Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis

Mehmet Okonsar

Discography by Mehmet Okonsar

J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"

All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

Pierre Boulez, Composer, Conductor And Music Thinker

The life and career of Pierre Boulez. One of the most important figures in today's music.

J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"

F. Liszt: "modern" works

J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"

Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"

J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations

Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.

Pierre Boulez was born in 1925 Montbrison, France. After initial learning mathematics and soon after the war he visited Paris to study composition with Olivier Messiaen.

He attended the Summer School for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany and grew to become familiar with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, along with other youthful avant-garde composers who have been to produce musical styles for the following two decades.

In 1946, Boulez worked the classic twelve-tone technique underneath the guidance of Rene Leibowitz. Like a student and after, Boulez showed a lot of admiration to modern-day artists of numerous specialties, which includes Klee, Mondrian, Joyce and Becket.

Musically his favorites included Messiaen, Debussy and Stravinsky. Boulez freely acknowledged their influence upon art his art.

Boulez, always a man of strong opinions, brought a protest against Igor Stravinsky's neo-classic music and was among the first French composers to consider Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone approach to composition.

Just like a victorious military speeding across enemy terrain, Schoenberg's disciples pressed ever further the master's twelve-tone techniques. Why must serialism be restricted to notes where there have been a lot of additional factors of music to become introduced in check?

Pierre Boulez was the one who brought the charge, and that he extended the serial way to pitch, rhythm, timbre and dynamics; taking serialism where Schoenberg most likely by no means meant it to go.

In 1953, he founded a contemporary music concert series that later grew to become the "Domaine Musical". Through the next decade, he trained at Basel College as well as in Darmstadt and would be a going to professor at Harvard College. He later became a member of the faculty in the College de France.

After embracing orchestra conducting, initially being an hobby, Pierre Boulez, composer was selected by famous George Szell within the mid-sixties, as the Cleveland Orchestra's guest (principal) conductor to ensure that Szell's audiences would have the ability to hear large doses of twentieth-century music that Szell himself felt beyond his grasp as a conductor.

Boulez's Cleveland recording of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" from that point revealed the piece with a clearness and energy that forever transformed how a public considered that music.

Pierre Boulez like a conductor directed the majority of the world's leading symphony orchestras and ensembles from the late fifties to our day. He offered at the same time as musical consultant from the Cleveland Orchestra from 1970 to 1972, chief conductor from the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1971 to 1975, and music director from the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1977.

He's presently the Conductor Emeritus from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, after getting been its Principal Guest Conductor. The orchestras that has directed range from the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Ensemble Inter-Contemporain, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. In 2005 he started a collaboration using the Staatskapelle Berlin.

Pierre Boulez can also be an articulate, intelligent and sweeping author on music. Others worked with questions of technique and aesthetics inside a deeply reflective, sometimes elliptical manner, Boulez on the contrary, was always crystal clear.

His writings have mostly been republished underneath the titles "Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship", "Orientations: Collected Documents", and "Boulez on Music Today", as with the journal from the Darmstadt composers of that time: "Die Reihe". Another edition from the French texts, with formerly uncollected material, has made an appearance underneath the title "Points de repere I, II, and III."

Pierre Boulez is among the most significant musical and intellectual figures from the 20th century. Like a composer, he authored a brand new chapter within the history of music in the fifties, particularly with "Le Marteau sans Maitre" (1953-55), a synthesis of numerous different streams in modern and world music including Balinese, African and Japanese.

Pierre Boulez is really a ceaseless questioner. His refusal to prevent and settle lower having a given solution complements a restless perfectionism. This creative doubt may also appear, at first glance, to contradict the supreme confidence Boulez gives his roles as both composer and conductor. Yet such dichotomies are integral to Boulez's musical thinking, producing the strain which has made him this type of an effective leading force from the postwar avant-garde.

Like a composer and musical thinker, Pierre Boulez is modernism's prominent heir, and, like a conductor of preternatural capabilities using the world's great orchestras under his baton, he's been busy getting within the modern harvest in music of unique authority.

Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern happen to be spirited compositions with an insider's revelatory touch, and also the enthusiastic collector may have adopted his Bartok series believe it or not acutely: "Duke Bluebeard's Castle", "The Wooden Prince", "Cantata Profana" and also the Concerto for Orchestra amongst others.

