(; spelled in correct French transliteration, or in some early writings by the composer ) is an
orchestra
An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments:
* String instruments, such as the violin, viola, cello, ...
l work for 61 musicians by
Iannis Xenakis
Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; , ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and enginee ...
. His first major work, it was written in 1953–54 after his studies with
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithology, ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th century, he was also an ou ...
and is about 8 minutes in length. The work was premiered at the 1955
Donaueschingen Festival with
Hans Rosbaud
Hans Rosbaud (22 July 1895 – 29 December 1962) was an Austrian conductor, particularly associated with the music of the twentieth century.
Biography
Rosbaud was born in Graz. As children, he and his brother Paul Rosbaud performed with thei ...
conducting. This work was originally a part of a Xenakis trilogy titled ''
Anastenaria
The Anastenaria (, ) is a traditional barefoot firewalking ritual with ecstatic dance performed in some villages in Northern Greece and Southern Bulgaria. The communities which celebrate this ritual are descended from refugees who entered Greece f ...
'' (together with ''Procession aux eaux claires'' and ''Sacrifice'') but was detached by Xenakis for separate performance.
''Metastaseis'' requires an orchestra of 61 players (12
wind
Wind is the natural movement of atmosphere of Earth, air or other gases relative to a planetary surface, planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heatin ...
s, 3
percussion
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a percussion mallet, beater including attached or enclosed beaters or Rattle (percussion beater), rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or ...
ists playing 7 instruments, 46
strings) with no two performers playing the same part. It was written using a
sound mass technique in which each player is responsible for completing
glissandi
In music, a glissando (; plural: ''glissandi'', abbreviated ''gliss.'') is a wikt:glide, glide from one pitch (music), pitch to another (). It is an Italianized Musical terminology, musical term derived from the French ''glisser'', "to glide". In ...
at different
pitch levels and times. The piece is dominated by the strings, which open the piece in unison before their split into 46 separate parts. The winds consist of piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, bass clarinet, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, and 2 trombones. The seven percussion instruments are xylophone, triangle, wood block, 1 timpano, tenor drum, snare drum, and bass drum.
A
ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
was choreographed to Xenakis' ''Metastaseis'' and ''
Pithoprakta
''Pithoprakta'' (1955–56) is a piece by Iannis Xenakis for string orchestra (with 46 separate solo parts), two trombones, xylophone, and wood block, premièred by conductor Hermann Scherchen in Munich in March 1957. A typical performance of ...
'' by
George Balanchine
George Balanchine (;
Various sources:
*
*
*
* born Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze;, Romanization of Georgian, : April 30, 1983) was a Georgian-American ballet choreographer, recognized as one of the most influential choreographers ...
(see ''
Metastaseis and Pithoprakta''). The ballet was premiered on January 18, 1968 by the
New York City Ballet
New York City Ballet (NYCB) is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company. Léon Barzin was the company's fir ...
with
Suzanne Farrell
Suzanne Farrell (born August 16, 1945) is a former American ballerina and the founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Farrell began her ballet training as a child in Cincinnati. In 1960, she received a ...
and
Arthur Mitchell.
Title
The Greek title Μεταστάσεις was transliterated by the composer himself in various ways when writing in French: ''Les Métastassis'', ''Métastassis'', and ''Les Métastaseis''. The Greek digraph ει is pronounced as "
i" in modern Greek, and the correct French transliteration is ''Metastasis''.
The title page of the published score gives ''Metastaseis
B'' in the composer's handwriting, and it appears typeset in this form on the score cover as well. The title, a ''
portmanteau
In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. '', in the plural,
[Harley, James (2004). ''Xenakis: His Life in Music'', p.256n5. Routledge. . "The word ''metastaseis'' is to be understood as being in the plural form, and is in fact often misspelled through overlooking this fact.] ''Meta'' (after or beyond) -''stasis'' (immobility), refers to the dialectical contrast between movement or change and nondirectionality. According to the composer's own description, "''Meta''=after + ''staseis''=a state of standstills—dialectic transformations. The ''Metastaseis'' are a hinge between classical music (which includes serial music) and 'formalized music' which the composer was obliged to inculcate into composition". These transformations include both the glissando mass events and the permutation of the
tone row
In music, a tone row or note row ( or '), also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometime ...
s.
The "B" (''beta'') refers to the revisions suggested by
Hermann Scherchen: reduction of the strings from
12-12-12-12-4 to 12-12-8-8-6.
Analysis
''Metastaseis'' was inspired by the combination of an
Einsteinian view of time and Xenakis' memory of the sounds of
war
War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...
fare, and structured on mathematical ideas by
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , ; ), was a Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture ...
