Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music

The Reynolds Desert House

Roger Reynolds,Karen Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000468137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teoria e gusto musicale

Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music describes the collaborative interaction of internationally acclaimed composer Roger Reynolds, musician Karen Reynolds, and musically inspired composer, engineer, and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) to create a house design, The Reynolds Desert House. The process combined aesthetics and intuition with mathematical systems, showcasing how art and science are balanced—by way of music and architecture—to address the essential technical aspects of music along with the role of emotion and energy. The book analyzes three representative chamber works and presents a trove of primary sources: letters, diaries, notes, photographs, sketches, and person-to-person conversations. What emerges are patterns of direct parallels between how Xenakis characterized the process of musical creation and his design of The Reynolds Desert House. Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music is a testament to the singularly innovative and creative mind of Iannis Xenakis.

Supplementary materials—including color reproductions of black and white images in the book—can be found at: www.rogerreynolds.com/xenakisreynoldsroutledge.html

1 CHRONICLE OF A FRIENDSHIP

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152231-1

Part One. Interactions from 1964 to 1984

• 1. Early Encounter in Berlin [1964]

We were living in Paris, where Karen had a Fulbright Grant to study flute and French. Our resources were extremely limited. A rare extravagance agreed upon was attendance at Pierre Boulez’s pathbreaking Domaine Musical concerts. Among other noteworthy experiences there, we heard Takahashi Yūji premiere Xenakis’s Eonta (with Pierre Boulez conducting an ensemble employing doubled brass, as Boulez did not believe single players could handle the demands of the individual instrumental parts). Later that same year, we drove through East Germany to Berlin hoping for a meeting with the eminent American composer, Elliott Carter. The Carters welcoming warmth was but the first in a series of small but significant gestures that Elliott and Helen extended to us in subsequent decades, in New York (a remarkable Giacinto Scelsi concert at the Italian Cultural Center presented by Klangforum Wein, dinners at Greenwich Street Tavern and the Century Club), in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, in Warsaw, as well as at the Carters’s 12th Street apartment, where we were welcomed and introduced to others whom Elliott and Helen felt might be kindred spirits.

A Virtual Premiere

In France, in the early 1960s, it was believed to be illegal for a foreigner to own a car for more than a year. Rumor or reality? As we were leaving the American Students and Artists Center on blvd. Raspail one afternoon, a youngish man approached us and asked whether we might be interested in buying a car. I responded that the thought was intriguing but that I had no resources to cover such a move. He asked how much I had with me at that moment. Pockets checked, my response was “Twenty-eight dollars.” “Sold!” was his reply. His acceptance was followed by an explanation that he had only one day left to replace his own name on the registration document with that of another.

During these days, Karen was busy with studies at the Sorbonne and also lessons under the tutelage of flutist Michel Debost. I worked continuously at a table in our unheated apartment on rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, making slow but detectable progress on the large-scaled work, Fantasy for Pianist. The lack of an adequate revenue stream confined us more or less to free events and the occasional film re-run that could be seen for a few francs. Years later, over dinner at our home in Del Mar, California,¹ Philip Glass was recounting his experiences in Paris during the same years. We realized that we had all discovered the same source of maximum food value for minimum outlay: couscous (the vegetable version) with abundant harissa sauce, of searing intensity. The combination kept one’s stomach occupied. This detail constituted a rare point of collegial consonance between Philip and me.

Possession of a car – it was a battered, red-white-and-blue Peugeot (We christened it “Jasper” after the painter, Jasper Johns, and his Flag images.) – opened our lives to a range of hitherto unthinkable potential. The one that was both the most impractical and thus also the most intriguing was the idea of driving through East Germany to West Berlin, where Carter was living with German government support. It could be revealing – perhaps more – to get a perspective from him on the work I was doing. We decided to risk a drive to West Berlin in the hope that, once there, it would be possible to arrange a meeting. We arrived, and it was a relief that, having answered the phone, Helen, who was notoriously diligent in protecting her husband’s time, agreed to an appointment. That meeting changed our outlook and had lasting repercussions.

FIGURE 1.1 Takahashi Yūji with his son. Courtesy Reynolds Archive.

Elliott suggested that Karen and I should attend an afternoon presentation by a traditional Iranian musician, and we did, discovering as a result that Xenakis was also in Berlin, supported by the Ford Foundation in cooperation with the West Berlin Senate. Each invited artist was encouraged to bring a “student,” and Xenakis identified the young pianist-composer Takahashi Yūji for this position. Gilbert Amy, a French composer whom I already knew, was also in attendance, and when the Iranian session concluded, there was a seemingly spontaneous proposal that we should all go out for dinner. The Carters had by then departed. There was general enthusiasm for the idea, though we did sense that Xenakis – who was then an unknown to us – was resistant. Only later did the reason for this emerge. When the check arrived for the evening’s eating and drinking, prevailing custom in Europe then obliged him to pay, as the senior figure in attendance.

During our dinner, something most improbable happened. Amy, who was a conductor, as well as a Boulez disciple, began, at the table, to explain with considerable animation that he had obtained the score of a work of mine that had not, in fact, actually been performed yet. And he had recently dreamed a performance of this music theater work, The Emperor of Ice Cream. Referring in imagination to his copy of the Peters Edition score, Amy proceeded to describe in specific and detailed ways various passages in the work – both what they sounded like and how they looked onstage. We were dumbfounded. The dream, generously if inexplicably recounted in a convivial atmosphere to a substantial group of accomplished older colleagues instantaneously conferred on me a curious sort of status. What were the chances that a casual acquaintance’s astonishment over his own dream and his unguarded generosity of its public telling would so uplift a younger colleague?

