Part Five - Composers

Overview

As shown in the previous chapter some composers have chosen to recreate their scores through a visual means. I am going This research looks at Iannis Xenakis and John Cage’s style in more depth. Both styles are very different from each other but have a strong reasoning and philosophy to their reasoning’s. I will begin by looking in to their backgrounds and try to identify the development behind the work they have produced.

John Cage

John Cage is known for his creative take on music, letting explorative creativity dictate his music and allowing himself to be controversial and create his own language of music. His early works represent fascination mixed with a strict compositional style, which develops and becomes more experimental over time. His piece 4’ 33” comprises of a piece of music in which the audience is the music. The orchestra simply sit in silence, so any noise made from the audience is essentially the music. Cage has stated that his own musical preference is one of silence,‘the music I prefer, even to my own or anybody else’s, is what we are hearing if we are just quiet’ [Griffiths, 1981, p28]. So his aims with 4’33” was to prove the composed music is the same as any other sound created.

The beginning of Cage’s creative score composition came from his piece Music for Carillon No.1 in 1952, in which rather than writing a normal score he folded a piece of paper and cut holes out of it where the fold mark were and recreated a graph on the paper.

IMAGE

Figure 313

The graph represents the time in quater seconds (vertical lines) and the pitch (horizontal lines) The dots then become semibreves (which are the points of attack in the music).

Imaginary Landscape No.2

The clusters in each 'island' as such are a representation of changes in time determined through the shape given, and is marked in the center of the pitch mark. The loudness of the sound is shown through the numbers marked (from 1-64), which is completely determined by the performer.

Cage's aim was to create music from out of the ordinary, which he certainly did. You can see below in the video of Water Walks from 5 minutes 30 seconds in, he has used house hold appliances to create a piece of music.

Water Walks performed live on TV

Other Works

Figure 315-317

Iannis Xenakis

Xenakis is an accomplished engineer, architect and composer. He started off working as an engineer and in 1947 went to work in Le Corbusiers studio and discovered Le Corbusier's modular system (a scale of proportions)'It became the fundamental unifier of scale and dimension, based on human proportions' [Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p. 10].

Modular based on human proportions.

Red=Average Height

Blue=With Arm Lifted

[Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p. 44]

After a while if Xenakis did not like a building, he would tell the architects the building would not hold up and to construct it his way, which they did. Eventually, after asking, Le Corbusier allowed Xenakis to design his own buildings. Xenakis had stated that he felt a 'connection' between music and architecture and that he was drawn to music. He stated 'Their inter-relationship was fundamental... Architects work from the global down to the details. I didn't find this movement a natural one, be it in architecture or in music.' [Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p. XVII]. This pushed Xenakis to think about music more and more, until he eventually enrolled in the Conservatoire school in Paris. Studying the piano under Arthur Honegger (Swiss Composer), Xenakis chose to include octaves and parallel fifths, as to which Honegger proclaimed that they were forbidden in traditional part writing. He was then removed from the class. Xenakis moved on to Messiaen's class in which Nadia Boulanger told him he had a lot of talent but she could not teach him as he was too much of a beginner, but not to pursue traditional music, and to just listen and compose.

Xenakis and Le Corbusier worked on the invention of the 'Undulating Glass Panes’, which is an architectural glass structure made from the combination of mathematics of the modular and Xenakis' music, "the result is the added dimension of rhythm in architectural space." [Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p. XVII] Xenakis linked the panes of glass with the layout of an accordion.

Figure 318

Section Drawing of La Tourette's Undulating Glass Panes

[Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p. 42]

Metastaseis

Figure 319

Xenakis first piece of music 'Metastaseis' was written in aid of the modular system. It was written for sixty musicians, made up of a piccolo, flute, oboes, bass clarinet, horns, trumpets, trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings. Out of a 12 tone scale 6 tempered and algebraic intervals (making scales of 6 durations) are applied and emitted, the scales can be added together creating a natural flow. The Golden Section (known as the Golden Ratio, 1:1.61, in mathematocal terms, it is the ratio between two proportions) appears in the sequence as the ratios become closer. "This is how the idea of the modular has created a close structural link between time and sound." [Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p.46]

Figure 320

Score (left) and Architectural Graphical Representation with the time on the X axis and the Pitch on the Y axis (right).

[Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p. 42]

Graphical Representation to go along with the music

What architectural form is to be given to musical or visual performances?

‪[Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p.261]

Xenakis formed this question after creating his piece 'The Diatope', in which the audience entered a canopy looking structure in Paris (in front of the Pompidou Centre) with eleven speakers and 1600 strobe lights flashing to the music. His response to his own question was that there is no answer, but 'the effect of the chosen architectural form has an almost tactile influence on the quality of the music or spectacle performed in it'. [Xenakis and Kanach, 2008, p.261]