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Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer. Founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog-site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal: "classical videos".

Discography by Mehmet Okonsar

J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"

All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

Mathematician, Architect But Essentially Revolutionizing Music: Iannis Xenakis

Life and works of one of the most important composers of our time: Iannis Xenakis

J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"

F. Liszt: "modern" works

J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"

Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"

J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations

Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.

Iannis Xenakis is among the most celebrated composers and legendary figures from the 20th century. He was probably the most influential thinkers of the century within the area of music but additionally in a variety of scientific matters. His music and philosophy have inspired an entire generation of composers and performers.

Xenakis, born of Greek parents in Romania, 1922, died in 2001, but his music is definitely an amalgam from the work of ancient Greek language, Byzantine chants, folk musics. When he started creating, his goal ended up being to elevate the Greek folk culture and packs of Western music, most importantly J. S. Bach.

"Xenakis resided in to the third millennium where his music really goes," stated Nour Matossian, his biographer and friend.

An ethnic Greek, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer, Xenakis, developed, using mathematical models like the set theory, the varied utilizations of stochastic processes, the game theory and the like a particular and unique music. Xenakis was among the first to react from the post-Webernian serialists and pointillists who centered music within the nineteen fifties.

Being an architect, his most significant contribution was the appearance of the Philips Pavilion for that 1958 World Fair Brussels.

He seemed to be an essential figure to the advent of electronic music. In "Concrete pH" Xenakis recorded the burning charcoal sounds, then layered and transposed the tracks to produce changing densities and ranges of button snaps, crackles, and jumps.

In 1954, he started experiments in stochastic music. "Metastasis" 1957, received the Prize from the European Foundation for Culture. 1958, he designed the Philips Pavilion in the 1958 The city Exposition.

Initially, his most notable achievement was the invention of "stochastic" music, in line with the mathematical laws and regulations of probability.

This is an approach to music composition which uses mathematical formula to calculate the space and concentration of each event. As his career has advanced, he grew to become among the world's best-known composers of electronic music or music produced by computer systems.

Among 20th century composers, he is known as being among the greatest leaders and experimenters. He is most well-known for trying to rationalize music composition using computer systems and formulas to produce sequences of notes, musical events somewhat detached from feelings.

By the the nineteen nineties Xenakis would have been a music superstar whose work appeared to be not any more valued solely by other avant garde composers. Followers, usually hesitant of avant-garde music, were now beginning to comprehend that he had invented a completely new approach to composition.

Xenakis was always intrigued by stochastic effects : sounds composed of numerous little elements that mix to create a completely unique soundscape.

For instance, even though seem of the rain consists of every individual drop of rain striking the floor, we are only conscious of the entire roar of precipitation. Consequently, Xenakis truly pressed the limitations of the items which is recognized as music, in reality the polar opposite of how John Cage saw music, rather than finding music in the "happen-instance" and everyday existence, Xenakis found it in form and order.

This can lead to his growth and development within "stochastic music". Stochastic music is indicated by number of sounds, "clouds" or "galaxies", where the amount of elements is really large that the behavior of individual elements can not be determined. However the behavior from the whole can be.

The word "stochastic" comes from Greek, meaning stretching towards an objective. For music artists, this means that music is indeterminate in the particulars, yet it tends towards an absolute goal.

In probability theory, a stochastic process or sometimes random process, may be the counterpart to some deterministic system. Rather than coping with just one possible reality of how the procedure might evolve under time, out of the box the situation, for instance, for solutions of the regular differential equation, inside a stochastic or random process there's some indeterminacy in the future evolution referred to by probability distributions.

What this means is that even when the first condition or beginning point is famous, you will find many options the procedure might visit, however, many pathways might be more probable and others less so.

Within the easiest possible situation a stochastic process comes down to a sequence of random variables known as the time series for instance Markov chain. Another fundamental kind of a stochastic process is really a random area, whose domain is really a region of space, quite simply, a random function whose arguments are attracted from a variety of continuously altering values.

One method of stochastic processes goodies them as functions of one or more deterministic arguments: inputs, generally regarded as as time, whose values (results) are random variables: non-deterministic, single, amounts that have certain probability distributions.

