Showing posts with label Xenakis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Xenakis. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Evryali (Shall Be Exalted?)

Johnson's Rambler (no relation) hosts this awesome clearinghouse of YouTubed contemporary music, which, okay, you've probably seen already. I'd have to say that one composer who benefits most greatly from the A/V treatment is Iannis Xenakis, whose music is actually designed to be heard as a set of points and curves. My father the schoolteacher might say that I am a visual learner, so it does give me a greater appreciation of Xenakis's stuff to get a virtual tour of, say, his sketches for Metastasis (best viewed full screen): or the "score" for Mycenae Alpha (ditto—also, be warned, it is loud and nasty): but my favorite online Xenakimation, again thanks to the Rambler, is the side-scrollin' Evryali graph that John Mark Harris has whipped up to accompany his performance of the (literally unperformable) piece, so you can watch it roll by like player-piano music. Has anybody performed Xenakis on Disklavier? (Defeats the purpose, I know, but still interesting.) Conversely, has anybody come up with MIDIfied visual maps like this for the music of Conlon Nancarrow? Would be fascinating to see...

Nun of the Above

On my way to her first opera,  Hildegard,  on Friday night, I was thinking again about Sarah Kirkland Snider’s music, and how I might descri...