The Instrumental Music of Iannis Xenakis: Theory, Practice, Self-Borrowing (review)

Whatever the desires of the musicological world, the world of new music has long seemed in desperate need of a book that is able to explain comprehensively the work of Iannis Xenakis and that goes beyond the biographical, but that does not rely—or relies only in part—on the mathematical conceits that dominate Formalized Music. Benoît Gibson's The Instrumental Music of Iannis Xenakis is not that book. Indeed, it does not set out to be, and it would be a wholly unfair standard against which to judge it. Yet what this study demonstrates eminently clearly is that such a volume is entirely conceivable and that there is no need for scholars working on Xenakis to feel that understanding the equations of Xenakis's own theoretical models is a prerequisite for writing. One of the great strengths of Gibson's approach to Xenakis is that it demonstrates that there are valuable, illuminating strategies to be taken that are not necessarily dominated by the composer's apparently preferred hermeneutic apparatus.

Gibson is keenly aware of the specific difficulties of approaching Xenakis's work, stressing in his introduction the fact that, notwithstanding the formidable appearance and reputation of Formalized Music, on the odd occasions on which he actually allied his theoretical apparatus with a specific example from his music, he had little concern for whether the theory and the practice truly agreed, suggesting that on some occasions he made errors in writing the score—either "slips of the pen" or "theoretic errors"—or changed the strict results of the theory in the interest of aesthetic considerations. In a gloss worthy of Ferney-hough at his densest, Xenakis summarizes his position thus: "bi-univocal exactness realisation-theory may be sometimes non-absolute" (p. xviii). Far from being put off by the problems, Gibson laudably seizes the absence of any definitive answers from the composer's hand, taking the ways in which Xenakis borrowed materials from his own scores in later work as his principal lens. Given the sometimes stark divide between the theoretical frameworks which Xenakis described and the way in which they were deployed in practice, the volume is also subdivided into two large parts, devoted to practice and theory respectively.

The first part of the book, then, examines the contexts and ways in which Xenakis reused elements from earlier scores in his later music. Gibson is clear that he is, in the main body of his text, only scratching the surface of the volume of borrowing undertaken by Xenakis; a lengthy appendix gives a fuller picture, showing borrowings across Xenakis's entire output in tabulated form, from the first major example in Duel I (1959) to the latest in Mosaïques (1993), the title in the latter case overtly signaling the presence of borrowed materials within the piece. Nevertheless, the number of examples Gibson provides is striking, from near-enough literal insertions of fragments of one piece into another (as in the recurrence of elements from Nomos Alpha (1965-66) in Antikhthon (1971)), to more complex reuses of material, less obvious at first glance, where rhythmic patterns recur with wholly different timbral or pitch characteristics (as in the relationship between Idmen B (1985) and à l'île de Gorée (1986)), or where pitch recurs almost literally, but with other characteristics adapted or transformed—such a situation occurs with Pithoprakta (1955-56) and Aroura (1971). One of the matters here illuminated is the degree to which Xenakis applies similar procedures, described here as micromontage, within individual scores, as for instance in Pithoprakta, Nomos Gamma (1967-68), or Kraanerg (1968-69), to generate textures exhibiting similar characteristics while being distinct from one another at the superficial level. The number of examples of borrowing shown by Gibson is surely enough to convince the reader that there is no coincidence at play here. Yet, despite the proposal that "self-borrowings occur more...