Iannis Xanakis: Metastasis
Order to Complexity to Disorder
Kundera on Xenakis. Xenakis severed relations between himself and music. Music as defined by a certain tradition, a heritage. He was not "new" he was "other." Unlike.
Xenakis "does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of it's legacy."
In this turn he locates a new origin for sound, not in the notes of man, but in nature. The sound the world makes, alive with rain, with dry heat and machinery.
Xenakis looks to the world of sound, sound with origins not confined to the heart of one man, or his intellect. In this turn he breaks with the authoritative notion that man is the heart of society, a person elevated above other life forms. In this turn from the lie of sentient beings, he takes his place within nature, where man and woman are small parts that do not define the whole.
Bakhtin also takes a turn from the I of writing to the world of speech. In his turn he locates the world of sound within an utterance— man at once a part of the grand dialogue, no more or less than a speaker.
About Xenakis' legacy: "Will he be remembered by music lovers?"
That is a question of music: what harmonies and scales are being agreed up, what instruments played, what opportunities for vocalizations, what beings expressed and realities explored.
They both fondle the dichotomies that have divided Nations, thoughts and music: man/nature; man/woman; oral/written; civilized/savage.
About Xenakis: "What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone has dared to tell European music that it can be abandoned. Forgotten."
So many parts of life are accepted as inevitable, events that cannot be avoided or evaded, certainties. This may be why some twist themselves around the barbed wire of free will and original sin. They are so certain,—as sure to follow as night follows day— of the story of their life, an appropriate score, an authority to empower their position.
Kundera mentions the circumstance of Xenakis' life: being sentenced to death, civil war, disfigurement. In his mind these circumstances "Led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul's subjectivity."
Many artists and many children of war (especially survivors of wars of extermination) break open in the attempt to understand. Arahon Appelfeld writes, "The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in a prolonged silence." (Beyond Despair)
The first time I heard Xanakis I thought of Beckett. I also think of Broch, beginning The Death of Virgil while interred by the Gestapo, finishing it in poverty and exile. None of these artists accept the inevitable. They have lost the certainty of day following night. And they respond with compositions: Metastasis. Pas Moi. The Death of Virgil.
Showing posts with label Appelfeld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Appelfeld. Show all posts
16 August 2012
30 July 2012
Language
"Parents had not bothered to teach their children this language [Yiddish]—their mother tongue—nor anything about the beliefs of their forefathers. Neither did they tell them about what had happened to them in the Ghetto and in the camps. In fact, they had hidden their lives from their children and had molded (albeit unintentionally) a life devoid of the thread of family history and without a spark of belief."
(Aharon Appelfeld, Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem)
"The rape culture of the European colonization of the New World—is the rape culture that stops the family from achieving decolonial intimacy, from achieving decolonial love."
(Junot Diaz, (interview) The Search for Decolonial Love, Part II)
for part one:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/junot_diaz_paula_moya_drown_race.php
I descend from a rape culture—close among shik'éí and saturating this land through the generations. My mother's mother's mother was raped. My eldest aunt was born from that rape. When anything needed an explanation, we would say "you know she was born from," and nothing more. She didn't know who her father was, there were many among us who did not know. That was important, but it did not explain it all. The rape silenced everything. We were formed and ordered by her experience. Shimá sáni's language hid our shame and hate. We learned to speak from her.
Life is spoken within the silence. People and places are revealed by their absence. Language shapes by what can be said and to whom. Silence does not interrupt speeches, the moans, the cries of happiness and despair—silence shapes. I see it on our bodies and in the ripped fabric we clothe ourselves in, calling it family, shik'éí.
In music, the articulation notation legato tells the player that the notes are to be played smoothly. Legato notes are to be connected. The connection is indicated by a curved line, drawn under the notes that are intended to be played without an intervening silence. This notation does not necessarily indicate a slur, though a slur is sometimes the means of expression available on the instrument.
Legato is what is known as an articulation. How is this music to be played? Articulation gives direction.
"This language—their mother tongue—anything about the beliefs—and what happened." These are the curved lines that hold our notes together.
When playing legato on strings virtuosos are known for their ability to play extremely complex runs, permeated with notes, at extreme tempos; on keys one note is held while the other is depressed, allowing the fade to resonate, introducing the new note that takes over without proclaiming a discontinuity from the rest; voices try to sustain vowels and eliminate interruptions by consonants. They call this the line —it should be maintained.
(Aharon Appelfeld, Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem)
"The rape culture of the European colonization of the New World—is the rape culture that stops the family from achieving decolonial intimacy, from achieving decolonial love."
(Junot Diaz, (interview) The Search for Decolonial Love, Part II)
for part one:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/junot_diaz_paula_moya_drown_race.php
I descend from a rape culture—close among shik'éí and saturating this land through the generations. My mother's mother's mother was raped. My eldest aunt was born from that rape. When anything needed an explanation, we would say "you know she was born from," and nothing more. She didn't know who her father was, there were many among us who did not know. That was important, but it did not explain it all. The rape silenced everything. We were formed and ordered by her experience. Shimá sáni's language hid our shame and hate. We learned to speak from her.
