Eonta
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| Eonta | |
|---|---|
| by Iannis Xenakis | |
| Composed | 1963–64 |
| Performed | December 16, 1964 |
| Published | 1967 |
| Movements | 1 |
| Scoring | Piano, two trumpets, three tenor trombones |
Eonta is a composition for piano, two trumpets, and three tenor trombones by Iannis Xenakis.[1] It was written in 1963–64, and was premiered on December 16, 1964, by the Ensemble du Domaine Musical, with Yuji Takahashi on piano and Pierre Boulez conducting.[1] (Takahashi had previously premiered Xenakis's solo piano work Herma.[2]) Its duration is approximately 18 minutes.[1]
Eonta was composed in response to a commission from the Domaine Musical in Paris.[3] Xenakis recalled that the initial concept came to him while he was sitting in a boat at Tanglewood: "We were surrounded by a forest and I stroked the water with my hand. It was then that I first thought of the instruments to be used in Eonta."[4] (In his notes, he wrote: "Reflection in water. Water is the piano."[5]) The bulk of the composition was written in Berlin, where Xenakis was living thanks to a scholarship from the Ford Foundation,[6] during 1963–64, although some of the music, such as the opening piano solo, were composed with the aid of an IBM 7090 computer located at the Place Vendôme in Paris.[7] (Xenakis had persuaded IBM France to allow him to run implementations of his stochastic algorithms, written in Fortran and previously used in the composition of works such as Achorripsis, on their computer.[8])
According to Xenakis, Eonta, the title of which means "beings," the present participle of the Greek verb "to be,"[7] was composed in homage to Parmenides, who "realized the ontological essence of existence, of 'to be', and felt that existence couldn't consist of one instance only."[9] The composer recalled: "As far as Eonta is concerned, the piece changes, of course, but is based on something constant."[9]
Compositional techniques
In his foreword to the score, Xenakis wrote: "The work makes use of stochastic music (based on the theory of probabilities) and of symbolic music (based on logistics)."[7] (When asked about his use of the term "logistics," Xenakis stated that he was using the nineteenth-century term for symbolic logic[10]) In composing the work, Xenakis defined a number of pitch sets and applied logical operations to them to yield new sets. Stochastic procedures were then used to determine the placement and ordering of notes within each set, often producing, as in the opening piano solo, "a vivid kaleidoscope in sound,"[11] or what the composer called "clouds consisting of sounds selected at random."[9] As such, Eonta is an extension of Herma and the works of the "ST" series (ST/4, ST/10, and ST/48), which were based on similar techniques.[3]
Dynamics were often determined statistically, with ppp and fff as extreme values. Xenakis stated: "There are passages where only one or the other occurs and also where every note has a different intensity. If the two are mixed it's natural that the nuances should also be mixed."[9]
Spatial aspects
Eonta was conceived with the layout of the performers in mind, and is one of the earliest of Xenakis's works that concern themselves with the movement of sounds in space. The brass players are asked to move to different positions on the stage, to raise and lower their bells and to move them to the right and left, to play into the open body of the piano in order induce sympathetic vibrations, and to circulate freely within a section of the stage.[12]
