The music of Iannis Xenakis’ estranged Kassandra


 Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was a radically innovative composer. Violently persecuted for his leftist activism in the Greek Civil War that followed the Second World War, he fled Greece to live the rest of his life in Paris. One of the most explicit expressions of his resultant feelings of trauma, guilt, and displacement can be found in the vocal piece he called Kassandra (1987). This demanding work requires its two performers to enact and explore the alienation experienced by the prophet Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Xenakis’ Kassandra is defined by a symbiotic relationship between percussionist and vocalist, by a simultaneously controlled and improvisatory score based on extracts from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and by a striking use of the baritone singer’s falsetto as well as his chest voice. These features of the piece mark out Cassandra as ‘other’ in her origins, her sex, and her language, while also hinting that her characteristics are not entirely foreign, but are in fact understood or even shared by the very communities that initially seemed to exclude her.

displacement in time as much as space. He is quoted as having said, 'I felt I was born too late -I had missed two millennia . . . But of course there was music and there were the natural sciences. They were the link between ancient times and the present, because both had been an organic part of ancient thinking'. 1 Titles such as Evryali, Medea, Psappha, and Palimpsest abound in Xenakis' oeuvre, though not all perform an obvious or easily identified act of reception. 2 It is through some of the composer's more explicit engagements with ancient Greek texts, placed in the context of his own biography and the broader social and historical conditions that followed the Second World War, that it becomes possible to make sense of the tension between Xenakis' forward-looking iconoclasm and his compulsive evocation of the past. This article focuses on how these contradictory forces operate in Xenakis' short vocal work Kassandra (1987), which is based closely on the Cassandra scene in Aeschylus' Agamemnon.
Xenakis' feelings about ancient Greece -a time and place with which he strongly identified but which he could never visit -were doubtless informed by events in his life that left him dislocated from his own home. Xenakis began life as the outsider implied by his name, born in 1922 to a Greek family that had long been settled in Romania. 3 When he was 10 he was sent to boarding school on the Aegean island of Spetzes, where he claimed to have been mocked for his odd Greek accent. After he finished high school he moved to Athens to study civil engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, but at that point the Second World War broke out and Xenakis joined the communist underground resistance. With universities scarcely operative, he scrambled through some semblance of study over the next few years, while committing most of his energies to resisting both the occupying forces and the Greek royalist militias. But it was the disastrous events during and after the end of the war that triggered Xenakis' ostracism from Greece. In 1944 Xenakis was critically injured by a British mortar explosion as he was resisting the British-backed efforts to restore the Greek monarchy -part of the early skirmishing that would ultimately develop into the Greek Civil War. He lost an eye, and only narrowly survived after making it through twelve hours without emergency treatment, and then undergoing multiple operations to reconstruct his face. Xenakis struggled on in Athens for just long enough to complete his engineering degree, but as the Civil War dragged on and communists were increasingly persecuted he was ultimately forced to flee the country. The Greek authorities condemned him to death in absentia, brutally affirming his status as an outcast for the next thirty years. employed in the atelier of Le Corbusier, where he found common ground with the controversial Brutalist architect. In their different ways, both Le Corbusier and Xenakis were trying to think across scientific, artistic, and aesthetic fields. In the 1950s Le Corbusier's firm was designing huge apartment blocks called 'Unités d'habitation', miniature cities within a single building, designed as a new way to house those displaced after the ravages of the Second World War. For the Unité commissioned to be built in Nantes (1955), Xenakis designed the nursery that sits on the top of the building. He peppered its walls with rectangular windows placed at irregular intervals to mimic the appearance of neumes, an early system of musical notation. For the Dominican priory Le Couvent de Sainte Marie de La Tourette , Xenakis designed a chapel in the shape of a grand piano, and masterminded the construction of long stretches of glass panes along the external walls. The layout of these panes was determined by the same mathematical ratios that Xenakis was simultaneously using to structure his first major musical composition, Metastaseis (1953-54) -a work that Xenakis described as recalling the sounds of Athenian anti-Nazi protests and gunfire. 4 As Metastaseis shows, in Paris Xenakis had also begun to explore and develop seriously his interests in music composition. For this he had found support from the titan of French contemporary music composition, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen not only recognized Xenakis' unique set of skills, but also understood that he was trying to process and express the trauma of war and exile in ways that had little to do with conventional musical training at the time. Though a pacifist, Messiaen had also experienced the horrors of the Second World War from his time in the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he most famously composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps -'Quartet for the End of Time'.
