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BBC Proms - 17 July - 12 September 2009 - The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival

What's On / Programme Notes

Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001)
Nomos gamma (1968)

for 98 musicians distributed among the audience
first performance at the Proms
‘One does not go to Xenakis expecting to have one’s ears soothed,’ a music critic once remarked with wry understatement. Xenakis himself strongly denied any intention to shock, yet he was also ready to admit that his formative experiences as a member of the Greek wartime and post-war resistance had their effect on his music.
Those experiences were both aural – the sound of mass anti-Nazi demonstrations, with competing slogans being shouted in and out of rhythmic unison – and brutally physical: his resistance career ended just after the war with his near-death from a British tank shell, which shattered one side of his face and destroyed an eye. The enforced isolation of this catastrophe drove him away from politics towards his first loves – music and architecture. He achieved rapid and innovative distinction in both.
Xenakis’s music is built from textures. The mass sounds of resistance demonstrations, or of natural events such as hailstorms, find their parallels in his love for swirling orchestral eruptions in which each member of Nomos gamma’s 98-person orchestra has their own individual part to play. A fascination with space – doubtless a product of his architectural work – led him in Nomos gamma to ‘tear down the barrier between audience and orchestra’ by placing orchestral players around and among the listeners. This is a rough ride, to be sure – Xenakis loved danger in both life and art – but the shaping of the music through the work’s 15 or so minutes is compelling and endlessly surprising. Xenakis is the classic case of an artist who, in Jean Cocteau’s phrase, ‘knows just how too far to go’.
Nomos gamma opens with wailing and sliding melodies on oboes and clarinets (sounding like a deranged imaginary folk music) punctuated by loud interjections from a group of drummers – the only percussionists in this work. The strings join in with typical Xenakis gliding sound-masses, and finally the brass, dominated by strong middle range trumpets and very low trombones. The persistently low trombone writing in this piece is one of its most distinct features, and sounds curiously akin to the ritual long trumpets (dungchen) of Tibetan monks (which Xenakis only heard after completing this work). Xenakis’s own programme note comments that the music involves a complete range of playing techniques, from traditional to novel sounds. One familiar technique is conspicuously excluded, however: ‘ABSOLUTELY NO VIBRATO’ his preface warns, thus outlawing the lush playing style commonly employed by symphony orchestras since at least the 1920s. The range of new playing styles Xenakis uses includes microtones (intervals smaller than the semitone tuning in Western music), bowing string instruments with extreme pressure (causing a kind of irregular grating), extremely fast irregular staccatos on brass and wind, and the detuning of the drums so that when played en masse they give the effect of thunderclaps or torrents of wild water. In her biography of Xenakis, Nouritza Matossian aptly reminds readers that the composer was fond of kayaking in rough conditions off the Corsican coast. Nomos gamma is not a picturesque description of such grandiose natural phenomena; instead it simply thrusts the audience right into the middle of them, without apology or preparation. For all the patient calculation that went into Xenakis’s music, the final impression of Nomos gamma is of spontaneity – direct, uninhibited communication of an intensity that is remarkably exhilarating.

Progamme note © Julian Anderson
Julian Anderson was Professor of Composition at Harvard University (2004–7) and is currently Senior Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. His second BBC Proms commission, ‘Heaven is Shy of Earth’, was performed at the Proms in 2006.

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