metalhead gallery

01. Eonta (Pt. 1), for 2 trumpets, 3 trombones & piano [13:17]
02. Eonta (Pt. 2), for 2 trumpets, 3 trombones & piano [6:57]
03. Metastasis, for 60 musicians [9:03]
04. Pithoprakta, for 49 musicians [9:43]


Ts 1 and 2 performed by Yuji Takahashi in piano, G. Moisan, J. Toulon, M. Chapellier in trombones, L. Longo and P. Thibaut in trumpets.
Tracks 3 and 4 performed by the Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris.
Conductor: Konstantin Simonovic.


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This record compiles three different pieces by Xenakis composed at different periods of time with different concepts in mind.


Eonta was composed in 1963-4 for Pierre Boulez’s Domaine Musical concerts. The idea for this piece was to mirror the energetic and dynamics of random sounds mixed into a chaotic piece that surprisingly holds with much consistence and coherence. As it is Xenakis practice, no room for improvisation is allowed in his works, so the energy and chaos in this music was completely forethought.


Metastasis, composed in 1953-54 was also conceived as a mix of diverging seemingly chaotic and unrelated sounds, that branch from a single melodic structure to become a cacophony of sound, mostly inspired by Einstein's relativity of time (every instrument in this 60 piece orchestra ends up playing a melodic line that is slightly different from each other by the end of the piece); as well as Xenakis memories of war sounds, particularly gunfire from several sources mixed together. He was expecting to prove that it is impossible to distinguish the sound of each single constituting gunfire, but played together, a unique and cohesive single and distinguishable sound that is totally different from every isolated individual one can be created.


In Pithoprakta, composed in 1955-6, Xenakis tried to emulate the behaviour of an ideal gas through the musical equivalent of the kinetic gas theory, assigning to each molecular speed of a gas a pizzicato glissando event, with the slope of the glissando proportional to the corresponding particle's speed. Arguing that, according to the law of large numbers, the differences in speed (each glissando) as the number of particles (in this case each instrument of the orchestra) increases tend to disappear in average and the macroscopic effect is one of a constant, ie. the gas temperature, which is proportional to the average speed of all the particles that are part of it. Even though the exact reproduction of this effect would require an orchestra of billons of instruments, a good drone (representing the constant temperature of the gas) sound is achieved in Pithoprakta with only 49 musicians.


Hats off to the crazy Romanian/Greek architect, mathematician and musician