Although Xenakis gradually built up enough of a following in the musical world that he could stop working in architecture and devote himself to full-time music composition, he never abandoned his interest in synthesizing space and time, sculpture and sound. This is most apparent in his Polytopes, the huge-scale pieces of performance art that he designed to animate specific spaces around the globe. Even their title transcends disciplinary borders: a neologism, rooted in Greek words evoking multiplicity (poly) and place (topos), it is a mathematical term that refers to a geometric object operating in multiple dimensions. Xenakis was not working in a vacuum: at the very time he was working on his first Polytope (for the French Pavilion in Montreal, 1967) case, his fascination with the worlds of antiquity increasingly drew him to the creative reimagining of spaces whose links with the past were visible. This reached its fullest expression in his later Polytopes, in which he applied sons et lumières to electrify ruins in Persepolis (1971) and Mycenae (1978), resuscitating the distant past by applying futuristic media -and contemporary communities of performers and audiences -to ancient material structures and landscapes. 6 This interest in revisiting and recreating the ancient world clearly had a personal component. Intersecting with Xenakis' interests in mathematics, engineering, and music, was his identification with the world of ancient Greece, and his understanding of how this identification counterbalanced a more general sense of alienation from the world around him. Consider, for example, how he presents his interaction with music from countries and cultures that are new to him, and how this transforms his appreciation of Greek history: '… in the 1950s, I discovered music beyond the European tradition: from India, Laos, Vietnam, Java, China and Japan. Suddenly I found myself in a world that felt my own. At the same time, Greece appeared to me in a new light, like the crossroads of remnants from a very ancient musical past'. 7 Xenakis appears to have discovered what was meaningful to him about the musical past of Greece by acknowledging his temporal and spatial distance from that world -that is, by embracing both anachronism and a global sonic perspective. At another time he wrote in jest to his wife: 'I am not a Roman decadent but a classical Greek living in the twentieth century '. 8 It is in his vocal works that Xenakis explores this dislocation most explicitly. Creating music to accompany Greek texts, in particular, forced Xenakis to confront his own unique experience of Hellenic identity, an identity that was dependent on his lived -and subsequently lost -experience of Greek space, time, and language. 9 Xenakis clearly intended to signal through his compositions a connection with the Greek past, with its places and its people, but he was also conscious of how much of an imaginative leap this communication process required for him, as 'a classical Greek living in the twentieth century' -and a classical Greek living in France, to boot. Echoing his memory of being mocked for sounding strange to his fellow Greek 6 On the Mycenae Polytope see Kotzamani (2014) with further bibliography. Chardas (2016: 91) quotes Xenakis describing the work as 'an artistic revival' in the programme notes. 7 … dans les années 50, j'ai découvert les musiques extraeuropéennes, de l'Inde, du Laos, du Vietnam, de Java, de Chine et du Japon. Je me suis trouvé tout à coup dans un monde qui était le mien. En même temps, la Grèce m'apparut sous un autre jour, comme le carrefour des survivances d'un passé musical très ancient. Xenakis, interviewed in Montassier (1980: 221).
Translations from the French are mine, except where noted. Vagopoulou (2006: 4) notes the influence of Japanese Noh theatre on Kassandra. pupils at boarding school, Xenakis described another disconcerting realisation of his own alterity when he finally went back to Greece in the mid-1970s, after the military junta fell and his death sentence was rescinded. After nearly three decades of absence, he found that the Greece to which he had returned was unrecognizable to him, and that his own native Greek speech had become antiquated and occasionally even incomprehensible. 10 Perhaps it should come as no surprise to find that as Xenakis' ties to the modern country of Greece frayed, his attachment to the world of ancient Greece only grew stronger. We can track Xenakis' growing interest in ancient Greece from the 1960s to the 1990s through his work on Aeschylus' Oresteia -a trilogy whose ancient complexities proved fascinating to many avant-garde composers. Before the twentieth century Aeschylus was not popular with composers of music. Static staging, difficult Greek verse abounding in flights of open-ended metaphorical imagery, and overt political messaging tended to deter all but the most committed of classically educated composers. 11 Yet the wars and political upheavals of the twentieth century triggered a renewed interest in Aeschylus' plays, as Ferrario explains: 'In a post-monarchical world that has experienced warfare on an unprecedented scale, dramas that expand beyond the human emotions to question absolutism, show the brutality of conflict, and perhaps even advocate for a just society have found an increasingly hospitable home'. 12 Ferrario also identifies the concomitant aesthetic shifts that made the challenge of Aeschylus more tempting to composers. As sound worlds became more radical, partly in response to the destabilizing trauma of the twentieth century, so the violence, surrealism, and sheer foreignness of Aeschylus' language grew in appeal. Ferrario describes Orff's use of Aeschylus' Greek in his Prometheus (1968), linking it back to Stravinsky's use of a Latin libretto in setting Sophocles ' Oedipus Rex (1927). The strangeness of the ancient languages in these works, along with the screaming, the lamenting, and the 'virtuosic, unconventional vocal delivery', creates an alienating effect that reflects the disorientating uncertainties of the century. 13 This wider appreciation of Aeschylean possibilities may explain why Xenakis reworked his settings of the Oresteia so many times. 14 In 1966 Xenakis wrote the music for an English-language production of the Oresteia at a festival in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 15 After the event he cut the piece down to become a concert suite, in the 10 Mâche (1993: 197). 11 Ewans (2018: 205) notes how difficult Greek choruses are to integrate into opera, and how Aeschylean language adds a further layer of complication. Ewans (2006) explores Aeschylus' profound influence on Wagner, but even Wagner was inspired only to adapt Aeschylean dramatic forms, not to set Aeschylus' own plays to music. 12 Ferrario (2016: 211). 13 Ibid., pp. 208-9. 14 Vagopoulou (2006: 4) notes how unusual it was for Xenakis to return repeatedly to the same work. 15 Dir. Alexis Solomos, using Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Oresteia. For details see Foley (2005: 209-10).