• 2. Encounters in Japan (the 1960s)

By 1966, we were living in Tokyo. We had decided to remain abroad after graduating from the University of Michigan in order to explore and develop our own potentials. We found the stimulation and shifting circumstances of life abroad fascinating and rewarding. We spent the early 1960s in Europe. Roger had a Fulbright Grant to work in the West German Electronic Music Studio in 1962, then a Guggenheim Fellowship. Karen was awarded a Fulbright Grant for flute study in Paris a year later. Subsequently, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored us for a year and a half in Italy. We then lived in Japan for three years under the aegis of the Institute of Current World Affairs, a New York foundation. During the time in Tokyo, we met Xenakis with the Takemitsus. Tōru admired Xenakis deeply, but, at that time, his English was not as fluent and inventive as it later became. He played us all a recording of a recent orchestral work, one that was harmonically sumptuous, still displaying his early fascination with the French Impressionists. Xenakis could not resist mocking the beauty of the sound, a musical circumstance that he certainly avoided, either because of his nature or the restrictions of his mathematically elicited musical language.

Near the end of Takemitsu’s life, Xenakis was invited to compose a short homage on the occasion of Tōru’s sixtieth birthday. Tōru played it for Roger, and the piece immediately brought to his mind the ironic cast of that day, decades earlier, just described. In the extreme upper register, strings and woodwinds gave a shrieking, glissandoing – an unmistakably ironic, strident, almost savage – version of the classic “Happy Birthday.”

FIGURE 1.2 The first page from the score of The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961–1962), © C.F. Peters Corporation, NY. Time flows left to right, and position in the two-dimensional field (bottom to top) specifies position on the stage, right to left. Image by permission C.F. Peters Corporation.

Our lives, from the early 1960s on, presented us with many opportunities for new engagements, but they also continued an interwoven tapestry of relationships not only with Elliott and Helen Carter but also with Iannis and Françoise Xenakis, with Tōru and Asaka Takemitsu. These geographically distributed relationships enriched life for us and remain a web of touchstones in memory. The extension of such collegiality and generosity cannot always be anticipated. And also, over the years, Roger had several conversations with Xenakis about the significant differences between his own primarily self-directed patterns of activity and, for example, those far more outward-directed roles that his rival for French government funding, Pierre Boulez, set for himself. Boulez received more, at least in part, because he gave more.

• 3. [Spring, 1966] Letter IX → RR

For reasons unknown now, Xenakis found himself, in 1966, just south of Detroit, in Michigan. The message cited here was written from a motel in Ypsilanti. This small suburb was exploring the commissioning of a work from Xenakis, and eventually actual performances of his Oresteïa (the first version) were presented in this highly unlikely venue. Xenakis had recently returned from an international symposium organized by UNESCO in Manila, “Musics of Asia,” and had stopped over in Japan on his way back – through the States – to France. There he met the same “cast of characters” that we had encountered in January of the same year, when we first made a month-long visit to Japan in January of 1966. Xenakis wrote:

You have many friendly salutations from Takemitsu, Ichiya[nagi], Akiyama, etc. Your piece was very well performed in front of a 500 people audience. But I’ll let you know more about the Festival when I’ll see you …

• 4. Xenakis is appointed to a position at Indiana University.

Improbably, the American Mid-West continued to play a role in Xenakis’s life when, in 1966, he was offered an appointment at Indiana University, with an understanding that he would found the Center of Mathematical and Automated Music (CMAM) in 1967. Takahashi Yūji was his assistant in realizing this project. Though this period was seemingly unproductive, in 1971, Xenakis’s foundational book, Formalized Music, was published in an expanded English language edition by Indiana University Press. He departed Bloomington a year later, returning to France and his family there.

• 5. [20.5.66] Letter RR → IX

Roger thanks Xenakis for his Ypsilanti letter and passes on contact information for University of Michigan Composer-in-Residence, Ross Lee Finney, in hopes of arranging a lecture invitation there. Roger also provides information about conductors who might be interested in performing Eonta in the States. At the end, Roger offers an invitation for a stay in the US that was not to be realized until 1990, after twenty-five years had passed:

[Houghton, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan] is quiet but beautiful country near Lake Superior. If you have any time to visit, you are welcome to stay with us. … We hope it will be possible to see you somewhere before you return to France.

• 6. [1.7.69] Arriving at UC San Diego

After spending four years in Europe (1961–1965), we spent an additional three in Tokyo under the aegis of the above-mentioned Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA). Responding to an increasing urgent pull to return to the US and participate in the social turbulence that arose in the 1960s, Roger was considering the offer of a tenured Associate Professorship at the University of California’s only recently established San Diego campus. The Music Department contained, at that time, nine faculty; five were composers. This was an unprecedented circumstance. Then Departmental Chair, Wilbur Ogdon, knew of Roger’s considerable association with the Rockefeller Foundation and sought to build upon this by setting him the task of establishing an “Organized Research Unit” for Music at UC San Diego. Such entities (along with Departments of Instruction) are the primary organizational units in the UC system, but no Organized Research Unit (ORU) in the Arts had yet been established. Working through his Foundation contacts and a maze of Faculty Committees at UC San Diego (UCSD) and the Office of the President in Oakland, Roger secured Rockefeller funding and University approval to begin the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research in 1971.

Although we had returned to the US and were continuing a collaborative activism from our new base in San Diego, connections with Japan and Europe remained strong and continued to evolve. Se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Chronicle of a Friendship
• 2 Beginnings: Considering Elements in Xenakis’s Early Sketches
• 3 Foundations
• 4 Using Space
• 5 Illumination
• 6 Precedents
• 7 Some Closer Looks
• 8 Creation: A Personal Assessment
• Index