Life is spoken within the silence. People and places are revealed by their absence. Language shapes by what can be said and to whom. Silence does not interrupt speeches, the moans, the cries of happiness and despair—silence shapes. I see it on our bodies and in the ripped fabric we clothe ourselves in, calling it family, shik'éí.
In music, the articulation notation legato tells the player that the notes are to be played smoothly. Legato notes are to be connected. The connection is indicated by a curved line, drawn under the notes that are intended to be played without an intervening silence. This notation does not necessarily indicate a slur, though a slur is sometimes the means of expression available on the instrument.
Legato is what is known as an articulation. How is this music to be played? Articulation gives direction.
"This language—their mother tongue—anything about the beliefs—and what happened." These are the curved lines that hold our notes together.
When playing legato on strings virtuosos are known for their ability to play extremely complex runs, permeated with notes, at extreme tempos; on keys one note is held while the other is depressed, allowing the fade to resonate, introducing the new note that takes over without proclaiming a discontinuity from the rest; voices try to sustain vowels and eliminate interruptions by consonants. They call this the line —it should be maintained.
03 July 2012
Translation
"I use words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others or let me be silent."
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
". . .with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him."
Aharaon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair
Sometimes I sit and read my dictionary. It's a huge Webster's New World dictionary I was given in grammar school. For a long time I hated dictionaries. You had to spell to use them. I was never a good speller. And while I currently spell better, homonyms are my Nemesis.
But I read. And I read the dictionary to find words.
I didn't start this till I took an Anthropology class while an undergraduate at Cal. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe was our teaching assistant. We didn't have sections but she read and commented on our papers. She was eloquent, uncorrupted and uncompromising. I wanted to impress her. She assigned Malcom X's Autobiography. I read how he taught himself to read while in prison by reading the dictionary. He was like the men in my family—but they never made the changes necessary to claim El Hajj. They staid where they stayed.
I always arrived to class early and sat in the front. I was terrified of flunking out. I still lived at home and attended meetings every night in the city. On the weekends I locked myself in my room to read and memorize. During the week I rode BART to campus and squeezed myself into seats and paradigms. I was always mispronouncing. People had no shame in correcting me. I felt stupid—and often still do, when people correct my English, at the store buying groceries.
For our final we were required to write about home, using several of the texts. I only remember Malcom, Jayne's lecture on the Rastafari and Anthony Garcia's lecture on Urban Indians. (This was the only class I took at Cal, outside the Native American Studies department that even mentioned Indians—except for a cultural Anthropology screening of Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? I had to leave midway through. I couldn't stand it.)
I'm not sure how I answered the question of home, when my world was bound by the daily journey from house, to work, to class and to meeting, but I know I couldn't speak. I started to go by the tag line: silent. Shaping words was beyond me. I was simply trying to get from one world to another intact. Getting to a meeting at the end of the day was a successful day, getting up in the morning a successful night. The process of translation requires a similar desire: to move from one place to another with something remaining—though it remains changed, it remains nonetheless.
In my experience home is not a place to speak from. Voice originates in the process of transformation and the desire to carry that over—from San Francisco to Cal, from Navajo to English, from here to there and from me to you.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
". . .with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him."
Aharaon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair
Sometimes I sit and read my dictionary. It's a huge Webster's New World dictionary I was given in grammar school. For a long time I hated dictionaries. You had to spell to use them. I was never a good speller. And while I currently spell better, homonyms are my Nemesis.
But I read. And I read the dictionary to find words.
I didn't start this till I took an Anthropology class while an undergraduate at Cal. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe was our teaching assistant. We didn't have sections but she read and commented on our papers. She was eloquent, uncorrupted and uncompromising. I wanted to impress her. She assigned Malcom X's Autobiography. I read how he taught himself to read while in prison by reading the dictionary. He was like the men in my family—but they never made the changes necessary to claim El Hajj. They staid where they stayed.
I always arrived to class early and sat in the front. I was terrified of flunking out. I still lived at home and attended meetings every night in the city. On the weekends I locked myself in my room to read and memorize. During the week I rode BART to campus and squeezed myself into seats and paradigms. I was always mispronouncing. People had no shame in correcting me. I felt stupid—and often still do, when people correct my English, at the store buying groceries.
For our final we were required to write about home, using several of the texts. I only remember Malcom, Jayne's lecture on the Rastafari and Anthony Garcia's lecture on Urban Indians. (This was the only class I took at Cal, outside the Native American Studies department that even mentioned Indians—except for a cultural Anthropology screening of Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? I had to leave midway through. I couldn't stand it.)
I'm not sure how I answered the question of home, when my world was bound by the daily journey from house, to work, to class and to meeting, but I know I couldn't speak. I started to go by the tag line: silent. Shaping words was beyond me. I was simply trying to get from one world to another intact. Getting to a meeting at the end of the day was a successful day, getting up in the morning a successful night. The process of translation requires a similar desire: to move from one place to another with something remaining—though it remains changed, it remains nonetheless.
In my experience home is not a place to speak from. Voice originates in the process of transformation and the desire to carry that over—from San Francisco to Cal, from Navajo to English, from here to there and from me to you.
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