process reverting to Aeschylus' original ancient Greek text for a libretto intended to be sung by a chorus of either children or adults. In 1987 Xenakis revisited the composition while on a visit to Sicily, in which he stayed not far from Aeschylus' burial site at Gela. There he produced a new episode for his Oresteia, called Kassandra; it was a piece based on the Cassandra scene from Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the 250 lines in which the Trojan prophet attempts to communicate with the play's chorus before she follows Agamemnon into the palace offstage to face her murder (Ag. 1072-1330).
A few years later Xenakis returned to his Oresteia one final time to add La Déesse Athéna (1992), a piece in which he explored another passage of powerful female speech, setting to music Athena's lines from the Eumenides in which she establishes the court of justice in Athens (Eum. 681-708).
Aeschylus' Agamemnon is the first extant ancient Greek text to develop in detail the unique features of the prophet Cassandra and the situation in which she finds herself when she arrives in Argos, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Years earlier, back in Troy, Apollo had granted Cassandra true visions of the future, but after she refused his sexual advances the god had stripped her of the ability to communicate her knowledge regarding the future. Apollo ensured that whenever Cassandra was possessed by prophetic frenzy, her language effectively became incomprehensible, foreign-sounding, to her interlocutors. 16 In the Agamemnon Cassandra has been forcibly transported from Troy to Greece as part of Agamemnon's spoils of war. This means that, as a Trojan, she is quite literally a foreigner in a Greek-speaking world. She is also now an enslaved woman in a ruling household, and one who will become collateral damage in the generational violence that has engulfed the house of Atreus. Aeschylus emphasizes how Cassandra's life-story has been one of repeated victimisation and marginalisation in every respect: sexual, social, cultural, and linguistic. Her rambling and confusing narratives, wandering backwards and forwards through time and space, are presented as the natural product of a prophet who is also always tragically displaced in time and space. Yet Aeschylus gives Cassandra the opportunity to use that same freedom from narrative convention as a form of resistance to the oppression she faces in Greece. 17 Her voice, both heightened and hobbled in its reach, is the weapon with which she asserts her authority as someone who can tell -if not sell -the truth.
The Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon, then, reflects the challenges faced by social outcasts when they try to communicate their insights, no matter how truthful or profound those insights might be, and the range of communicative strategies that they might adopt to defy these challenges. 18 As such, the scene has appealed to many ancient and modern artists interested in voices of alterity and subversion. 19 Virginia Woolf, for example, responded powerfully to the figure of Aeschylus' Cassandra, as Prins has demonstrated. 20 For Woolf, the trouble that Cassandra has with making herself understood in the Agamemnon can, and should, be read as a radical portrayal of the difficulties involved in translating, particularly translating an ancient language whose riches have been co-opted by a patriarchal education system that largely excluded Woolf. From this the scene ultimately comes to stand for the difficulties involved in all acts of communication, linguistic or other. Woolf writes of Aeschylus' words: 'we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words'. 21 She finds this phenomenon at its most evident in Cassandra's first incoherent cry in the Agamemnon, in which the prophet produces a string of untranslatable noises that make it unclear whether she is speaking Greek or not, or indeed whether she is even speaking a human language at all. As Woolf wrote in her essay 'On Not Knowing Greek': 'No splendour or richness of metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶÁ / ὤπολλον ὤπολλον'. 22 Cassandra's 'naked cry' is sound, but not sense -or rather, its sense is its unmediated, untranslated sound.
