… not performances of his music, but an exhibit of his diagrams, drawings, scores and other visual work related to his compositions. It sounds boring, but it was not.
I didn’t care that I couldn’t follow what he was trying to get at in creating these abstract structures—even the experts disagree about that. And I didn’t care that I could only occasionally hear the connection between the diagrams and the music (which MOCA provided on a convenient iPod).
The work was extraordinarily beautiful, like the notebook pages from 1959 (illustrated below) and the diagram he drew in 1964 to describe his Achorripsis for 21 instruments (illustrated above).
It was also interesting how different the tone of this exhibit devoted to a musician was compared to a typical exhibition of a visual artist.
I guess musicians have retained their status as shamans.
The exhibit and catalog are very free about presenting Xenakis as a prophet, a post-WWII culture European star whose goal was to disconcert, rebuke and reform audiences.
And above all he was a philosopher who, like John Cage, attempted to create music that reflected the structure of nature.
It’s instructive how the discourse of music still permits these kinds of discussions, which would seem extraordinarily strange in a discussion of a visual artist.
What if he was a musician like any other, with a mixed body of accomplishments—some successes, some failures, many experiments?
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