction What can we deduce from the composers’ personal archives? What do archives tell us about the person who has collected and organised (or disorganised) them over the years, about their own creative process, about their ‘workshop’? I have ‘used’ personal and institutional archives for 20 years for the purpose of constructing histories of authors, works, centres and collaborations, …

Creative Practices of Early Tape Music Michelle Ziegler The first issue of the American magazine Tape & Film Recording addressed a wide-ranging readership covering both “home” and “professional” sound recording (Mooney 1953). It portrayed the heterogeneous use of tape records in industry and leisure-time activities in 1953. Recording sounds and voices in home, office, plant, school or church served to preserve …

A Challenge of Writing in Musique Mixte from 1958 to 1960 Elena Minetti “Writing is historically the first technique for manipulating time”1 (Kittler 1993: 183; English translation in Krämer 2006: 99). With this phrase, Friedrich Kittler considered writing to be the earliest technique for arranging and reversing events happening on the time axis. In this view, writing is a practice that has the …

James Harley Introduction At approximately the same time as Iannis Xenakis was penning his radical early scores such as Metastaseis (1954) and Pithoprakta (1956) that changed the history of orchestral music, he was embarking on his apprenticeship at what became known as GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales), producing his first electroacoustic work, Diamorphoses, in 1957. In his theoretical conceptions of …

Pierre Carré and François Delécluse Introduction During the 1960s and 1970s, Xenakis conceived several shows which mixed music, architecture and performance; he called them ‘polytopes’. In the Polytope de Cluny (1972), in particular, the most advanced technologies of the time were employed to imagine a new synergy between music, space and light. During this 25-minute-long installation, concrete tape music flowed …

Traces of Mycènes alpha in Anémoessa Marko Slavíček Background From the earliest stages of his career, Iannis Xenakis was interested in two different approaches to composition: the definition of low-level material, or micro-composition, and the construction of high-level form, or macro-composition. Having an engineering education and working experience, Xenakis turned to graphic design as a means of achieving his goals. …

Traces of Traditional Musics in Xenakis’s Electroacoustic Œuvre Reinhold Friedl No expedition to Amazonia, Sikkim or Kilimamdjaro without a tape recorder. No tape experiments, no phonogène or electronic music in Paris, Milan or New York without Zulus, sorcerers and lamas.1 (Schaeffer 1960: 300) Introduction This article discusses a hitherto little-noticed aspect of Xenakis’s œuvre: the use of recordings of instruments from traditional …