With the twentieth century's growing appreciation of Aeschylus, creative artists working in a variety of media joined Woolf in responding to Cassandra's extraordinary speech in Aeschylus' Agamemnon with a similar combination of bafflement, fascination, and identification. 23 In each rewriting of Cassandra's role the representation of her linguistic estrangement maps onto a more contemporary experience of political, social, or cultural isolation. Cassandra is exotic, foreign, a Trojan in Greece; she is divinely inspired and cursed in a world of limited mortal understanding; she is a prisoner of war being brought into the house of her captors. She is therefore a figure for foreign exiles, for resistance fighters, for creative artists, for minorities, for feminists, for leftists, for the oppressed and marginalised and misunderstood. It is not hard to see why Xenakis might have felt impelled to return to his Oresteia suite to fill out the character of Cassandra. Xenakis found in Cassandra a figure who allowed him to explore in sound the frustrations and unexpected insights granted to those who have been uprooted from their homes, especially those for whom language, or the ability to communicate politically or artistically, has become fraught.  (2005); see also Pillinger (2017). 21 Woolf (198421 Woolf ( : 30) [1925. 22 Ibid., p. 31. 23 Goudot (1999).
The first striking feature of Xenakis' Kassandra is its instrumentation. This is all the more noticeable when the piece is performed as part of the Oresteia suite. The Agamemnon movement in the suite depends on a mixture of orchestral instruments and choral voices, all of which mark the play's concern with public display and the ostensible welcoming of the king Agamemnon as he returns to his people. Just before Kassandra is to be performed, there is a formal trumpet fanfare (marked a blaringly loud fortississimo), reinforcing an atmosphere of official, martial, civic activity. By contrast, Kassandra begins with an austere, if energetically syncopated, beating of skin drums, introducing the spare and intimate instrumentation that the work will employ throughout. 24 Xenakis scored the piece for only two performers: a percussionist playing woodblocks and those skin drums, and a baritone singer who would also play the Javan psaltery. He wrote it for two particular performers, the singer Spyros Sakkas and the percussionist Sylvio Gualda, so the sense of unusual intimacy is further reinforced by the ease of the three artists' collaboration.
The versatility of Sakkas' vocal talent inspired Xenakis to make the most dramatic innovation in this piece. Whereas in the rest of the Oresteia suite both choral and individual roles are performed by a chorus, or at least by small groups of singers, in Kassandra a single voice performs the part of both the chorus and the isolated prophet. Cassandra's speech is represented by the baritone singing in falsetto, while the chorus of old Argive men -or at least the chorus-leader -is represented by the same singer using his chest voice. 25 A similar move in La Déesse Athéna, also written with Sakkas in mind, sees the baritone hop in and out of falsetto to represent the male and female aspects of the goddess Athena. 26 Sakkas' vocal abilities allowed Xenakis to use one voice to dramatize a female-gendered insight (prophetic or divine) 24 The score instructs the performer to play with hands (mains), but the instruction is often ignored by performers, including by Gualda in the first recording of the piece, which is the recording referred to throughout this article. 25 Le baryton est successivement Cassandre dans son registre aigu et coryphée des vieillards d'Argos dans son registre grave -'the baritone is alternately Cassandra in his upper register and chorus-leader of the old men of Argos in his lower register', as Xenakis writes in the foreword to the score of Kassandra (Editions Salabert, 1987). In the score for Xenakis' Oresteia (Boosey and Hawkes, 1996), which is the final revision of the work but includes neither Kassandra nor La Déesse Athena (as they are exclusively published by Editions Salabert), the front matter oddly suggests that the baritone's role in Kassandra might be sung by a baritone plus one or two children instead. The details are not explained anywhere else in the Oresteia score, and the idea is not found anywhere in the score to Kassandra. It is hard to know what Xenakis had in mind. Would the children play the role of the chorus leader or of Cassandra? If two children were involved, how would their voices manage the highly improvisational melodic shaping -would they be expected to sing in unison or to present another kind of vocal fragmentation? 26 Wolff (2010: 298); Harley (2004: 45). Wolff (2010: 299) notes that the instrumentation of the rest of the Oresteia tends toward the extremes of pitch also found in Kassandra, stretching as it does from piccolo to tuba with little in the mid-range.
