La légende d'Eer

Iannis Xenakis - La légende d'Eer

CD released 2003

La légende d'Eer (diatope) 8-channel electronic tape

Played by Electronic Studio Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln

From the back cover:

Minimalist and wild, incisive and graphic, La légende d'Eer unfolds to the rhythm of the crackling of merging timbres in ductile electronic sound. Associated with a lighting device calling for one thousand six hundred and eighty flashes and four lasers, their beams reflected by four hundred mirrors, La légende d'Eer, ('Diatope') is an aural and visual experience - an epic score, a gesture of light and sound, in which the listener is invited to immerse himself in the 'corps sonore', as the composer suggests: 'I was thinking of someone in the middle of an Ocean. The elements are all around him, sometimes raging, sometimes calm.'

From a rough Google Translate translation of the liner notes:

Composed in 1977, The Legend of Eer is one of the longest electroacoustic scores of Iannis Xenakis.
To date, the composer wrote fourteen works of this kind, many of which have been designed in relation to the site of their release. For some, like Persepolis or Mycenae Alpha, this is a historic site open which was invested; for others, such as The Legend of Eer, Iannis Xenakis also imagine the place as a framework has broadcast. Imagine the place - in this case to the square in front of the Beaubourg Centre Georges Pompidou - and the band and light device that are associated with it Diatope meet the terms of a variety of polytope, a term that the composer used to denominate its musical and light installations. The Diatope Beaubourg represents a culmination in the series polytopes. In the inside of a shell whose plans were traces the composer, one thousand six hundred and eighty flashes are willing and four hundred mirrors variously reflect the rays of four lasers, and eleven speakers. In this show, the music and the lights are independent. The bright interventions and the course crees by displacements of lights are automated programs, but the meetings that occur with music - fixed, too, in its development - are fortuitous and each has different diffusion.

From notes by Richard Toop:

La Légende d'Eer [1977] marks a further stage in the alliance of music and architecture. In an interview to be found at the very end of Olivier Revault d'Allonnes' 1975 book on Les Polytopes, Xenakis is asked where he would like to locate his next 'spectacle', and he replies: "In the heavens and on the earth. Perhaps at Bonn or Paris (in the Beaubourg square). Remember the Myth of Er the Pamphylian (Plato's Republic, Book 10) and his column of light. As well as Poimandres (Hermes Trismegistus' Hermetics, Book 1), and the 'illuminations', the revelations of the Byzantine ascetics up to Gregory Palamas. As well as those of the Chinese and Japanese buddhists (Zen)."

In practice, it was the 'Beaubourg vision' that came good: Xenakis was asked to create a new 'polytope' on the square outside the Pompidou Centre, to celebrate the opening of the latter in 1978 (in the event, the premiere had to be delayed for several months). Though the resulting Diatope picked up some architectural threads from the Philips Pavilion of two decades before, there was at least one significant difference: here, for the first time, Xenakis was creating a space and the music for it, hand in hand, and seeking an architectural form (based on hyperbolic paraboloids) equally amenable to the reflexion of light and sound.

The title, The Legend of Eer, comes from the final pages of Plato's The Republic. Since so much of Xenakis' musical thinking has links back to his wartime experiences - to the mass movements of people and machines in the darkness, and to the extraordinary play of searchlights over cities under bombardment - it's hard to overlook Nouritza Matossian's parallel between the fate of Er, whose body returns to life after ten days, and that of Xenakis, who was initially assumed to be unsaveable after sustaining severe facial wounds. However, Xenakis insists he was "not inspired by the legend" and though he appended parts of Plato's text to his notes for the first performance (significantly omitting the passage on the Harmony of the Spheres!), he gave equal emphasis to other texts: Pascal contemplating Infinity in his Pensées, Hermes Trismegistus, and Jean-Paul Richter, as well as a recent [1976] Scientific American article by Robert P. Kirschner on supernovas.

Tracklisting:

1.  La legende d'Eer  {45:24}

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