All a-flutter

Some instrumentalists still look at any and all “extended techniques” as an annoyance that originates in avante garde music of the 20th c., even though many of them have been in use at least since the music of Biber, hundreds of years back. I don’t expect any...

From Xenakis to X-Factor

I’m going to attempt to tread carefully in today’s post, so as to minimize the hate mail. A collection of words can have devastating, world changing power when we allow them to be perceived as “truth.” The fundamental level of social discourse in our time is that “it...

Xenakis- Akrata

For those of you who have already read my Xenakis quote from yesterday, you may be wondering why I chose it. Given that there are plenty of series on this week’s concert, doesn’t the quotation of such a statement seem a bit self-defeating from a marketing standpoint?...

The crisis of serial music

The writer is Iannis Xenakis The year is 1955  “[…] the serial system is thrown into question on its own two bases, which embody the seed of their own destruction and inadequacy :           the series;    their polyphonic structure.      A series (of any sort)...