in attempted conversation with a male-gendered response. 27 In an interview with Vagopoulou, Sakkas identified his collaboration with Xenakis as part of a compositional process analogous to Cassandra's inspiration: 'I believe that [Xenakis'] kind of inspiration goes hand in hand with the performer's dexterity … . Kassandra comes as a delirium; no matter if there is a text behind it, it is in fact a delirium.' 28 Xenakis' inspiration for Kassandra certainly manifests itself in a carefully calibrated sharing of the interpretative process with his performers. He directs precisely the rhythms of the percussion, as well as the untempered tuning of the psaltery, and he marks the relative pitches of both drums and woodblocks. 29 Xenakis denotes the voice of Cassandra with a treble clef, and that of the chorus with a bass clef. The melodic line of the voice within those distinctions, however, is marked purely in terms of graphics that indicate rising or falling pitch, with further directions as to the vocal attack and timbre. In his foreword to the score Xenakis describes the notation as being 'neumatic' in fashion -like the windows he had designed in the nursery of the Unité d'habitation at Nantes -but in fact the wandering line (literally a line, rather than dots, on the musical stave) is more impressionistic still than even the relative pitches marked by medieval neumes. 30 The singer is instructed to match his semi-improvisational melismatics to the tetrachords he has selected to play on the psaltery, which in turn he is encouraged to choose on the basis of his own interpretation of the character of each passage. 31 The electronic amplification of the 27 On the female gendering of prophecy in the ancient world, particularly in relation to prophets granted their visions by the god Apollo, see Fowler (2002), Brault (2009), Miller (2009, and Pillinger (2019: 12-16). 28 Vagopoulou (2007: 213). 29 Wolff (2010: 289) notes how often, since Milhaud's Les Choéphores (1915), twentiethcentury composers have used abrasive, stark percussion sounds to evoke ancient Greek tragic performance, despite the lack of evidence for percussion in the original productions. Wolff attributes this to composers' desire to evoke the imagined acoustics of archaic ritual and to 'other' the sound-world of their compositions. Brown (2004: 286) discusses related attempts to engage with the musical traditions of Africa or East Asia -as Xenakis also does -to defamiliarize, at least for modern Western audiences, the performance world of ancient Greece. 30 La notation est du type neumatique afin de tenter une approche nouvelle de la voix qui soustend le texte d'Aeschyle -'The notation is neumatic in style, to try out a new approach to the voice that supports the text of Aeschylus'. Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra (1987). 31 Le baryton accorde les mouvements de sa voix sur l'un des tetracordes qu'il choisit selon les séquences du texte et leur caractère -'The baritone pitches the movements of his voice to each one of the tetrachords that he selects according to the development and character of the text'. Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra (1987). See Harley (2004: 188-9). It should be noted that Sakkas (2010) strongly resists the suggestion that a good performance of Xenakis' vocal works is ever truly improvisational.
singer's voice, suggested in parentheses in the score, adds one further layer of technological anachronism, even as it reinforces the power and intimacy of the words voiced. 32 All of these moves combined serve to remove the piece that much further from the conventions of the European classical music tradition. Xenakis and his performers construct a radical sound that avoids as far as possible the tonal patterns of any other piece of music -including those of any other performance of Kassandra, since every iteration of the piece will depend on the singer's interpretation of the notation. The connections that the work builds are, instead, those that arise in the moment of performance. As Sakkas observes: 'The work is expressed according to the way it will be played by the performers and by the rapport that will develop between the musicians and the public, both of whom are participants in a ritual'. 33 And there is one more sonic connection that Xenakis embraces in the piece. The composer insists that the singer must attempt to replicate the pronunciation of fifth century Attic Greek. His notion of this ancient Greek pronunciation is fairly idiosyncratic, as can be seen in both the Latin transliteration he provides in the Kassandra score and the more detailed instructions for pronunciation found in the foreword to the Oresteia score. 34 Still, the sound of Aeschylus' language, articulated as it is by the solo singer's malefemale voice, is identified as one of the few acoustic constants in Kassandra, an anchor within each performance of a piece that otherwise swirls in anarchically jumbled sounds of past, present, and future. 35 This combination -sometimes conflict -of rigidly controlled text and limitedly controlled music enables a unique fidelity to Aeschylus' Agamemnon; it allows each performance of the work to portray several of the most important aspects of Cassandra's communicative difficulties in the ancient play. This begins from the very opening sequence of Kassandra, in which the audience is introduced in swift succession to the various parts that construct the work. Firstly the percussionist beats rhythmically on the drums, accelerating into a tremolo that fades away to nothing. Next the singer enters playing the role of Cassandra and plucking the psaltery. Then, after the first phrase, the singer abruptly switches into the voice of the chorus to 32 Connor (2000: 38) explores the intimacy of electronic amplification: 'The microphone makes audible and expressive a whole range of organic vocal sounds which are edited out in ordinary listening; the liquidity of the saliva, the hissings and tiny shudders of the breath, the clicking of the tongue and teeth, and popping of the lips … '. 33 Sakkas (2010: 312). 34 Xenakis' instructions combine elements of Erasmian and modern Greek pronunciations without any clear rationale. One of the anonymous readers for CRJ helpfully pointed out that Xenakis' instructions would make a Greek singer like Sakkas less comprehensible to a modern Greek audience than if he were left to sing the words with a regular modern Greek pronunciation. 35 Chardas (2016: 110) 110 explores Greek twentieth century composers' broader habit of using the language of ancient Greek to signal the 'unending significance' of their subject matter. deliver a response to Cassandra. (Sound clip 1.) This back and forth, punctuated by episodes of solo woodblock, will continue for much of the work. The first words sung are a version of Cassandra's first words in the Agamemnon, the very same stutterings that Woolf found so powerful: ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶÁ / ὤπολλον ὤπολλον -'otototoi popoi da; / Ahpollo Ahpollo' (Ag. 1072-3). 36 In Aeschylus' Agamemnon these first sounds uttered by the prophet are anticipated by an exchange between the chorus and Clytemnestra in which they speculate on the kind of speech the as-yet silent Cassandra might deliver, and wonder if the Trojan princess might need a translator. Among those exchanges Clytemnestra associates Cassandra's barbarian speech with that of a swallow (Ag. 1050-2): ἀλλ' εἴπερ ἐστὶ μὴ χελιδόνος δίκην ἀγνῶτα φωνὴν βάρβαρον κεκτημένη, ἔσω φρενῶν λέγουσα πείhω νιν λόγωι.
