Metastasis (Xenakis composition)
Encyclopedia
Metastasis, also Metastaseis or Métastassis, is an orchestra
l work for 61 musicians by Iannis Xenakis
. His first major work, it was written in 1953-54 after his studies with Olivier Messiaen
and is 8 minutes in length. The work was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen Festival
with Hans Rosbaud
conducting.
Metastasis was inspired by the combination of an Einsteinian
view of time and Xenakis' memory of the sounds of war
fare, and structured on mathematical ideas by Le Corbusier
. Music usually consists of a set of sounds ordered in time; music played backwards is hardly recognizable. Messiaen's similar observations led to his noted uses of non-retrogradable rhythm
s; Xenakis wished to reconcile the linear perception of music with a relativistic view of time. In warfare, as Xenakis knew it through his musical ear, no individual bullet being fired could be distinguished among the cacophony, but taken as a whole the sound of "gunfire" was clearly identifiable. The particular sequence of shots was unimportant: the individual guns could have fired in a completely different pattern from the way they actually did, but the sound produced would still have been the same. These ideas combined to form the basis of Metastasis.
The work requires an orchestra of 61 players (12 wind
s, 3 percussionists playing 7 instruments, 46 strings) with no two performers playing the same part. It was written using a sound mass
technique in which each player is responsible for completing glissandi
at different pitch
levels and times. The piece is dominated by the strings, which open the piece in unison before their split into 46 separate parts.
As Newtonian
views of time
show it flowing linearly, Einsteinian views show it as a function of matter
and energy
; change one of those quantities and time too is changed. Xenakis attempted to make this distinction in his music. While most traditional compositions depend on strictly measured time for the progress of the line, using an unvarying tempo
, time signature
, or phrase
length, Metastasis changes intensity, register, and density of scoring, as the musical analogues of mass and energy. It is by these changes that the piece propels itself forward: the first and third movements of the work do not have even a melodic theme or motive
to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time.
The second movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a twelve-tone row is used, with durations based on the Fibonacci sequence. (This integer sequence is nothing new to music: it was used often by Bartók
, among others.) One interesting property of the Fibonacci sequence is that the further into the infinite
sequence one looks, the closer the ratio
of a term to its preceding term comes to the Golden Section; it doesn't take long before the result is correct to several significant figures
. This idea of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Sequence was also a favorite of Xenakis in his architectural works; the Convent de La Tourette was built on this principle.
Xenakis, an accomplished architect
, saw the chief difference between music and architecture as that while space is viewable from all directions, music can only be experienced from one. The preliminary sketch for Metastasis was in graphic notation
looking more like a blueprint
than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with pitch on one axis and time on the other. In fact, this design ended up being the basis for the Philips Pavilion
, which had no flat surfaces but rather the hyperbolic paraboloids of his musical masses and swells. Yet unlike many avant-garde
composers of this century who would take such a thing as the completed score, Xenakis notated every event in traditional notation.
By the title "Metastasis," the composer meant "transformations," referring to both the glissando mass events and the permutation of the tone rows.
A ballet
was choreographed to Xenakis' Metastasis and Pithoprakta by George Balanchine
(see Metastaseis and Pithoprakta); the work was premiered on January 18, 1968 by the New York City Ballet
with Suzanne Farrell
and Arthur Mitchell
.
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
l work for 61 musicians by Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
. His first major work, it was written in 1953-54 after his studies with Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...
and is 8 minutes in length. The work was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen Festival
Donaueschingen Festival
The Donaueschingen Festival is a festival for new music that takes place every October in the small town of Donaueschingen...
with Hans Rosbaud
Hans Rosbaud
Hans Rosbaud , was an Austrian conductor, particularly associated with the music of the twentieth century....
conducting.
Metastasis was inspired by the combination of an Einsteinian
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
view of time and Xenakis' memory of the sounds of war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
fare, and structured on mathematical ideas by Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
. Music usually consists of a set of sounds ordered in time; music played backwards is hardly recognizable. Messiaen's similar observations led to his noted uses of non-retrogradable rhythm
Non-retrogradable rhythm
In music or music theory, a non-retrogradable rhythm is a pattern of note durations that is read or performed the same either forwards or backwards, i.e., it is a rhythmic palindrome. The term is used most frequently in the context of the music of Olivier Messiaen...
s; Xenakis wished to reconcile the linear perception of music with a relativistic view of time. In warfare, as Xenakis knew it through his musical ear, no individual bullet being fired could be distinguished among the cacophony, but taken as a whole the sound of "gunfire" was clearly identifiable. The particular sequence of shots was unimportant: the individual guns could have fired in a completely different pattern from the way they actually did, but the sound produced would still have been the same. These ideas combined to form the basis of Metastasis.
