Stochastic
In 1957, the American composer Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) entered mathematical and statistical rules into the University of Illinois's ILLIAC computer. This enabled the machine to set the grammar of an auto-generated work for a string quartet; the Illiac Suite is the first score created by a computer.
In Paris, almost simultaneously, IBM offered Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) access to their super-calculator IBM 7090. As a young architect and musician, assistant to Le Corbusier and an avid mathematician, Xenakis opposed the serial music that was in fashion at the time. He thought that sound should be sculpted from a mass and that music was made of sound corpuscles animated by Brownian motion which statistical treatment could organise.
Inspired by the formal research of the Bourbaki school
that dominated mathematical research at the beginning of the 1960s, he applied Poisson distribution, Markov chains and set theory for the organisation of sounds. IBM produced the ST series – for stochastic music – and we can hear the re-orchestrated forms: Atrées, Morsima-Amorsima and, on the formal side, Herma, born of combinatorial set theory. Very rarely played, these works have the Vernian charm of anticipations of the past. We can rediscover them interpreted by some of the finest ensembles. KNM Berlin plays Illiac Suite, Morsima-Amorsima and Herma (18 March, Alhambra), and the Ensemble Contrechamps revives Atrées (22 March, Ansermet studio), comparing it to a creation by Alberto Posadas (1967), a Spanish musician who, following Xenakis' mathematical approach, composed using fractals.
Marc Texier - director of Archipel