But unless she is, like a swallow, possessed of an unintelligible foreign voice, by speaking within her mind I am persuading her with my argument.
From the moment the voice enters in Xenakis' Kassandra we are reminded of Clytemnestra's speculative characterization of Cassandra. Xenakis may not specify the exact pitch of the falsetto voice, but he demands an absolutely precise attack throughout the work, which results in a birdlike articulation reminiscent of Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux -'Catalogue of Birds'. The breathless staccato of 'otototoi' is carefully marked by separate curved lines on the score. The voice must then transition into a glissando, marked by a curving line, then a wide vibrato, marked by a wiggly line, and finally into an unusual fluting sound, marked by a broken line. Xenakis brings the Greek accentuation into play, too: simple stress marks ('/') above the stave replace the polytonic accents of Aeschylus' text, but the fluctuations in the pitch line map approximately onto the rising and falling indicated by the ancient accents that Xenakis has omitted. The result is a simultaneously stressed (modern, monotonic) and pitched (ancient, polytonic) version of Aeschylus' Greek ( Fig. 1).
This falsetto line is immediately followed by the chorus' response, which the singer delivers in chest voice: τί ταῦτ' ἀνωτότυξας ἀμφὶ Λοξίου; -'Why do you cry out 'otototoi' to Loxias [Apollo]?' (Ag. 1074). This jump from falsetto to chest voice virtually without a breath introduces the most astonishing feature of the piece: the combination, and virtual overlap, of multiple characters in one single singer's overstretched voice. Even Sakkas, whose remarkable vocal agility helped to inspire 36 Xenakis writes Ἀπόλλω rather than ὤπολλον. All translations from the ancient Greek are mine. and shape the piece in the first place, is pushed to his limits, so that his voice cannot help but express the strain of representing both Cassandra and the chorus that is trying to understand her. Sakkas describes Xenakis as leading the performer 'into highly dangerous conditions for one's spiritual and bodily integrity'. 37 This strain, which begins here in the first lines but will continue and indeed increase over the course of the work, operates in two competing directions. On the one hand the dramatic fragmentation of the singer's voice into multiple characters suggests that the piece is exploring a breakdown of communication that is so powerful it splits the individual performer at the centre of the piece into a broken embodiment of that communicative failure. This fragmentation ripples out beyond the singer, as the relentlessly precise, rhythmic drumming is jarringly juxtaposed with the glissandoing, wandering movement of the voice(s) and the gentle plunking of the psaltery. Even the two performers appear initially to be pitted against each other in their articulation of quite different kinds of musical language.
On the other hand, there are similarities in the ways Xenakis constructs the percussion and the vocal lines. Both employ sudden shifts of dynamics, attack, and tremolos of different speeds, and the percussionist switches between drums and T H E M U S I C O F X E N A K I S ' E S T R A N G E D K A S S A N D R A 81 woodblocks in the same way that the singer switches between chest voice and falsetto. As Xenakis describes it, 'The percussion consists of skin drums and woodblocks punctuating or commenting on the text'. 38 The vocalist and the percussionist may be using different musical languages, but the languages complement each other and appear to be mutually comprehensible. Even their physical efforts match: Sakkas notes that by the end of a performance of the piece he and Gualda were 'both gasping for breath'. 39 He observes that the audience, too, is led 'breathless to the work's end '. 40 This symbiosis of the performers, along with the sympathetic engagement of the listeners, encourages a more positive reading of the fragmentation experienced by the singer playing both Cassandra and the chorus. The singer is not an individual who is dissociating and disintegrating over the course of the performance; he is, on the contrary, the incarnation of shared experience. The singer is two separate but allied voices, and he represents within one single human body, one single vocal tract, the struggle of both the individual Cassandra and the community of the chorus to breach their mutual foreignness. It is fitting that their first exchange is triangulated through an appeal to Apollo, the god who has created such communicative mayhem for Cassandra, and who is here identified as the god of linguistic confusion with his cult title 'Loxias' -'the riddler'.
