MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Sunday night from 10pm–midnight PST, celebrate the legacy of Iannis Xenakis on Flotation Device at 91.3 KBCS-FM Bellevue/Seattle/Tacoma. The program, hosted by composer/intermedia artist and polymath Michael Schell, will include selections from Karlrecords’ new remastered edition of Xenakis’s electroacoustic works (w/enhanced bass) by Martin Wurmnest and Rashad Becker.

The Greek-French avant-garde composer was born on 29 May 1922 in Brăila, Romania. In honor of his centenary, fellow composer Roger Reynolds and flutist and arts activist Karen Reynolds have published Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynold Desert House, which explores their collaboration to create a house design integrating music and architecture. The book also includes analyses of three representative chamber works by Xenakis as well as letters, diaries, notes, photographs, sketches, and transcriptions of person-to-person conversations. More here from Roger Reynolds:

A few years ago, we contracted with Routledge publishers to issue a book: Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House. The cumbersome title was a result of negotiation over how to assure the maximum number of potential “key words” that could attract search engines. In the following months and years, we learned a bit about book publishing.

We had worked for years on the notion that the multifarious materials we had gathered over four decades could somehow be shape-shifted into a coherent collection of chapters, they forming a book that would be detailed, accurate, informative, and would also provide an intimate window into Xenakis’s ways and capacities as we had experienced them.

Iannis and Françoise came to UC San Diego at our invitation for a festival in his honor in 1990. While they were in Southern California, we drove them out to the land that we had purchased in the Anza-Borrego Desert — a deeply ravined site on which we dreamed of realizing a design that he had offered to us during a dinner we shared with them in their 9, rue Chaptal apartment in Paris in 1984.

When several representative chapters were drafted, we submitted them to our Routledge editor, who in turn sent them to the required external reviewers. A particularly thoughtful remark by one clinched the deal:

This is a very unique proposal of the highest quality on a topic that is greatly underdeveloped: the links between musical, architectural and literary creativity in Xenakis’s work.

We worked for many months completing eight chapters with a multitude of illustrative images: photos, designs, letters … Now, after innumerable proofings, the book exists, and we hope it will be shared.

Filed under: avant-garde, Iannis Xenakis, music news, Roger Reynolds