Shortly after Xenakis settled into his work as a civil engineer with Le Corbusier, he began his music career by looking for someone with whom he could study. After being turned down by Nadia Boulanger, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud, he followed the advice [...]]]> A new piece on Arts Electric attempts to answer that question.

Shortly after Xenakis settled into his work as a civil engineer with Le Corbusier, he began his music career by looking for someone with whom he could study. After being turned down by Nadia Boulanger, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud, he followed the advice of Annette Dieudonné, a friend of Nadia Boulanger, who suggested that he seek advice from Olivier Messiaen. Noting Xenakis’ background in mathematics and civil engineering, Messiaen advised him not to study harmony and counterpoint but rather to develop his mathematical ideas. Xenakis attended Messiaen’s class at the Paris Conservatory regularly through 1952 and less regularly in 1953.

Among many related and various theories and skills, civil engineering articulated for Xenakis the phenomenon of underlying complexity, as found, for example, in a multiplicity of miniscule causalities that are too numerous to be individually traced and, consequently, can be understood only as distributions and probabilities within a statistically-described whole. In 1953, he applied the principle in music by calculating the trajectories of individual stringed instruments, notated as lines rather than notes, in his orchestral composition Metastaseis. It was his first significant composition, and it proved seminal for other ideas and other projects—among them the Philips Pavilion and the UPIC system—throughout his life.

Read more at Arts Electric.

From the performer, Richard Lainhart:

…from the time I first touched the Haken Continuum, I’d dreamed of using it to play a composition by Olivier Messiaen called “Oraison”. I first heard “Oraison” years ago as a student of electronic music, and had fallen in love with its simple, beautiful harmonies and profound sense of mystery.

“Oraison” is [...]]]>

From the performer, Richard Lainhart:

…from the time I first touched the Haken Continuum, I’d dreamed of using it to play a composition by Olivier Messiaen called “Oraison”. I first heard “Oraison” years ago as a student of electronic music, and had fallen in love with its simple, beautiful harmonies and profound sense of mystery.

“Oraison” is not only a lovely piece of music, but has historical interest too – it may be the first piece of purely electronic music written expressly for live performance. Also of note is that Messiaen re-arranged “Oraison” for cello and piano and used it for the fifth movement of “Quartet for the End of Time”, which he composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941; the “Quartet” is one of the great classics of 20th-century music.

“Oraison” (“prayer”) is from a suite of pieces for six Ondes Martenot called “Fete des Belles Eaux” (“Celebration of the Beautiful Waters”), composed for the Paris International Exposition in 1937. The Ondes Martenot was among the first electronic instruments, and is still among the most expressive. The Continuum’s own expressive qualities seemed at least the equal of the Ondes Martenot’s, while allowing for polyphony and the possibility of performance of the work by a single player. I transcribed “Oraison” for my Buchla 200e/Continuum system, programmed the modern system in homage to the sound of the Ondes Martenot, and now offer this performance to you.