Miller Theatre Program Notes Iannis Xenakis: Oresteia

Saturday, September 13, 2008, 8:00PM Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 8:00PM Wednesday, September 17, 2008, 8:00PM Introduction I felt I was born too lateI had missed two millennia. I didnt know what there was for me to do in the twentieth century. (Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, by Blint Andrs Varga) Composer of electronic music, rethinker of the orchestra, startling defier of the norms of good instrumental sound, pioneer of musical cybernetics, Xenakis here situates his modernity in the distant past, as if his music were all about revivifying an archaic culture, making the statues speakand sing. Often he would chose titles for his works with reference to the literature, philosophy, and religion of Greece in classical or pre-classical times. Only rarely, however, did he form his music directly on the model of an ancient text. Not only is his treatment of the Oresteia (The Orestes Story) the most substantial of these exceptions, it is also his longest work and the one that took him longest to complete, for to his original score of the mid-1960s he made additions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is a story with many beginnings. One was in Athens during World War II, when Xenakis, then a student, stood in the halls of the National Archaeological Museum and first started wishing away those two millennia (and more). Another was in 458 B.C., again in Athens, when Aeschylusnow in his mid-sixties and the most famed dramatist of the agepresented his fellow citizens with a trilogy unfolding how a young man was beset by supernatural forces for fulfilling his obligation to revenge his fathers murder. Still others lay in yet earlier centuries, when the pieces of the Orestes legend came together out of history and invention. And there was another in the small town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, which decided in 1963 to honor its Greek heritage (Demetrius Ypsilanti, for whom the place was named, was a hero of the Greek War of Independence) by building an amphitheater for an annual festival of Greek drama. As it turned out, the debut performances in the summer of 1966 took place on a makeshift stage on the college baseball field, with an audience in the bleachers. Nevertheless, ambitions remained high. Alexis Solomos, artistic head of the National Theater of Greece, was brought in to direct. He had worked with Xenakis in Athens in 1964 on another Aeschylus play, The Suppliants, and now he called on the composer again, to supply music for what was the U.S. professional premiere of the Oresteia. There was also a starry cast. Judith Anderson, as Clytemnestra, turned the ball field into a nightmare-real landscape of bloody tragedy, according to Time magazine. Like other composers writing music for the Oresteia in the 20th century, from Darius Milhaud to Harrison Birtwistle, Xenakis evidently strove for the elemental and the hieratic, as if to evoke the remoteness of the source material in the act of making it so very present. The instrumental score, for an ensemble of wind and percussion plus a lone cello, is often rude and brazen, the harmonies rendered savage by quarter-tones. Many of the choruss contributions, set for groups of men, women, and children, suggest that the lineage of Greek drama can be traced straight through to the chant of the Orthodox Church. Elsewhere come signal, fanfare, and brute noise, with all the non-percussionist performers also playing small percussion instruments. Greek theater, we are reminded, was ceremony, a ceremony of life and death. In 1967 Xenakis recast his Ypsilanti score as a 40-minute concert piece. Twenty years later he brought the music back to the stage and added a new section, Kassandra, for a performance amid the ruins of Gibellina, Sicily. This was only a few kilometers from the burial place of Aeschylus at Gela,