Familiar good examples of processes patterned as stochastic time series include signals for example speech, audio and video, stock exchange and exchange rate fluctuations, medical data and random movement for example Brownian motion or random walks.

Composers who've acknowledged being affected by Xenakis include Toru Takemitsu, Julio Estrada and Krzysztof Penderecki.

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Discography by Mehmet Okonsar

J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"

All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

The Piano Sonatas By Pierre Boulez

An overview of the three piano sonatas by Pierre Boulez.

J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"

F. Liszt: "modern" works

J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"

Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"

J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations

Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.

The three piano sonatas of Pierre Boulez occupy an essential position in the piano literature from the 20th century.

Actually the piano is not central towards the work of nearly all composers from the century, because it ended up being too connected with composers from the nineteenth century. The thirty-two sonatas of Beethoven were for lengthy a constraining factor. Composers from the first half of the 20th Century attempted to flee out of this.

In most cases, major composers from the other half from the century have not composed anymore for piano, but a number of them more easily elected for that instrumental genre from which is the sonata.

Since 1945 the type of Beethoven is a solid point of reference for composers who have switched towards the particular form within the perspective of the renovation of musical language.

Boulez's Earliest Piano Sonata, carried out in 1946, features only two sections. It had been his earliest twelve-tone serialized work along with his "Sonatine" for flute and piano, and that he initially meant to dedicate it to Rene Leibowitz. However their friendship ended when Leibowitz attempted to create "corrections" towards the score. In composing this sonata, Boulez had great inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg's "Drei Klavierstucke", Op. 11.

The 2nd Piano Sonata dating from 1947-48 is a strongly original work which acquired Boulez a worldwide status.

The pianist Yvette Grimaud brought the world first audition on 29 April 1950. Through his friendship with the American composer John Cage, the composition was performed within the U.S. by David Tudor in 1950. The work is within four movements, lasting an overall total around half an hour. It's infamously hard to play.

Boulez's Second Piano Sonata (1947-8) marked his own radical and mature adaptation from the atonal twelve-tone method developed by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

Boulez would continue to use serial concepts to any or all facets of music-rhythm, register, dynamics, et al. in the "Structures I" for 2 pianos (1951-2), fully developing that style in two large-scale works together with strong literary references: "Le marteau sans maitre" ["The hammer with no master"] (1953-5), after poems from the surrealist poet Rene Char, and "Pli selon pli" ["Fold upon fold"] (1957-62), set to poems of Mallarme.

The 3rd Piano Sonata was initially performed through the composer in Cologne and Darmstadt, in 1958, within a "preliminary version" of its five-movement form.

One motivating pressure of its composition was Boulez's need to explore aleatoric music. He has formerly released several writings, both demeaning this specific practice and recommending its reformation, prior to the composition of the sonata in 1955-57 and 63.

Boulez has released only two complete movements of the Sonata in 1963, along with a fragment of some others; the rest of the movements, in numerous stages of elaboration, remained not implemented to the composer's satisfaction.

From the published movements (or "formants", as Boulez calls them), the main one entitled "Antiphonie" is easily the most fully developed. The "formant" entitled "Strophe" may be the one least developed because the preliminary form.

A facsimile from the manuscript from the preliminary version from the remaining formant: "Sequence" was released by Schatz and Strobel in 1977, but was subsequently ongoing to almost two times its original length.

The movements are: 1. "Antiphonie" (unpublished aside from a part, known as "Sigle" [Siglum] 2. "Trope" 3. "Constellation" (released only in the retrograde version, as "Constellation-Miroir") 4. "Strophe" (unpublished) 5. "Sequence" (unpublished, aside from a facsimile of the preliminary-version manuscript)

In the 50's, starting with the 3rd Piano Sonata, Boulez played around with using what he calls "controlled chance", and then he formulated his particular sights on aleatoric music within the articles "Ala" and "Sonate que me veux-tu".

His utilization of chance, that he would later employ in works like "Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna" and "Domaines" is quite different from that within the works of for instance John Cage.

During Cage's music, the performers have frequently the freedom to produce completely unforeseen sounds, using the object of getting rid of the composer's intention in the music. In settings by Boulez, they merely get to choose from options which have been prepared at length through the composer. A technique that after put on the successiveness order of the sections, frequently referred to as "mobile form".

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