Persepolis at Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A)
Persepolis at Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A)
November 7-8th, 2024 | 20.30 hours
Last November, I was invited by Exploratorio C3A. Meditaciones en torno a lo foráneo, a brand-new contemporary and experimental music program organized by the composers Miguel Álvarez Fernández and Bruno Dozza at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía at Córdoba (Spain) to perform Iannis Xenakis’ Persepolis. The piece was realized together with the local video artist, Juan López López, who projected during the performance images consisting on the idea of ruin.
I had the opportunity to perform Persepolis, the major electronic music piece composed by Iannis Xenakis. The piece was composed in 1971. Along the fifty-six minutes-long music, Xenakis spreads the eleven sound entities of his polytope around the octophonic parts, creating different acoustical spaces. These acoustic realms are produced through six big temporal sections and they interpolate in such a way that the eight-channel materials superimpose each other creating a huge texture. According with the author’s notes on his piece, it seems that the master line that Xenakis takes as a time reference is Channel 1 (A). It is a way of working that will be adopted at the Polytope of Cluny, in which the analog concept of length, concerning with the magnetic tape, embraces everything.
The focus of the piece is much more concrete (GRM) than synthetic and dominates the idea of impureness. The bigger part of the sounds used within the tape are processing and transformations of orchestral instruments, but some of them look like pottery. I guess that the latter were motivated by an archeological sight towards the Iranian desert.
The visual aspects of the piece reflect a projective philosophy, with a taste in light sculpturing and laser projections. Possibly, it could occur inasmuch as Xenakis was dreaming with the visual artist Keiji Usami’s oeuvre at least one year ago, whom he met working on the Iranian Pavilion at Osaka World Fair. All these things ended up flourishing at the Polytope of Cluny the next year.
There is a direct relationship with the piece Persephassa for six percussion players, which was composed two years before, in 1969, for the Iranian Festival at Shiraz. Persepolis was, in a certain way, the continuation of this starting point, composing a new electronic music piece for the inauguration of the festival in 1971, the year in which the 2500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy was celebrated. The electronic piece, Diamorphoses, composed at the GRM in 1957 for two channels, around seven minutes long, was used in that occasion as a prelude for Persepolis. It is probable that the concrete approach in Persepolis was motivated by this short piece composed fourteen years before. Furthermore, Xenakis settled Persepolis up as the central body of a spectacle that included a prelude, such as it happened with the piece Concret PH, composed almost in turn for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, which was the prelude of Poème électronique by Varèse. In other words, Persepolis was the particular, personal “poème” that Xenakis realized for this important celebration in Iran that, without Diamorphoses, it would have remained incomplete. So we did at the concert, using the Diamorphoses piece as a prelude. Here you can download the concert program notes in pdf.
One of the main concerns on setting the original tracks up onto a working space using the Logic Pro X program was to clarify how to establish several different crossfades that glue them all. That was tricky, but not impossible. Because of the excess of the tracks length that the pieces imply, it was necessary to make concrete a logical system to tie all the sound material. This is a piece around one hour long, so Xenakis had to use two seperate reels of approximately half-hour each to complete the duration of each track. According to his technical notes, he had to set an analogic/manual synchronization system able to play the whole material without discontinuities.
Within the editorial notes of the piece, there are available two graphical references to make this task. The first one is a score-structure of the tape, in which the different sound materials of the pieces are represented onto a schema with temporal references at the top. There is a sort of shaded area in grey that indicates, in a pretty undetermined way, in which part should operate the crossfade at the eight tracks at once. Nevertheless, there is a second graphical reference, which indicates just the waveforms of each sound track as they are, in a non symbolic way, including as well time references at the top. In both schemes, time references are pretty general, not accurate, a fact that makes impossible a synchronization taking the second or less as unity. This second representation indicates invariably the actual length of each track, so it seems logical to take it as the main guide, combined with the score-structure scheme, to determine the solid steps to make this crossfading task. Furthermore, in the waveform scheme, a collection of vertical lines represented where the material must be crossfaded, ruled by one single meeting point. The true thing is that, if you try to do according to this indication, the materials of the eight different tracks do not match each other, as for to finish the eight at once.
Therefore, I solved the whole inaccuracy by merging both schemes and, above all, putting the whole attention of the waveforms at the tails of the first reels materials, in order to match them with the waveforms at the beginning of the second reels materials. That was really the key to do so. One thing you discover on doing that, is that Xenakis did not want all the tracks finishing together at once, but with different ending points. Following this implacable logic, whilst tracks 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 finish at once, tracks 3 and 6 must be finished seven seconds before. That is how this synchronization problem was sorted. The result was a continuous, no gasps, fluid effect within the sound discourse.
There were in total two performances of the piece. November 7th was an open-air performance at one of the three polyhedric big C3A’s atrios, whilst the 8th was performed at the interior of Caja Negra, its main concrete-made scenic space. The first one represented a kind of quasi-symmetrical design, proper for a sound diffusion calibrated and uniform. People was walking around the space during both performances, so that made the experience aurally enriching.
With the support of Guillermo Garrido, we designed using the 3D design SketchUp program several layouts for the second performance. Here sounds were much more intriguing, since the space offered an opportunity to behave as a real instrument. The main idea was to recreate the original urban design of Persepolis by depicting throughout the distribution of the stereo pair sources, as imaginary images, the old door thresholds of the city. During the performance, I followed the instructions by Xenakis, who recommends to play the piece dealing with the different soundtracks at the mixing console behaving as an orchestra conductor. It was really fascinating to get involved in both, the production and the creative process in both concerts, working within such a human team.
Ismael G. Cabral wrote an article at magazine Scherzo that describes pretty accurately how happened along the second evening (in Spanish). Many thanks for this superb review:
https://scherzo.es/cordoba-deambulando-entre-las-ruinas-de-persepolis/
