DESCRIPTION:
Orient-Occident, film music for 2-track tape & 4 loudspeakers (1960)

By 1960, Iannis Xenakis, who had worked as an architectural assistant to Le Corbusier for over a decade, was on his own, striking out as a professional composer. Through his association with the electronic music studio at Radio France known as Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), he was awarded a couple of commissions to produce soundtracks for documentary films. Orient-Occident, the only one to have seen life as a concert work and recording, was created for a film by Enrico Fulchignoni. The premise of the work was a portrayal of a whole range of ancient cultures, based on an exhibit of artifacts collected from throughout Europe and Asia. Interestingly, the director intentionally gave the composer complete freedom to create a soundtrack that would reflect the images and the intent of the film, but without needing to track the visual structure in any specific way.

Xenakis drew upon a range of unusual sound sources, including the sustained but distorted sound of a violin bow drawn over various objects. The sonorities are generally clearer, less noisy, than his other electroacoustic works such as Diamorphoses and Bohor. The crackling charcoal of Concret PH (1958) puts in an appearance, along with other "statistical" textures such as water droplets. Other percussive sounds tend to be repeated in patterns, evoking drumming patterns of the cultures presented in the film. The cultural resonances, though, are primarily evoked through the various timbres, or tone-colors, rather than specific rhythms or melodies. While the film was over twenty minutes in length, the version of Orient-Occident that has been disseminated as an independent composition is half the length, and remains an important work in the electroacoustic domain. [allmusic.com]

Art by Konstantin Batynkov