How Would One Approach Studying A Piece Like This

He's a bit of the Alberto Burri of the piano.

He doesn't scandalize me any more or any less than Allevi and Einaudi.

I remember some time ago seeing a documentary with Pollini, in which he described his musical approach to Boulez (who is more or less of that genre).

The skill lies precisely in finding the approach for oneself. This is what Pollini says. As for Boulez, I don't know.

TheSimon wrote:

Huahuahuahaua this one but I'll write it and then sell it back !!! :lol:

Watch out, I'm sending the SIAE [Italian copyright agency] your way. :lol:

Tiring discussion!

Honestly, I don't think saying that a little girl could redo those notes can be an added value (to the discussion). While it may be true that she can do it, it is obvious that there is certainly no logic in her doing so, whereas in Xena's piece there is.

And one could say: what do I care about his reasoning, about his speculations? In fact, one is free to say so! However, this should also be applied to Beethoven (for example), to his quartets (for example), not just to those we don't like.

I believe, however, that the logic underlying a musical piece should always be underlying and not the characterizing element that makes the piece in question more or less appealing. One can be curious or not about these compositional procedures, but Boulez himself, in 'Thinking Music Today', clarifies his point of view on music, saying precisely that music is one thing, mathematics is another (obviously he says it better, but I don't know the book by heart). Then, of course, this is his opinion; it may be authoritative, but it is still an opinion—there are those who see beauty in Brownian motion (in music). At this point, however, what about algorithms...

"How Would One Approach the Study of a Piece Like This?"

Maybe someone has already written about it, while studying!

@micamahler

Having a logic does not mean that the same works. And in 6 pages I feel I have demonstrated that Xenakis's mathematical logic here does not work because we are in a stochastic field.

It would be like saying... A friend of mine, an electrician, designed an electrical system for my garage; I try to turn on the lights and they don't turn on, I try to plug a charger into a socket and it doesn't work, I flip a switch and the circuit breaker trips. There might have been logic involved, but the point is that it doesn't work at all... At this point my cousin arrives and, just for fun, starts connecting wires she finds lying around. It provides power to the system and still nothing works... It doesn't matter if the electrician used logic if, in one case or another, nothing works anyway!

And he was the stochastic one he wanted! If the resulting sound doesn't please you, that's another matter (besides, I agree, I don't like it either).

Perhaps in six pages of discussion I missed some messages, so excuse me if I repeat something already said by others. Formulas aside, has no one pointed out the explosive, feverish, frenetic, primordial character of Herma? As a friend noted - who knows a lot - when you are faced with Xenakis "violence snaps" (as Abatantuono would say). In this Xenakis, he truly has few rivals: some Beethoven, some Stravinsky... at the moment no other names come to mind.

micamahler wrote:

And he was the stochastic one he wanted! If the resulting sound doesn't please you, that's a different story (besides, I agree, I don't like it either).

You are responding with swords when there is money on the table. Read all six pages of discussion. I wrote one thing to you and you responded to something else.

Stochastic = Random. A random thing is random regardless of who writes it. If I tell you to give me 10 random numbers and we compare them with my 10 random numbers, who can determine which sequence is more beautiful? It doesn't even make sense to ask...

RedScharlach wrote:

...Formulas aside...

Formulas aside? The Herma is born on mathematical foundations. If this aspect is denied to it, everything collapses. There is nothing musical, or rather there is very little; it is practically just mathematics and... Stochastics. That the Herma is feverish, frantic, and explosive may be true, I agree, as could it not be?

TheSimon wrote:

Like formulas apart? The Herma is born on mathematical bases. If this aspect is denied to it, everything collapses. There is nothing musical, or rather there is very little, it is practically only mathematics and... Stochastics. That the Herma is feverish, frantic and explosive may be true, I agree, how could it not be?

Ehm... the problem is that while I am listening to a piece, perhaps a piece I don't know, it is very difficult for me to appreciate or even just intuit the mathematical bases on which it is built; instead, the expressive aspects (explosive frenzy, feverish violence...) are immediately intuitively evident to me, and it is much easier for me, if not logical, to build my judgment on such impressions.

TheSimon, you continue to push forward the usual misunderstanding.

It is not true that if you remove mathematics Herma falls. A composition lives with and without its own composer, and the ideas of its own composer.

