The Grain of the Melody in Selected Works by Iannis Xenakis

Jenny Olivia Johnson (New York University, USA)

In his published interviews with Iannis Xenakis, Bálint András Varga observes that many of the composer’s highly original stochastic compositions contain moments where a salient melody suddenly emerges, notable in its extreme contrast to the “sonic halos” and clouds of noise that dominate the surrounding textures.  While Xenakis often dismissed these melodies as essentially unimportant byproducts of his larger structural designs, the extent to which melodic figurations and fragments are juxtaposed with non-melodic, noise-based sounds suggests that Xenakis was crafting a conscious musical dialogue between the revolutionary, mathematically-generated sounds he was imagining as an adult and the culturally specific musical world in which he grew up.  The fragments of Greek and Byzantine melody we find lurking in the complex fabric of much of Xenakis’s repertory haunt these stochastic compositions like the ghosts of the composer’s troubled youth—specifically the untimely death of his mother in his early childhood, and the severe injuries he endured as a young man during the British occupation of Athens in 1945.

To what extent can we identify Xenakis’s fragmented and quixotic melodies as symbols of an emotionally fragmented and traumatized past? Are they hidden ‘piecemeal’ within otherwise rigorously constructed pieces of sonic architecture, or are they part of the sonic architecture?  Is it revealing to consider these rather lyrical instrumental melodies as distorted and anguished vocalizations, purposefully removed from the voice and its gestural limitations, and thus de-humanized?  If so, how does this relate to the physical and psychological demands this music makes on its performers?  And, finally, what do the relationships between melody and stochastic noise in various compositions reveal about Xenakis’s unique merging of two disparate approaches—the musical and the mathematical—that is so central to his legacy?

Drawing upon post-Structuralist, cultural-, gender-, and trauma-studies approaches to musical meaning, this paper applies selected ideas rooted in the thinking of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Ann Cvetkovich.  In addition, this paper turns to contemporary theoretical approaches to Xenakis’s music, using work by Ronald Squibbs and Thomas DeLio, in particular, to investigate alternative analytical approaches to Xenakis’s music that foreground his unique pairings of traditional and groundbreaking compositional techniques in such diverse pieces as Nomos Alpha for solo cello, Jonchaies for orchestra, Mikka for solo violin, and Aïs for baritone, percussion, and orchestra.

Composer and musicologist Jenny Olivia Johnson is currently a doctoral candidate at New York University, where her teachers and advisers include Louis Karchin, Elizabeth Hoffman, Suzanne Cusick, and Jairo Moreno.  She also holds degrees from Barnard College, Columbia University, and Manhattan School of Music.  Among her many awards and honors are the 2004 Prix de Composition from the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, nomination for an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a residency grant from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and publication by Boosey & Hawkes.  Her music has been performed by such renowned ensembles as the Young People’s Chorus of New York, Alarm Will Sound, ICE, and the Orchestra ‘de ereprijs’ in Apeldoorn, Netherlands.