As Kassandra develops, it builds upon this fraught but collaborative communication that is taking place between the musicians and within the body of the singer. Soon the work widens its scope, to welcome the integration of entire communities that are foreign to each other. In Xenakis' work, as in Aeschylus' play, Cassandra's birdlike sounds are closely linked to her identity as a barbarian, a non-Greek. 41 At one point in the Agamemnon the chorus expresses its astonishment at Cassandra's clear knowledge of past events that took place in Argos, even though the prophet was living in Troy at that time (Ag. 1198-1201): καὶ πῶς ἂν ὅρκου πῆγμα γενναίως παγὲν παιώνιον γένοιτο; hαυμάζω δέ σου, πόντου πέραν τραφεῖσαν ἀλλόhρουν πόλιν κυρεῖν λέγουσαν ὥσπερ εἰ παρεστάτεις.
And yet how could the binding security of an oath honestly secured be helpful? Then again I am indeed amazed at you, how, brought up beyond the sea and talking about a foreign-speaking city, you are as accurate as if you had been present here. The moments when the chorus can see the truth in Cassandra's speech -that is, when she describes events in the past rather than the future -are striking to them not because they come from a prophet, but because they come from a foreigner. How does Cassandra know about things that happened in the house of Atreus when she was living on the other side of the Aegean? And how can she express the narrative of the past in such clear Greek when her incomprehensible prophecies make her sound so foreign? Xenakis decided to highlight this moment in which the chorus is surprised and impressed by Cassandra's knowledge, by making some drastic cuts to the text that precedes it. Xenakis instructs his singer to deliver Cassandra's cry ἰώ (Ag. 1136) in the form of a drawn-out groan marked fendu -'cracked' -in the score, then has the cry fade into an extended passage on the psaltery. The composer cuts the following sixty lines of stumbling communication between Cassandra and the chorus in the Agamemnon, and instead jumps directly to the chorus' lines quoted above (with a couple of small changes). The chorus' respectful appreciation of Cassandra's insight now responds not to the prophet's words, but to her broken howl and to the twanging strings that follow it. Cassandra is being validated and embraced by the chorus in all her alien incomprehensibility. (Sound clip 2.) The prominence of the psaltery at this point is significant because, as Xenakis wrote in the foreword to Kassandra, he believed that its sound could signal both a spatial and a temporal shift: 'The Psaltery, a copy of a 20-stringed instrument from Java belonging to Maurice Fleuret, is a remarkable descendant of the ancient lyre. It is strung in 6 perfect fourths with two intermediary pitches, creating a global scale that is non-tempered and non-diatonic'. 42 Lifted (appropriated) from its Southeast Asian origins the geographical and cultural displacement of the psaltery allowed Xenakis to represent his translation of Aeschylus' original text across space and time. The instrument is avowedly inauthentic, but it is an attempt to be truthful to the sounds of ancient Greece. In taking over from Cassandra's cracked and inarticulate cry the psaltery offers its own version of Cassandra's 'otototoi'; beyond verbal communication and outside notions of past and future, its unfamiliar sounds (in a European context) nonetheless convey an integrity that the chorus recognizes even though there are no specific words to which they can respond. As they say to Cassandra, but also to the psaltery: 'you speak and are as accurate as if you had been present here'.
Having expanded a single voice to encompass multiple bodies, and having used the Greek language and the Javan lyre to celebrate the value of foreign speech and sound, Xenakis goes on to develop one further feature of Cassandra's position: her role as a woman communicating, for the most part, with men. Cassandra's 42 Le Psaltérion, copie d'un instrument à 20 cordes de Java appartenant à Maurice Fleuret est un succédant remarquable de la lyre antique. Il est accordé en 6 quartes justes conjointes avec deux notes intermédiaires formant une échelle globale non-tempérée et non diatonique. Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra (1987). Maurice Fleuret (1932Fleuret ( -1990) was a composer, critic, and ethnomusicologist who championed contemporary and global music.