No wait Clà, this is your thought, so please specify that it is your thought, otherwise whoever passes by will read it and take you for the professor and me for the idiot of the moment, after I spent two weeks studying the Herma and all the mathematical logic behind them. Starting something with wrong ideas at my place invalidates all the work. E.g. "Let's do a study on harmonic motion!". I study my theory, I make a model, and then nothing works. Ok, the model is cute, it will stay in the museum... But it doesn't work.

Here is an example...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbbCeP_YUyQ

Listening to him speak, he sounds like a nuclear engineer; it is interesting to note the conviction and the language used to explain his discovery, too bad that everything he says is absolute bullshit that will never work! Look, if I base a product solely on a theory, and this theory is wrong, or even non-functional in my case of application (because maybe it was designed for other purposes), the result is a failure.

Open content (youtube)

The avant-gardes are failures in terms of listening... they serve only to delight the brains and that's it. So much so that thanks to these post-war inventions, people persist in going to listen to narrative music. That is, pre-Webern.

Even Schoenberg and Berg made an impact... then...

Sorry, I know, it has nothing to do with the topic, moreover I don't even like HERMA ... I just wanted to let you hear for what reason I love Xenakis ...

Open content (youtube)

RedScharlach wrote:

Sorry, I know, it has nothing to do with the topic, moreover I don't even like HERMA ... I just wanted to let you hear for what reason I love Xenakis ...

Here you can appreciate some other gems, among others there are comments of a completely different nature ... who knows if the compositional method is the same?

www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/570-il-legame-fra-musica-e-matematica

RedScharlach wrote:

... I just wanted to let you feel for what reason I love Xenakis ...

...and not only, as far as I am concerned.

Anyway, here you can find the score

http://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/1864-xenakis-rebonds/

TheSimon wrote:

Random for Random, what would the difference be?

Furthermore, I find it paradoxical that HERMA's critique is reduced to this question. At the end of the fifties, Ligeti formulated his famous critique of post-Webernian serialism: "The more accurate the network of operations with preordained material, the higher the degree of leveling in the result. The total and insistent application of the serial principle leads, ultimately, to the negation of serialism itself. There is no authentic fundamental difference between the results of automatism and the products of chance: total determination results in equality to total indeterminacy" (György LIGETI, "Wandlungen der musikalischen Form", in Die Reihe, no. 7, 1960; it. trans. "Metamorfosi della forma musicale", in Ligeti, ed. E. Restagno, EdT, Torino 1985, pp. 223-242: 230). Substantially, faced with hyper-determined pieces such as Boulez's Structures and Stockhausen's Klavierstücke (taking a couple of piano examples), the same objection as TheSimon was raised: they sound like keys pressed at random by my 5-year-old cousin. Moreover, as early as 1955, Xenakis himself had observed that totally serialized polyphony has as its macroscopic effect an incalculable and unpredictable dispersion of sounds across the entire range of the acoustic spectrum (Iannis XENAKIS, "La crise de la musique serielle", in Gravesaner Blätter, no. 1, 1955, pp. 2-4). Xenakis – allow me to simplify – starts from the same premise as the five-year-old cousin and realizes a piece in which the impulses, distributed stochastically, sound to the listener neither more nor less random than the hyper-determined music of post-Webernian serialism.

The historical perspective I have summarized does not say whether HERMA is beautiful or ugly (furthermore, I do not believe that beauty or ugliness were the main concerns of Xenakis and his colleagues in those years) but provides some explanation for phenomena that otherwise risk being misunderstood.

