xenakis

[wektor]

Normally it's the modelling of a randomly occurring process using consequent random steps. So yeah I guess.

well you are correct about the modelling part

 

[wektor]

what is funny is deterministic processes can often generate seemingly random results, especially if it's more complicated, you have all sorts of unstable behaviours exhibiting in say, chaos theory, or mixer feedback, I think some other thread had posts that explained how computer random is also not so random, as far as you use the same seed for the generation, which is exactly the case here.

 

[wektor]

dont get me wrong you can make a fucking incomprehensible mess with or without chance, far too easy

 

[IdleRich]

well you are correct about the modelling part, as far as I remember it was more of an apparent randomness he was after, quite deterministic actually.
you can say the dust in the air floats around randomly but knowing enough about what affects its movement and how you should be able to reproduce the (ideally) same thing, if you can reproduce the environment and so on, whether as say cage's stuff is aleatoric, involving chance.

That wouldn't be stochastic though - with a stochastic process there is a probabilistic decision at each step with each outcome given a probability, and then you can go as many steps as required with the model giving you the probably of each outcome.

 

[wektor]

That wouldn't be stochastic though - with a stochastic process there is a probabilistic decision at each step with each outcome given a probability, and then you can go as many steps as required with the model giving you the probably of each outcome.

A stochastic process is random and non-deterministic. The next state of the environment is not fully determined by the previous one.

seems like I was wrong and you were right indeed

 

[IdleRich]

Well stochastic means probabilistic, but if you're talking about a particular piece of music which you say is not probabilistic/stochastic then you may well be right, I don't know anything about his works, I make no claims for them.

 

[wektor]

my grandfather had lived with Xenakis for a very long time hence I happen to know his work in every detail.

 

[IdleRich]

I don't think I did justice to how powerful the electronic piece in conjunction with the light show was. I was really dragged along by Borja and Liza cos we'd been out all night and I couldn't be arsed. But it was free and Borja had been to the first one on Friday and was dead keen to go again. I didn't know what to expect, had some vague idea of an orchestra with added electronics - which fair enough may have been closer to the mark on Friday, but I had no idea it would be so intense.

The main event, the bleeps and glitches with lights, was proper brain-melting mashing stuff. In a sense it was like being in a club with amazing lights in the way the sound was so thick and gloopy that you felt you could touch it as it came at you from all sides. Really though, despite that being the best comparison I have, it wasn't like that at all. But it was totally psychedelic in a kind of rigorous way - Borja sat next to me turned and mouthed "What.... the.... fuck?". It was amazing, I hope it was recorded somehow, it seems weird that they should just do it once, and it wouldn't be the same anywhere else unless you know any other auditoriums with a glass wall looking into a sumptuous garden.

 

[version]

XENAKIS AND GREECE | EMST

www.emst.gr

Greece finally pays tribute to Iannis Xenakis

... it has taken more than 20 years since his death in Paris, the place to which he fled after narrowly surviving a British tank shell in the clashes that preceded Greece’s brutal civil war, for Xenakis to be properly feted in the country of his origin.

“Elsewhere he had been celebrated far and wide, here fitting tribute had never been paid. It was a glaring omission of the Greek state towards someone of such enormous stature.”

“What we have done in collaboration with the Musée de la Musique – Philharmonie de Paris and the Centre for Contemporary Research of the Athens Conservatoire (CMRC) is finally host the first major comprehensive presentation of his work,” Gregos explained. “There had been shows and concerts here and there, but this is the first time he has been acknowledged on an institutional level in Greece.”

The re-embrace has seen record numbers flock to EMST, a concrete edifice on a busy boulevard beneath the Acropolis, with hundreds daily visiting the exhibition dedicated to Xenakis’ troubled relationship with Greece, drawn from the archives of the CMRC which the composer co-founded.

guardian.com/artanddesign/2024/jan/28/visionary-composer-polymath-and-true-cosmopolitan-greece-finally-pays-tribute-to-iannis-xenakis

 

[version]

The Wire have made some of his articles free for the time being;

Neil Kulkarni (26 July 1972 – 22 January 2024) - The Wire

As a tribute to writer Neil Kulkarni, who died on 22 January aged 51, we have made a selection of the many articles he wrote for The Wire free to read in our online library for one month

www.thewire.co.uk

"As elemental as Shakespeare, Aeschylus, The Bomb Squad. Public Enemy brought me to noise, and consequently much of the music that - often with infantile contrarianism - subsequently bracketed itself as noise has been disappointing, displaying a flabby indulgence a million miles away from the purposeful, genuinely revolutionary possibilities offered by hiphop. On first hearing Iannis Xenakis, that all changed."

The Wire - April 2022 (Issue 458)

Read fully-searchable digital publications on the Exact Editions platform.

reader.exacteditions.com

 

[version]

That review's brilliant. The kind of writing that makes you drop everything and stick the music on.

 

[Corpsey]