as he noted in the score for the new piece, which he devised for two artists with whom he had collaborated before, the actor-singer Spiros Sakkas and the percussionist Sylvio Gualda. The work was recorded by Radio France in Strasbourg soon after the Gibellina production, and this is the performance to be heard on the Nave album MO 782151. A second section for Sakkas, La Desse Athna (The Goddess Athene), was written for a performance in Athens in 1992, honoring the composer on his 70th birthday, and creating a final version that plays for over an hour. Torn from the theater and restored, put together at different stages in the composers life, leaving out much of the drama, or else representing it by instrumental commentary, wildly disparate in style and tone, Xenakiss Oresteia thrives on disunity. The statues sing indeed. They are broken and stand amid wreckage, but it is their condition and status as remnants that gives them power. They have survived. From more than two millennia ago, they are still here. The Aeschylus story in brief The chorus, onstage throughout, says more than any individual, whether in lengthy passages of description or narration, or else in dialogue with the characters. The action they observe, interrogate, expound, and review starts with news arriving in Argos of the fall of Troy and the imminent return of the Argive king, Agamemnon, after a decade-long campaign. ClytemnestraAgamemnons wife, who has governed in his absencewelcomes her husband back. However, he brings with him a trophy concubine, the Trojan princess Cassandra. Clytemnestra kills both of them, justifying herself on the grounds not only of Agamemnons adultery but also of his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia on the way to Troy. She stakes her claim to go on ruling with Aegisthus, the consort she took while Agamemnon was away. Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns to Argos and meets his sister Electra at their fathers tomb. Together they decide on vengeance. Orestes duly kills Aegisthus and, after some hesitation, Clytemnestra. Then he stands to face the chorus (and the audience), like Clytemnestra before him, a revenger over two bodies. However, he lacks his mothers bold confidence, sensing rather that he is pursued by the Furies for his sin of matricide. With the Furies at his back, Orestes appeals to the gods: first Apollo, then Athene, who declares there must be a trial, before a jury of Athenians, to decide whether or not Orestes acted justly in killing his mother. The jurors are evenly divided, and so Athene gives her casting vote, in favor of Orestes. When the Furies complain, Athene transforms them from demonic creatures into mankinds helpmates. The Xenakis version Xenakiss work presents fragments of the three plays in due order, beginning with the Agamemnon, which tells of the kings return and murder. A quick double stamp from the ensemble introduces a short prelude in which instruments growl and slither within hot, quarter-tone space. Then the chorus enters: men in unison answering a soloist. The ensuing instrumental section, with high wailing oboe, reflects the sacrifice of Iphigenia, after which the chorus returns, cursing Helen of Troy in bare fourths. Another instrumental lament leads back toward the atmosphere of the prelude, now with speaking chorus. A fanfare frames the arrival of Agamemnon, whose speech is replaced by pounding drums with slow glissandos from super-high piccolo and cello, on harmonics, and brass punctuations. When Agamemnon has gone into the palace and his wife Clytemnestra has followed him, Cassandra is left onstage with the chorus. At this point comes Xenakiss first insertion, Kassandra, involving a male vocalist also strumming a psaltery, an instrument the composer used here as a direct descendant of the ancient lyre, together with a percussionist performing on skin drums and wood blocks. The vocalist, whose part is notated as a waving line, alternates between falsetto speaking or singing for Cassandras lines and his baritone register when he is acting as the chorus, so that the whole scene (somewhat cut) is delivered as split monologue. In graphic imagery, and at extraordinary

musical tension, Cassandra foresees Agamemnons murder at the hands of his wifea prophesy the chorus interprets as madness. Xenakiss earlier score picks up just before the scene of Agamemnons slaughter, the kings dying words being relayed by the chorus, still of men only, crying out. Then the same chorus sings in outbursts of lament before the scene ends with instrumental music for Clytemnestras self-justification. We now proceed to the second play, the Choephoroi (The Libation-Bearers), so called because it opens with Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, watching as his sister Electra and other women arrive at Agamemnons tomb to pour a libation (an offering of oil or wine), a tribute Clytemnestra has ordered to salve her guilty conscience. The instrumental opening, of keening lines punctuated by wood block, replaces the lines in which Aeschyluss chorus considers the queens demeanor. Then Xenakis introduces his chorus, of women in this part of the trilogy, giving a different color from that of the male-dominated Agamemnon. There are no soloists. The chorus first sings a lament, in phrases separated by a clangorous quarter-tone chord; then, with percussion only, they rattle off a dialogue in which Electra and Orestes move toward a demand for vengeance. Extremely high piccolo notes and cello harmonics lead to a choral chant of expectation while Orestes is in the palace. Trombone, cello, and percussion create an ominous atmosphere before Aegisthuss death cry is heard. Then an instrumental passage supports Orestess confrontation with Clytemnestra, and the play ends with sirens and percussion. The third play takes its title from the new name the gruesome Furies who have been dogging Orestes get at the close: The Eumenides (The Kindly Ones). Far from kindly at first, these dark creatures, introduced by subterranean wind tones and percussion, mutter in complaint to Apollo and sing a chant of blood lust. According to an ancient story, this episode had such an effect at the first performance that a pregnant woman miscarried and died. A shrill fanfare announces the arrival of Athene, and of La Desse Athna, in which the solo male vocalist again switches between baritone and falsetto declamation, but now on fixed pitches and as a single person, the goddess, decreeing that her favored people of Athens shall henceforth decide homicide cases by trial. There is no psaltery this time, but accompaniment for the full wind-cello ensemble plus solo drummer. In the final sequence, the chorus delivers the argument between Athene and the Furies in which the latter agree to become the Eumenides, and a choir of children comes forward with a hymn, personifying them in their new role. The plays final chorus is sung by the full chorus in an atmosphere of mounting celebration and noise.
Paul Griffiths (www.disgwylfa.com) Miller Theatre has commissioned writer and music critic Paul Griffiths to write the program notes for its 20th anniversary season of events.