I share what you have written because finally, for once, we arrive at "how the piece sounds" regardless of the logics determined during the writing phase, and this is a good thing for me... However, we must also return to discussing such logics in order to be able to distinguish different styles, because otherwise, if the stochasticity upon listening is the same as serialism (and Ligeti says it here too: "There is no authentic basic difference between the results of automatism and the products of chance: total determination results in the same as total indeterminacy"), then serialism could be the same as dodecaphony, perhaps in a less accentuated way. And instead, the differences exist, and in abundance! If in one case we witness the variation and stratification of 12 notes, in the other case we witness not only the stratification of notes but also of duration and dynamics!! Ligeti says that in serialism, by increasing stratifications, one witnesses an increase in entropy. But this is logical and soon demonstrated, given that in a closed and limited set (and even a relatively small one: 88 elements), by compacting layers (subsets containing some of the elements of the main set), the more layers are compacted, the more common elements will merge with each other, making it difficult for the ear—and not just the ear—to separate and recognize these layers. In essence, if I mix 20 subsets containing 30 elements of the main set, it will be very easy to find common elements among these subsets that will merge as if they were a single layer and could make it difficult to recognize the individual layers; in particular, there will be at least (30*20)-88 elements, which is 512 elements shared in a pile (unisoning). In a polyphonic context, differentiation could still be emphasized by the timbre of different instruments and by dynamics; in a pianistic context, it would also create a paradox: playing the exact same notes at the same instant with different dynamics. In essence, returning to the previous level, it is easy to mix layers, but it becomes increasingly difficult to return to individual layers as the entropy of the system increases. So what do we do? How do we solve this problem? Do we say that serialist music is stochastic music? But we cannot say that because it is not the same thing; otherwise, what would be the point of coining two different terms? The point is that they start from different premises despite the acoustic result appearing very similar if not identical; I latch onto this thought to demonstrate that the premises cannot be overlooked, as contrary to what someone has said during these 7 pages, judging only the music by its final result, since it is precisely the premise that makes the difference! We can perhaps say that the more the entropy of a serialist system increases, the more the entire composition will tend toward the stochastic genre, if anything. In the book you cited, Ligeti indeed compares these stratifications to a game with colored modeling clay, where, while at first the contrasts between different colors are distinguished quite easily, as the clay is mixed, the color tends to become compact and grayish. And the process is irreversible... Here is the quote from Ligeti: "Allow me to use an illuminating analogy: the game with modeling clay. The various lumps of different colors gradually disperse as the material is kneaded; the result is a conglomerate in which patches of color can still be distinguished, while the whole is characterized by a lack of contrasts. Continuing to knead, even the small patches of color will disappear, giving way to a uniform gray. This flattening process is irreversible. Symptoms of this tendency can be seen already in elementary serial compositions. In these cases, the premise of the writing is that elements should be used with the same frequency and each should have the same importance. This leads irresistibly to an increase in entropy..." It seems, therefore, that Ligeti, on one hand, confirms the fact that since the result of serial automatism is practically identical to the result produced by stochastics, listening is reduced to a primitive knowledge of the author and the type of music being listened to, because it would be impossible to trace back to the author starting from the music. How can one recognize if the author belongs to serialism or stochastics if the final result to the ear is the same?? Therefore, even the fact of "understanding" what is heard is not linked to the knowledge of the author, their works, and a careful study of their biography in the history of music and a careful analysis of the score. A question occurs to me spontaneously... For those who perceive music as something immediate, who is going to read all this stuff? And consequently, another question... But

What is music? What is it for? What are its purposes? Does the branch discussed in this post fulfill these purposes?

Here subjectivity comes into play. I answer based on my own sensitivity.

What is music? -> It is the most special of communication languages.

What is it for? -> To transmit sensations: auditory, visual, bodily, mental, whether they be pleasant or not.

What are its purposes? -> To provide cultural, spiritual, carnal, and physiological enrichment.

Does the branch discussed in this post fulfill such purposes? -> Only one, the cultural one; because the very fact of having discussed it with you while researching has given me the opportunity to enrich myself culturally. However, it does not fulfill my musical taste because, in my opinion, it lacks spiritual and physical enrichment. In essence, I find it totally pleonastic.

I find what you have written very convincing, even if in the end we will continue to disagree in our judgment of HERMA...

I will add another observation. It has been said: "if one did not know it is a piece by Xenakis, no one would deign to give it attention". This is probably true. The concept of authorship has carried considerable weight in aesthetic judgment for several centuries now. If the Hammerklavier had been composed by Kalkbrenner, it would probably be considered a curiosity worthy of the attention of a handful of musicologists. Or - without resorting to paradoxes - one can cite The Book of the Courtier (1528), where Castiglione tells of a motet sung at the court of the Duchess of Urbino, amidst general disinterest. As soon as it was known that the motet was a composition by Josquin (Princeps Musicorum!), everyone present poured out praises.

But I believe these are arguments for a new discussion (of the type "How much does the author matter?").

Perhaps to get to know Xenakis better, perhaps it is better to delve deeper into works like Tetras... don't you think?