By Kyle Gann
DJ Spooky Performs in a New Digital Version of Iannis Xenakis's Kraanerg
Iannis Xenakis and DJ Spooky? The genius composer of the 1950s European modernism and the rising bad boy of hip-hop? The Greek resistance fighter who pioneered the calculus of noise and the dreadlocked, ambient sampler of rare recordings and random sounds? High art and low, classical tradition and vernacular, old and young, performing together with the ST-X Ensemble November 12 at Cooper Union's Great Hall? Sounds like a postmodernist dream come true.
It would be wonderful, wouldn't it?, to find some rapprochement between the generations. Our young artists yearn for a blessing from their modernist grandfathers, but it doesn't seem forthcoming. The giants who created 20th-century music - Ligeti and Boulez, Babbitt and Elliott Carter - are too trapped in their audience-scorning worldview to recognize that today's young avant-gardists are continuing the work they started. The complexity, noisiness, and downright ugliness of post-war music liberated music from stifling conventions. But it turned out that the modernist grandfathers didn't want to liberate music from European tradition; the only freedom they intended to offer young composers was the freedom to imitate them. So when today's composers committed the sin of writing accessible, vernacular music, most of the older composers turned their back on their wayward progeny.
But there's always hope for a reunion, hope that someday, some prodigal son will be welcomed home. That's why I'm on the phone, linking DJ Spooky, aged 27, on tour in Albuquerque, with Monsieur Xenakis, 74, in Paris. Spooky (who writes for the Voice as Paul Miller) has been invited to operate the machinery in a new, digital manifestation of Xenakis's 75-minute, 1968 classic for tape and orchestra, Kraanerg. Why Spooky? He was the choice of Charles Zachary Bornstein, conductor of the ST-X Ensemble, who felt his expertise in spinning discs might ease some of Kraanerg's traditional performance problems. Though Kraanerg has been performed many times since 1968, there has always been a difficulty synchronizing the orchestra with the tape, which consists of prerecorded orchestral material. The Cooper Union performance, produced by the 92nd Street YMCA, is the premiere of a new digital version, which promises to avoid the old problems.
"The score for the musicians," Spooky explains, "is done in conventional notated time, but the score for the tape is done almost as a flow chart. My timed cues are very precise. The orchestra is playing right up to the edge of the recorded material, and the difficulty has always been that the person playing the tape would always leave a pause of some sort. They couldn't make it seamless. That problem is solved pretty easily with digital circuitry."
Spooky sees Kraanerg as an extension of his DJ work, of his interest in synchronizing recorded sounds and artfully splicing them together. The biggest difference for him is that he usually doesn't work with live performers. Also, working in the Afrocentric world of hip-hop, his work is quintessentially improvisational, and following a strict and complex score will be an unusual experience for him. He does have some leeway, however: "My improvisation will consist of switching the placement of the sound around the room: left to right, up to down, vertical to horizontal. That's what the conductor left up to me."
Xenakis, for his part, has little idea that a popular Manhattan musician with his own aesthetic and following is involved in this digital restoration. Given his background, he could care less how hip-hop relates to his music retroactively. In the '50s, after receiving a severe face wound and a death sentence while fighting the Nazis in the Greek resistance during World War II, Xenakis escaped to Paris and worked with the architect Le Corbusier. His early works such as Kraanerg (originally a ballet) epitomize an architectural approach to music, filling out great arches of space with textures defined according to mathematical probabilities, a type of directed randomness known as a stochastic process. In the '80s, he developed what's called the UPIC system, a computerized algorithm that allows one to draw shapes on a computer screen, which the computer translates into sound. The music of that late period became noisier and less elegant; it was more exciting to hear an orchestra in Pithoprakta generate a detailed analogue version of noise than it is to hear the computer spit out noise at the flick of a key.
Both composers have tendencies toward incomprehensibility; Xenakis in his books speaks integral calculus, Spooky speaks fluent Foucault and Derrida. Although both can converse in French, I can't seem to bring them within a few light years of being on the same wavelength. Spooky, who was born a year after Kraanerg was composed, took an early interest in Xenakis's musical fusion of physics and architecture, and, as an intense student of recent French intellectual history, he hears Kraanerg as a reflection of the violence and tumult of the student riots of 1968. Xenakis, ever the formalist from a formalist generation, doesn't speak in such associative terms. Xenakis had turned to math to create what he thought were forms of classical perfection; postmodern Spooky hears in those tortured forms "free association and the psychological impact of memory, a kind of controlled delirium." And when I ask Xenakis's impression of DJ Spooky's work as an avant-garde DJ, he replies, "Watt eez dee-zhay?"
Spooky explains in smooth French (a language of which I comprehend the nouns) that he performs on turntables, making collages out of recordings. Xenakis thinks that sounds interesting, and asks Spooky to send him some recordings. So has Xenakis kept up with any other American music?
"No."
How about the younger European composers?
"No. (Pause.) I don't want to be influenced."
Today Xenakis is busy writing commissioned orchestral pieces for Swedish and German orchestras, and doesn't employ the complex math he used to: "The stochastic way of composing is something that is innate now. I don't need to use the computers anymore." Neither does Spooky need math to reflect the chaotic ideas he draws from Xenakis's early work. But Xenakis, not articulate in English, seems to wonder why these two crazy young Americans have called, and there will be no meeting of the minds today. The passing of the torch from the giants of modernism to the generations they inspired remains an elusive dream.