The work requires an orchestra of 61 players (12 wind
Wind instrument
A wind instrument is a musical instrument that contains some type of resonator , in which a column of air is set into vibration by the player blowing into a mouthpiece set at the end of the resonator. The pitch of the vibration is determined by the length of the tube and by manual modifications of...
s, 3 percussionists playing 7 instruments, 46 strings) with no two performers playing the same part. It was written using a sound mass
Sound mass
In contrast to more traditional musical textures, sound mass composition "minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and impact." Developed from the modernist tone clusters and spread to orchestral writing by the late...
technique in which each player is responsible for completing glissandi
Glissando
In music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. In some contexts it is distinguished from the continuous portamento...
at different pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
levels and times. The piece is dominated by the strings, which open the piece in unison before their split into 46 separate parts.
As Newtonian
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
views of time
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
show it flowing linearly, Einsteinian views show it as a function of matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
and energy
Energy
In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
; change one of those quantities and time too is changed. Xenakis attempted to make this distinction in his music. While most traditional compositions depend on strictly measured time for the progress of the line, using an unvarying tempo
Tempo
In musical terminology, tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece. Tempo is a crucial element of any musical composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece.-Measuring tempo:...
, time signature
Time signature
The time signature is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats are in each measure and which note value constitutes one beat....
, or phrase
Phrase (music)
In music and music theory, phrase and phrasing are concepts and practices related to grouping consecutive melodic notes, both in their composition and performance...
length, Metastasis changes intensity, register, and density of scoring, as the musical analogues of mass and energy. It is by these changes that the piece propels itself forward: the first and third movements of the work do not have even a melodic theme or motive
Motif (music)
In music, a motif or motive is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition....
to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time.
The second movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a twelve-tone row is used, with durations based on the Fibonacci sequence. (This integer sequence is nothing new to music: it was used often by Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
, among others.) One interesting property of the Fibonacci sequence is that the further into the infinite
Infinity
Infinity is a concept in many fields, most predominantly mathematics and physics, that refers to a quantity without bound or end. People have developed various ideas throughout history about the nature of infinity...
sequence one looks, the closer the ratio
Ratio
In mathematics, a ratio is a relationship between two numbers of the same kind , usually expressed as "a to b" or a:b, sometimes expressed arithmetically as a dimensionless quotient of the two which explicitly indicates how many times the first number contains the second In mathematics, a ratio is...
of a term to its preceding term comes to the Golden Section; it doesn't take long before the result is correct to several significant figures
Significant figures
The significant figures of a number are those digits that carry meaning contributing to its precision. This includes all digits except:...
. This idea of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Sequence was also a favorite of Xenakis in his architectural works; the Convent de La Tourette was built on this principle.
Xenakis, an accomplished architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
, saw the chief difference between music and architecture as that while space is viewable from all directions, music can only be experienced from one. The preliminary sketch for Metastasis was in graphic notation
Graphic notation
Graphic notation is the representation of music through the use of visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation. Graphic notation evolved in the 1950s, and it is often used in combination with traditional music notation...
looking more like a blueprint
Blueprint
A blueprint is a type of paper-based reproduction usually of a technical drawing, documenting an architecture or an engineering design. More generally, the term "blueprint" has come to be used to refer to any detailed plan....
than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with pitch on one axis and time on the other. In fact, this design ended up being the basis for the Philips Pavilion
Philips Pavilion
The Philips Pavilion was a World's Fair pavilion designed for Expo '58 in Brussels by the office of Le Corbusier. Commissioned by Philips, an electronics company based in the Netherlands, the pavilion was designed to house a multimedia spectacle that celebrated postwar technological progress...
, which had no flat surfaces but rather the hyperbolic paraboloids of his musical masses and swells. Yet unlike many avant-garde
Avant-garde music
Avant-garde music is a term used to characterize music which is thought to be ahead of its time, i.e. containing innovative elements or fusing different genres....
composers of this century who would take such a thing as the completed score, Xenakis notated every event in traditional notation.
By the title "Metastasis," the composer meant "transformations," referring to both the glissando mass events and the permutation of the tone rows.
A ballet
Ballet
Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...
was choreographed to Xenakis' Metastasis and Pithoprakta by George Balanchine
George Balanchine
George Balanchine , born Giorgi Balanchivadze in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a Georgian father and a Russian mother, was one of the 20th century's most famous choreographers, a developer of ballet in the United States, co-founder and balletmaster of New York City Ballet...
(see Metastaseis and Pithoprakta); the work was premiered on January 18, 1968 by the New York City Ballet
New York City Ballet
New York City Ballet is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Leon Barzin was the company's first music director. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company...
with Suzanne Farrell
Suzanne Farrell
Suzanne Farrell is an eminent 20th century ballerina and the founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C....
and Arthur Mitchell
Arthur Mitchell (dancer)
Arthur Mitchell is an African-American dancer and choreographer who created a training school and the first African-American classical ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem...
.
Further reading
- Barthel-Calvet, Anne-Sylvie: "MÉTASTASSIS-Analyse: Un texte inédit de Iannis Xenakis sur Metastasis". Revue de Musicologie 89, no. 1 (2003): 129–87.