CLASSICAL MUSIC : Out-of-Character Overture to a Chat With Composer

Last week, while placing a Paris call to interview avant garde composer Iannis Xenakis, an unexpected and ironic prelude occurred. After the French operator told me to hold the line, there was a flood of gushing, recorded music that could have plunged a diabetic into instant insulin shock. After a few moments of saccharine melody, I heard the voice of Xenakis, the iconoclast who early in the 1950s had written off both melody and counterpoint as viable options for the serious composer.

Commencing today with a reception and solo percussion performance by Steven Schick, UC San Diego’s music department will fete Xenakis with a weeklong festival that includes three concerts, two seminars, one recital and an outdoor barbecue. Some 20 works by the noted and often controversial 67-year-old Greek composer will be performed, many for the first time in North America.

Xenakis freely admits that his compositions sound more like artillery on a battlefield than a shimmering evocation of pastoral repose. His musical signature is a series of intense sound clusters, “Throbbing, shifting, sliding, gliding, sputtering masses of dense sound,” as music historian Eric Salzman wrote of Xenakis’ 1983 string quartet “Tetras.” (Nearly all of his works have Greek titles.)

And why does Xenakis’ music resemble the sounds of military conflict?

“Because life itself is like that,” he said matter of factly. “It is a constant battle. Nature is also like that, surrounded by life and death.”

This dour outlook is not, however, the resigned conclusion of an ivory tower philosopher. A participant in the Greek Resistance against Nazi occupation forces--World War II interrupted Xenakis’ engineering studies--the partisan was wounded and lost the vision of one eye. Finding himself on the wrong side of Greece’s post-war politics, he took up exile in Paris, where he went to work for the architect Le Corbusier and simultaneously studied music at the Paris Conservatory under Olivier Messiaen.

Having roots in both engineering and music allows Xenakis to understand the affinities between these two disciplines.

“Art and science are usually perceived as opposites,” he noted, “but take the example of astrophysicists. They have to master mathematics, but they are more poets than scientists, because they cannot prove what they talk about, concepts such as the Big Bang Theory and so forth.”

Because Xenakis’ music is undergirded by complex mathematical formulas, usually designed with the aid of computer, he has been accused of introducing unnecessary complication into the art of music. Xenakis denies the novelty of math in musical composition.

“Math has always been a part of music more or less. In ancient times we had the Pythagoreans, and J.S. Bach used to use numerology in his works. It was an important mathematical concept of that time, and you feel it in his music. Unfortunately, with the 19th Century came the divorce between rational thinking and musical creation.”

At Xenakis’ government sponsored music research center in Paris, his experiments in mathematically noted music have led to a music-composing machine called UPIC.

“The system allows any one to compose by designing on a drawing board. When you draw by hand on the board, which is connected to a computer, the machine produces the music. Children as young as age seven have used system. It was my idea, stemming from the problems I had writing for the orchestra as a young man. It was my dream to be able to go directly from drawing to sound.”

Guitarists of the world, unite. No need to fret, Grossmont College’s 12th annual guitar festival hits its full stride this weekend. At El Cajon’s East County Performing Arts Center Friday night, the acclaimed Los Angeles Guitar Ensemble will appear in concert at 8 p.m. Marc Teicholz, winner of the 1989 Guitar Foundation of America competition, will perform solo in the college’s recital hall Saturday( evening. To climax this year’s programming, festival organizer Fred Benedetti and his musical better half MEANING? George Svoboda will play guitar duos Sunday night at ECPAC.

Grace notes from “The Magic Flute.” Mozart’s fairy tale opera “The Magic Flute” may be his most musically straightforward stage work, but people have been unraveling its complex symbolism since it premiered in 1791. San Diego Opera associate conductor Karen Keltner promises to dispel some of the mysteries surrounding the upcoming Mozart production in her lecture 5:30 p.m. Thursday in Civic Theatre’s Beverly Sills salon. Keltner will preside on the podium for the five “Flute” performances April 14-25 that will conclude the current season.

The local company continues its free lunch-hour “Opera on the Concourse” programs April 4 and 18 in front of Civic Theatre. Cast members from “The Magic Flute” will participate in tomorrow’s midday songfest.

Shades of P.D.Q. Bach. Not that the fun-loving members of the Canadian Brass are above musical humor, but their “Tribute to J. P. Souse,” as listed in the San Diego Symphony’s “Performing Arts” program last week, sounded a bit suspicious. J.P. Souse? Wasn’t he the Bavarian march king who was never sober enough to give Beethoven counterpoint lessons?