. Music usually consists of a set of sounds ordered in time; music played backwards is hardly recognizable. Messiaen's similar observations led to his noted uses of
non-retrogradable rhythms; Xenakis wished to reconcile the linear perception of music with a relativistic view of time. In warfare, as Xenakis knew it through his musical ear, no individual bullet being fired could be distinguished among the cacophony, but taken as a whole the sound of "gunfire" was clearly identifiable. The particular sequence of shots was unimportant: the individual guns could have fired in a completely different pattern from the way they actually did, but the sound produced would still have been the same. These ideas combined to form the basis of ''Metastaseis''.
While in
Newtonian physics
time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
flows linearly at a universal rate, the Einsteinian view describes it as a function of
matter
In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic pa ...
and
energy
Energy () is the physical quantity, quantitative physical property, property that is transferred to a physical body, body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of Work (thermodynamics), work and in the form of heat and l ...
; change one of those quantities and time too is changed. Xenakis attempted to make this distinction in his music. While most traditional compositions depend on strictly measured time for the progress of the line, using an unvarying
tempo
In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for 'time'; plural 'tempos', or from the Italian plural), measured in beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given musical composition, composition, and is often also an indication of the composition ...
,
time signature
A time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, and measure signature) is an indication in music notation that specifies how many note values of a particular type fit into each measure ( bar). The time signature indicates th ...
, or
phrase
In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adject ...
length, ''Metastaseis'' changes intensity, register, and density of scoring, as the musical analogues of mass and energy. It is by these changes that the piece propels itself forward: the first and third movements of the work do not have even a melodic theme or
motive to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time.

The second movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a
twelve-tone
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale ...
row is used, with durations based on the
Fibonacci sequence
In mathematics, the Fibonacci sequence is a Integer sequence, sequence in which each element is the sum of the two elements that precede it. Numbers that are part of the Fibonacci sequence are known as Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted . Many w ...
. (This integer sequence is nothing new to music: it was used often by
Bartók, among others.) One interesting property of the Fibonacci sequence is that the further into the
infinite sequence one looks, the closer the
ratio
In mathematics, a ratio () shows how many times one number contains another. For example, if there are eight oranges and six lemons in a bowl of fruit, then the ratio of oranges to lemons is eight to six (that is, 8:6, which is equivalent to the ...
of a term to its preceding term comes to the
Golden Section
In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their summation, sum to the larger of the two quantities. Expressed algebraically, for quantities and with , is in a golden ratio to if
\fr ...
; it doesn't take long before the result is correct to several
significant figures
Significant figures, also referred to as significant digits, are specific digits within a number that is written in positional notation that carry both reliability and necessity in conveying a particular quantity. When presenting the outcom ...
. This idea of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Sequence was also a favorite of Xenakis in his architectural works; the
Convent de La Tourette was built on this principle. See:
Modulor
The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965).
It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the Imperial and the metric systems. It is base ...
.
Xenakis, an accomplished
architect
An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...
, saw the chief difference between music and architecture as that while space is viewable from all directions, music can only be experienced from one. The preliminary sketch for ''Metastaseis'' was in
graphic notation looking more like a
blueprint
A blueprint is a reproduction of a technical drawing or engineering drawing using a contact print process on light-sensitive sheets introduced by Sir John Herschel in 1842. The process allowed rapid and accurate production of an unlimited number ...
than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with pitch on one axis and time on the other. In fact, this design ended up being the basis for the
Philips Pavilion
The Philips Pavilion (; ) was a modernist pavilion in Brussels, Belgium, constructed for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair (Expo 58). Commissioned by electronics manufacturer Philips and designed by the office of Le Corbusier, it was built to hous ...
, which had no flat surfaces but rather assumed the shape of
hyperbolic paraboloid
In geometry, a paraboloid is a quadric surface that has exactly one axis of symmetry and no center of symmetry. The term "paraboloid" is derived from parabola, which refers to a conic section that has a similar property of symmetry.
Every pla ...
s like those used to model the musical "masses" and swells of his string glissandi. Yet unlike many
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
composers of this century who would take such a thing as the completed score, Xenakis notated every event in traditional notation.
References
Further reading
*Baltensperger, André (1996). ''Iannis Xenakis und die Stochastische Musik''. Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt. Cited in Hurley (2004), p. 356n9.
*Matossian, Nouritza: ''Xenakis''. London: Kahn and Averill, 1990. .
*Xenakis, Iannis: ''Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition'', second, expanded edition (Harmonologia Series No.6). Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992. . Reprinted, Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001.
External links
Los Angeles Philharmonicpiece detail, ''Metastasis''.
Perusal score at Boosey & Hawkes(requires free registration)
{{Authority control
Compositions by Iannis Xenakis
1954 compositions