Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

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States, Events and Transformations

Explorations of the sound continuum

The world of natural sound is a multivariable continuum of noises,

timbres and tones, states and events, transitions and transformations,

change and regularity.

In the 1950's and early 60's, the composers Iannis Xenakis and György

Ligeti began to explore the vast and many-faceted continuum of sound by

composing sonorous states, events and transformations in musical spaces

of timbre, intensity and movement. They changed the direction and scope

of contemporary art music in a crucial way by introducing fundamental

innovations in the technique of composition which permit music to

approach the continuum of natural sound, thus bridging a gap between

listening to music and listening to the world.

Their pioneer works are Metastasis (1953-54) and Pithoprakta (1955-56)

by Xenakis, Apparitions (1958-59) and Atmospheres (1961) by Ligeti. In these

works, they dissociated themselves from the European art music tradition

by avoiding melody and harmony, and by giving low priority to well-

defined pitch or altogether avoiding tones of clearly discernible pitch.

The two composers conceived their musical innovations independently of

each others, but it seems significant that their individual fates were

marked by particular common features. Both were born in Eastern Europe

in Romanian territory, but in families speaking a different language. Ligeti

was born in 1923 of Hungarian parents of Jewish origin in central Transsyl-

vania, Xenakis in 1922 of Greek parents in Braila near the mouth of the

Danube.

During World War II, both composers escaped death several times.

Ligeti could easily have been killed in 1944, when he was conscripted to

unload munition trains at a railroad junction which was regularly attacked

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from the air. Moreover, it was most likely that he, like his father and

brother and most Hungarian jews, would have been exterminated by the

German occupying forces. Xenakis was extremely close to death in 1945

when, while fighting in the Greek resistance, his face was hit by an ex-

ploding shell, tearing out his left eye.

After the war, both were forced to flee to live in exile. Xenakis chose to

desert from the Greek army in 1947, when he was pressed to sign a docu-

ment abjuring his political conviction. Condemned to death, he escaped

illegally through Italy to France. Ligeti chose to flee from Hungary when

Soviet troops invaded the country in 1956 and found refuge in Austria and

Germany. Catastrophes, threatening death, violence, noise and lack of

security are formative experiences underlying the music of Ligeti and

Xenakis. They have gained first-hand knowledge of the fragile border

between death and existence, an experience of the zero point where every-

thing or nothing is possible. This may well be the motivating force behind

their persistent investigations of unexplored realms of sound and

sonorous experience.

Metastasis - A soundspace in continuous transformation

The premiere of Metastasis, Iannis Xenakis' first orchestral work, was a

challenge to the audience. Metastasis was premiered in the Donaue-

schingen Festival by the SWF Radio Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden,

conducted by Hans Rosbaud, on 16th October, 1955. The event was tumul-

tuous, and Xenakis recalls the audience being divided into two opposing

parties; "As to the scandal, half of the audience, the young people, were for

me, their elders against."

It is the nature of this work to provoke the listener to revise his listening

habits, open his ears to noisy and unexpected events and retrace the

pathways of his musical perception, adjusting his auditive expectations in

the direction of a musical continuum.

Metastasis was composed in 1953-54. The instrumentation of the work is

piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, bass clarinet, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 tenor trom-

bones, timpani, percussion and strings (12, 12, 8, 8, 6).

The 1955 Donaueschingen live performance of Metastasis is available on

CD, but for clarity of sound and detail, a technically better studio recor-

ding is preferred. Here I employ the LP recording by the French ORTF

Orchestra conducted by Maurice le Roux as reference.

The total duration of this recording of Metastasis is 8'55. The music takes

shape in three sections: