#ianis xenakis

[peowbeow]

[fourteenth]

Concret PH (1958) is a musique concrète piece by Iannis Xenakis originally created for the Philips Pavilion (designed by Xenakis as Le Corbusier's assistant) and heard as audiences entered and exited the building. Start with a sound made up of many particles, then see how you can make it change imperceptibly, growing and developing, until an entirely new sound results... This was in defiance of the usual manner of working with concrète sounds. Most of the musique concrète which had been produced upt to the time of Concret PH is full of many abrupt changes and juxtaposed sections without transitions. This happened because the original recorded sounds used by the composers consisted of a block of one kind of sound, then a block of another, and did not extend beyond this. I seek extremely rich sound (many high overtones) that have a long duration, yet with much internal change and variety. Also, I explore the realm of extremely faint sounds highly amplified. There is usually no electronic alteration of the original sound, since an operation such as filtering diminished the richness.

—Xenakis, Program notes, Nonesuch recording