Systems of Embers, Dust, and Clouds: Observations after Xenakis and Brün

The following considerations are meant to describe a personal way of listening to Iannis Xenakis and Herbert Brun (their music, their words, their designs) and to clarify, in retrospect, how that listening might have pushed me to establish a dialectical attitude towards their art and thought. I would also like to describe how that listening might have reflected onto specific compositional explorations that I (as a composer of a younger generation than theirs) have been pursuing in recent years. My ear found its way particularly in their electroacoustic and computer music compositions. This may sound like a personal, and even idiosyncratic, statement about their music, as those compositions alone are clearly but a partial aspect of the entire and multifaceted picture of their work. It must have been in the mid 1980s that I first listened to Iannis Xenakis’s music. At that time, he was already in his sixties. A little later, I also encountered the music of Herbert Brun, who was then almost seventy. I was little more than twenty years old. I was turning to computer music, leaving behind the customized solid-body Fender guitar I had been scratching for some years with resultant sounds ranging from deafening punk rock and dark ambient music to southern Italian (i.e., partly Arabian, Greek, and North-African) song. I was turning to a different noise. The sounds of other electroacoustic and computer music impressed me, too, including Luciano Berio’s tape works from the late 1950s, some early John Cage (the Imaginary Landscapes, and the ‘‘mix’’ pieces), as well as JeanClaude Risset’s computer-synthesized music from the 1970s and 1980s. I was also fascinated by Franco Evangelisti, the early works by Gottfried M. Koenig, and a number of younger researchers and composers (including my former teacher Michelangelo Lupone, and other friends and colleagues I met across the years). But listening to the music of Xenakis and Brun—I mean all of their work, but with a strong preference for electroacoustic and computer music—had a special impact on me, an impact that today, in retrospect, I should try to better understand.