The Voice of the UPIC: Technology as Utterance
Peter Nelson · transcript Verlag eBooks · 2024
Iannis Xenakis, in his predilection for the ancient rather than the modern, has always proved a puzzle for theorisation focused on notions of the avant-garde.His own early critique of serialism (Xenakis 1955(Xenakis , 1956) ) already marked him as being on a different path to the generation of European and American composers who shaped the discourses of post-war music.Furthermore, Xenakis's aesthetic outlook was deeply informed by non-Western cultures, particularly following his trip to Indonesia in 1972 (cf.Andreyev 2022), as well as by ancient Greek thought (cf.Xenakis 2001).This led him to repurpose the practices of music away from Eurocentric concerns with works of art created in the aesthetics of modernity, and from the technocratic development of more or less esoteric musical structures, opening up the possibilities of sound and music in ways that offer a positive counter to the standard tropes of modernism through their recognition of a specific and material correspondence between the real forces of existence and the creative insights of the imagination.This correspondence is of course fundamental to the ancient philosophical traditions of Greek thought, and in an interview given at the Huddersfield Festival in 1987, Xenakis stated quite clearly: "I brought myself up into the ancient Greek tradition, that's for sure", (Xenakis 1987) and in a published interview with Bálint András Varga he says, "I felt I was born too late -I had missed two millennia" (Varga 1996: 15).What are we to make, then, of Xenakis's consistent concern for new technological means, particularly his use of the digital computer?Starting with his collaboration with engineers at IBM France in 1962, through the establishment of the CEMAMu (Centre d'Études de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales) 1 in Paris in 1966, and his work at Indiana University in Illinois, all the way to his later development of the stochastic granular synthesis programme GENDY (cf.Serra 1993), the digital computer was a constant in Xenakis's creative endeavour.1 CEMAMu was founded in 1965 at CNET (Centre national d'études des télécommunications), Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, with grants from the French Ministry of Culture.