Quick Analysis No.2
Iannis Xenakis, Khoaï - Χοαί - For Harpsichord
Listen to Khoaï - Χοαί HERE
On the one hand, making a point of saying that a particular work of art could only have ever been made by its specific creator seems a bit redundant and tautologous. Of course this is true of any work by definition, it was made by its maker, no one else can write it because it’s already been written. And yet, on the other hand, sometimes it feels like a profound and necessary observation to state this fact about a work; when a piece contains so much of its author’s character that insisting it could never have been written by another person becomes an emphatic endorsement of an artist’s highly unique and irreplicable idiom.
Khoaï - Χοαί by Iannis Xenakis is one of these works: it simply could not have been written by anyone else. No one else on the planet, living or dead, would do THAT with a solo harpsichord. Part of what I love so deeply about Xenakis’ music more generally is its fearlessness and boldness to work with sounds in their most raw and un-sugar-coated forms. To leave the harsh corners and rough edges of sounds completely exposed with no desire at all to soften or sweeten them with more conventionally palatable textures and techniques. For a composer concerned with the brutality of sound and the harshness of emancipated post-tonal dissonance, the harpsichord, with its unforgiving rattly texture and wiry percussive decay, is like an invitation to play the game of atonal music composition on nightmare difficulty: A challenge that Xenakis grips with both fists and throttles mercilessly.
So what do I mean by doing ‘THAT’ with a solo harpsichord? Well, Khoaï - Χοαί opens with a tremolo across four open octaves of F-natural in the instrument’s lowest register. This gesture alone establishes the tone as abrasive and strident, declamatory and intense, but with completely open and hollowly ambiguous harmony. Pretty quickly after this we jump up to the upper/mid register and reveal a set of pitches that clash with the four octave F-natural that opened, D-sharp, F-sharp and then three open octaves of D-sharp. It’s like we’re being given bold, strident gestures spanning the entire register of the instrument, but with totally ambiguous and hard to define harmony, which does then rapidly build up into dense atonal chromaticism that directly contrasts with the wide open octave tremolos. Within just a page or so’s worth of material we have disjunct and spikey, closely voiced chromatic harmonies, unpredictably jumping across the harpsichord’s register, colliding with hollow, open octaves all rattling around together in passages littered with jittery tremolos and increasingly disjointed arpeggiations. There is a dryness, a starkness and a brutality to this opening that I see as so quintessentially Xenakis that I can’t imagine another composer being bold enough to form a piece of music in this manner.
From this point the piece continues building up this erratic opening texture until new musical ideas either emerge from the dense web of chaos, or suddenly arrive with no warning in sharp contrast to what was presented before. At page-six the broken and fragmented material of the opening builds up into a more consistently frenetic toccata-like passage.
On page-eight at bar seventy-four we again find some exposed open octaves on B-natural, beginning with dry, pulsating crotchets separated by silences, which again begin to build up rhythmically and chromatically to a point of saturation.
Later, at the start of page-twelve we suddenly launch into a frantic, high arpeggio of mechanically consistent, repeating semi-quavers reiterating a six-note cell of A-natural, D-sharp, E-natural, F-sharp, B-natural & C-natural. This is then followed in stark contrast by low register tremolos quickly building into a series of rapidly ascending scales, highly chromatic in harmony.
After this point, with most of the piece’s material established, Xenakis keeps ratcheting up the tension and intensity, leaping from one texture to another, juxtaposing bursts of material against one another until, on page-twenty-three, the piece reaches a completely saturated frenzy of closely voiced chromatic chords, rapidly building in machinegun-like semi-quavers, traveling from the instrument’s lowest register its highest. After this frenzy the music gradually re-fractures over its last ten pages until the final page where Xenakis presents a naked semitone of C-natural and D-flat in the middle of the bass register surrounded by increasingly long silences until the final gesture presents that same semitone exploded into an open major 7th.
I realise that to many people this specific brand of strident, uncompromising and abrasive atonality might just sound absolutely unpalatable with no reason to dig into why it exists, what it’s doing and how to find a way in to listening to it. It might be the kind of thing that on the surface sound like a truly random sequence of hands being slammed onto a keyboard, the kind of thing that some may be tempted to say “well, I could do that” or “this sounds like something my four-year-old son would play” in response to hearing it for the first time. In truth it is a difficult piece to listen to which deals in the aesthetics of intensity, surprise, texture, gesture, saturation and a bold harshness of atmosphere. It is about the exact opposite of easy listening that challenges performer and listener alike with an uncompromising density of harmony and even employing a deliberate ugliness of sound. I love Xenakis and I think this piece absolutely exemplifies his fearlessness as a composer.
- Jocelyn Campbell, 2024
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