A rare quartet of Xenakis quartets
So extreme are the four string quartets of experimental Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) that can't enter their tactile world until experiencing them live.
So extreme are the four string quartets of experimental Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) that can't enter their tactile world until experiencing them live.
Having played individual works in past concerts, the JACK Quartet packed Bowerbird's series at the University of Pennsylvania's Rotunda Sunday with a program of all four in a single program. Might one's ears fall off by the end?
The concert was neither long nor bewildering. Of course, one knew to expect music that would make Elliott Carter seem tame, if only because Xenakis loved high-density use of extended techniques, mostly glissandi, that allowed his music to shoot off in all directions at warp speed, as in his earliest string quartet, ST-4/1,080262, composed between 1956 and 1962. Though written according to a computer-driven algorithm (don't ask for details), the effect isn't that of strictly ordered music, but of a fire in a fireworks factory, bursts separated by moments of extreme stasis, when a single pizzicato note is repeated 40 times.
The 1983 second quartet, Tetras, also has anything-might-happen heterogeneity, but with a more controlled sense of musical outcome. The JACK Quartet didn't simply get the notes but brought profound cognitive powers to Tetras, playing it like a series of weather fronts piling in on one another, with such visceral effect that there was no standing outside the music to process any larger perspective. It was wild - wilder than the group's more impressionistic Wigmore Hall Live recording.
Xenakis' last two works also feel like companion pieces, though instead of packing as many different sounds as possible into a single piece, they are about ruthless consolidation.
In the 1994 Ergma, Xenakis confines his feverish inspiration to the tiniest platform imaginable. What might that be? The more incongruous moments in Gyorgy Ligeti's influential 1992 Violin Concerto are eccentric, wheezy ocarina and slide-whistle effects, and it's these harmonies that Xenakis explores with concentration you didn't think possible in Ergma.
The 1990 Tetora has an only somewhat greater range of expression, but is in much the same intentionally artless spirit - one imagines small, untrained children attempting to play music - with harmonies that feel almost accidental but have far too much long-term cause-and-effect strategy to be random. Of the four, only Tetras feels like a candidate for greatness. But would you know that without hearing the other three?
