Bohor, for electro-acoustic sounds (1962)
Iannis Xenakis, who had been working as an engineering and architectural assistant to the famed Le Corbusier from 1947, was drawn to the electronic music studio, and its capacity for scientific experimentation. He began working at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) studio in Paris in 1955, and continued to produce tape works there until 1962. Studio founder Pierre Schaeffer had developed an approach to the discipline of electroacoustic music based on the classification and recombination of recorded sounds recognizably taken from the real world. He termed this approach "musique concrète," and it remains an important facet of the new compositional genre of pre-recorded or synthesized sounds. Xenakis, on the other hand, was primarily interested in studying the phenomenon of density, and the creation of noisy textures that were often quite nebulous in terms of semantic identity. Bohor, produced and premiered in 1962, was his most extreme work in this vein, and it marked the end of his association with the GRM studio (Pierre Schaeffer is reported to have hated it!).
At over 20 minutes in length, Bohor is a substantial piece, and would have been all the more impressive in its original eight-channel form. It is a radical study in formal construction, shaped from an absolutely continuous texture -- always loud, always noisy, and always unsettling. The shifts of density and introduction of new layers of sonority as the piece goes along keep the listener's interest, but the music is primarily concerned with maintaining a maximum level of energy and sustaining it for the duration of the piece. The intensity only increases, amazingly, right until the end, when the sound seems to be torn away, leaving a silence of released tension and ringing ears (Xenakis has always preferred to present his electroacoustic music at extremely high dynamic levels). Relentless intensity will soon cause the listener to tire and tune out (or run out of the room!), so one can only admire the subtle variation of texture and density Xenakis deploys in order to balance the violent energy of the noisy sonorities. This combination of expressive directness and formal integrity is a hall-mark of this composer's distinctive style. His later electroacoustic works, like Persepolis and Le Légende d'Eer, are even more ambitious. [allmusic.com]
