Xenakis's 'Polytope de Mycenae' Author(s): Brigitte Schiffer Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 127 (Dec., 1978), pp.

44-45 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/945961 . Accessed: 27/10/2011 04:14
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TEMPO

I mentioned that only four pieces explored unfamiliar ensemble combinations. These were Edward McGuire's jocular and folksy Soundsaround . . . for viola and percussion (ingeniously running to rubber balls in a drum, a wet sauceMusiclor the pan, glass, bamboos and ballons); Andrew Worton-Steward's Chamber combination of flute, piano, harpsichord, celeste and vibraphone keyboardy Reich, and Ligeti but failed to achieve a (which locally recalled Herzegewdchse, the 1968 As whenupona trancedsummer night ill-advisedly drawn persuasive unity); from Michael Finnissy's bottom drawer; and David Graham Ellis's Love Song. Granted that some of LoveSong's effect was lost by the last-minute substitution of an amplified violin for the ondes martenot, this piece was rather a disappointment because its hommageto Messiaen succumbed too much to the temptations of quotation and pastiche. Perhaps this is the place to mention Haydn Reeder's which proclaims in its title, as in its expanded consumption of time, Chrometalea, an intention to exploit the colour of sound: a pity therefore that it contented itself with the now conventional medium of flute(s), clarinet(s), violin and cello, on mostly playing clusters enclosing quarter-tones smorzato bass clarinet. At the other extreme, the age-old solo piano was sufficient stimulus to the vital imagination of Andrew Vores. Naturally at 2 Vores had not disguised much of his debt to inherited piano techniques, but his jubilant exploitation of the whole keyboard (in layered arguments), his rhythmic invention, and his readiness to conjure surprises made his Piano Worka refreshing contrast to the inhibited safety of Allan Moore's The UpwardCycle(piano), Roger Steptoe's Suite for Cello, Janet Graham's Crux (flute and piano) and Janice Hamer's Two Morning Asanas (piano); though in naming these I am singling out works which each achieved something individual, and indeed sounded more mature than Vores. The solo clarinet piece Bob's Mandalaby David Graham Ellis had its moments as a virtuoso display, but I was unable to feel its 'centering' which might have justified its extreme length. Finally mention should be made of Geoffrey King's Quintet for flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin and cello, which was spacious but purposeful in a Stravinsky/Goehr/Maxwell Davies idiom. The Young Composers' Platform is now moving onto a one-yearly basis, and the next concerts will take place at York in Autumn 1979. One's hope must be that rather than reflecting the self-doubting spirit of our times, one or two composers will have achieved something audacious; in this way they might, as artists should, lead rather than follow.

Xenakis's 'Polytope de Mycenae'

BrigitteSchiffer
WHEN Iannis Xenakis returned to Greece for the first time after an exile of 27

years, in 1974, he made a pilgrimage to the ruins of Mycenae, the cradle of our civilization, which he remembered from an early visit in 193 as a schoolboy. It was then and there, during that second visit, that the idea of an artictic revival, 'a sort of Mycenae Polytope', took root. Unlike the previous Polytopes (those of Brussels and Montreal, Osaka, Persepolis and the Diatope of the Plateau Beaubourg, all of them the outcome of

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that peculiar unity of thought so characteristic of Xenakis), the latest was born out of a passionate commitment to the land and the people of Greece. Moreover, as in Persepolis, it was not a man-made architectural project that was to be 'sonorized', but a historic site and its actual scenic environs. All that is specifically Greek in Xenakis's previous works-the incidental at music to Sophocles's Oedipus Colonus,Euripides's Helenand Aeschylus's Oresteia, for one percussionist (written in honour of Sappho) and Persephassa, Psappha another percussion piece for 6 players, dedicated to the Chtonian deity-all these works were integrated into the new Polytope. They were linked together by electronic 'interpolations' specially composed with the help of a new composition system (using minicomputer and plotter) developed by Xenakis at the Centre de Mathematiques et Automatiques Musicales in Paris; and also by recitations from Homer and from recently-discovered Mycenean funeral inscriptions; by processions of children bearing torches, goats bearing lights and bells, and young people from the neighbourhood bearing the funeral masks of the Achaean kings; by fires lit on the hilltops of Mt. Elias to commemorate the victorious return of the soldiers from Troy; by flashes and beams of light from anti-aircraft searchlights; and by fireworks, which illuminated the whole region. Opinions may differ about the pronunciation of the archaic texts 'according to the phonetics of their times', to the 'prosodic melody of the Attic language of the fifth century' and to the 'harmony based on Aristoxenos's and Euclid's music theory'. But there can be no doubt whatsoever that the recitations of Spyros Sakkas and Olga Tournaki struck a note of authentic tragedy, that the lamentations and invocations from Helen, sung organum-fashion by the women of Argos, and the hymns to the cities of Athens and of Attica from Oedipusat Colonus,sung by students from the Provence and accompanied by 14 instrumentalists of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Lorraine, had an unmistakable archaic touch. Orestia, the trilogy of the curse-ridden dynasty of the Achaean kings, filled the tombs of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus with sinister fanfares and desolate chants entirely suited to the site and its history. The percussion sounds of echoed hauntingly from the mountains and from the Psapphaand of Persephassa walls of the Acropolis. The sounds of the seven electronic 'InterCyclopean polations' gave to the event a quality of unreality and wildness, while the processions, fires and illuminations added a strong visual flavour in which the continuity of a 3,600-year-old civilization was brought home with vigour and conviction. The phenomenal percussionist Sylvio Gualda and his ensemble of six, the musicians from the Lorraine under the direction of Michel Tabachnik, the student choirs from the Provence with their leaders, Christine Prost and Roland Haydarebian, and the women and children of Argolis conducted by Stefan Vassiliades sang and played side by side, turning this historical, musical and environmental event into a triumph of cooperation and good will. What had started as a sudden vision was soon transformed, by John Papaioannou, into a commission endorsed by Panagiotis Lambrias and was financed, to the scale of a ?ioo,ooo-budget, by his National Greek Tourist Organisation. It has since turned into a 'new chain of international artistic feats at Mycenae' where, in Xenakis's own words, 'history and art will henceforth be amalgamated'.