Aspects of compositional realization in Xenakis's pre-stochastic and early stochastic music

In the preface to the score of Metastaseis (1953-54), Xenakis indicates that certain of the work’s features prefigured aspects of stochastic composition, the approach that he would adopt in Pithoprakta (1955-56) and subsequent works. While there are good reasons to contrast the serial procedures that underlie certain passages in Metastaseis with the stochastic approach taken in later works, there are also significant points of contact between Xenakis’s compositional realization of both approaches. These points of contact include harmonic contexts, both within a given work and between works, and specific techniques for managing the flow of musical events in the rhythmic domain. Throughout this brief inquiry, emphasis is placed on the musical effectiveness of Xenakis’s solutions to the compositional problems posed by the non-serial atonal, serial, and stochastic approaches that followed one another in close proximity in his early works. While his pioneering efforts in the development of stochastic composition remain a source of fascination in themselves, along with his particular syntheses of ideas from both architecture and music, there appear to be eminently practical musical reasons for some of the compositional choices that Xenakis made in his early music. This presentation hopes to uncover a few of these practical reasons as a stimulus toward further thought about the immediacy of the impact produced by Xenakis’s music, as well as about its enduring effectiveness.