A Music Beyond Time Ivan Hewett
At one level—the level of the nerves and viscera—Xenakis’s music is easy to appreciate. It sweeps over us like a force of nature, its abrasive cries and percussive thundering ringing in our ears and vibrating in our solar plexus. Not for nothing did Milan Kundera call Xenakis “the prophet of insensitivity.” But when the initial shock wears off, one realizes that the music works at other levels too. A kind of discourse emerges, of sonic masses in motion. One hears rarefactions, densities, things converging to a point or outwards to dense clouds, lines splitting into ever smaller lines like the branches of a tree, sliding sounds suggestive of vast curved surfaces like those of a modernist building. Discerning this strange logic only increases the mystery. Where on earth did this music come from? What drove this composer to work on our sensibilities in such a fiercely abstract way? Why the total absence of familiar aural and musical signposts, indeed any sign of the human—apart from here and there an echo of some atavistic folk-music or implacable ancient ritual? The remoteness of Xenakis is partly the remoteness of the artistic movement of which he was a part: the second wave of musical modernism that emerged after the Second World War. The music of the Angry Young Men who led it—Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen—seems rebarbative, abstract, and “inhuman” in ways analogous to Xenakis’s. They claimed a historical necessity for their music, but at a distance of more than half a century, this has proved to be dubious, to say the least. One needs historical imagination and a sympathetic ear to discern the still burning intensity in their music, now that the strident polemics that animated it have passed into history.
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