vulnerability as a mortal woman is crucial in the ancient Greek myth. It is Apollo's attraction to her and her denial of him that brings upon her the curse of being both truthfully prophetic and doomed never to be understood. 43 This situation is revealed in its most explicit physical dimension when Cassandra finally accepts her fate at the very same time as she prophesies it (Ag. 1256-94). 44 At this point in the play, as Apollo mentally assaults the prophet with his inspiration, Cassandra hurls away the accoutrements of her prophetic skill (Ag. 1264-70) in a grotesque act of undressing that may be read as either her ultimate submission to Apollo, or a defiant (second) act of rejection. Hall notes the additional frisson that male actors cross-dressing could bring to such a scene from antiquity onwards, particularly in a twentieth century when directors were able to represent more diverse and fluid genders and sexualities on stage. 45 Xenakis' singer, presenting now as male and now as female, has already performed this diversity and fluidity through his vocal modulations. Here he gets to reinforce this by gesture too: this action of discarding Apollo's symbols is, significantly, one of the few stage directions that Xenakis marks in the score. In Xenakis' piece the tension leading up to this moment builds through an increasingly frantic exchange between Cassandra and the chorus. It begins with them acknowledging the limited success of their current communications (Ag. 1239-45), and then accelerates through several lines of stichomythia (Ag. 1246-55) in which Cassandra cannot help but continue to articulate the events to come while the chorus attempts some quibbling interjections. Finally, Cassandra takes over with an extended prophecy. Xenakis sets almost all of this speech, concluding only at the moment where Cassandra foresees the arrival of her avenger, Orestes. Cassandra identifies him, significantly, as another exile: φυγὰς δ' ἀλήτης τῆσδε γῆς ἀπόξενος -'a refugee, a wanderer, an exile from his land' (Ag. 1282). This is the point in Kassandra where the singer, who has perforce been leaping in and out of falsetto during the stichomythia, brings his portrayal of the inspired prophetess to a climax. His voice, now almost screaming the constant falsetto of Cassandra's inspiration, starts to break. The chest voice begins to make itself heard through the strain, and the pretence of the female persona starts to break down. Finally, in a howling cry that follows the vision of Orestes' arrival, the male voice emerges from concealment. The singer is instructed to produce a fluting glissando which moves in a quite extraordinary slow slide through all the vocal registers, from the treble to the bass clef, from Cassandra's falsetto into the chorus' baritone. (Sound clip 3.) The glissando is a remarkable moment that reveals the bare bones of the performance, while also exposing and then conflating all the apparent dichotomies explored by the work as a whole. These seconds are totally given over to what Barthes 43 For a couple of different approaches to the possible events that may have led to Apollo's curse on Cassandra see Kovacs (1987) and Morgan (1994). 44 On the ineluctable performativity of Cassandra's prophetic voice, and the connection between her uttering and accepting the future, see Pillinger (2019: 16). 45 Hall (2004: 15). describes as the 'grain' of the voice, 'the body in the voice as it sings'. 46 The singer is no longer a prophet and a chorus, a local and a foreigner, a man and a woman. The singer is a single body with a single voice. This reinforces the work's earlier hints that the communicator Cassandra is ultimately not so different from her receptive interlocutors, that the foreign female prophetic voice is not so distinguishable from the native male choral voice. The individual visionary cannot be extricated from the community that depends on such a figure; everyone is implicated in the outsider's struggle to be heard.
Kassandra explores the prophet's distance from and yet enduring connection with her interlocutors, her home (language), and her sex. Underpinning this tension between disruption and continuity is Cassandra's defining superpower: her ability to wander away from, and then return to, her own moment in time. This the figure of Cassandra does, first and foremost, through her prophecies, for her visions give her the ability to transcend time although her body is trapped in the mythic past. But she also transcends time through her reception in the works of artists such as Xenakis. If the music of Kassandra at first strikes its audience as alien, unfamiliar, and futuristic in ways that take Cassandra ever further away from her ancient Greek past, every detail can also be understood as an attempt to resituate Cassandra in the fifth century Greece of Aeschylus -or rather, in the Bronze Age world filtered through Aeschylus' drama. In Kassandra Xenakis aspires to an authentic voicing of the past through the compositional techniques of the present, while he also consciously defers to the interpretative decisions of future performers, collaborators, and audience members. There is no attempt to disguise the temporal layers that lie beneath the voice of Cassandra in Kassandra, no attempt to trick the audience into feeling comfortably based in either the present or the past. In a way that suits the figure of Cassandra -and Xenakis -so well, the composer is demonstrating how one's language (musical, verbal, cultural) can feel at odds with one's spatial and temporal environment, and yet still engage meaningfully with others in that environment. As Wolff says of so much of twentieth century music's engagement with the classical world: 'The distant past has partially become timeless, and offers an enticing combination of being both distant and other, and somehow also part of us'. 47 In a collection of responses to Xenakis' work published some years before Kassandra was written, the novelist Milan Kundera reveals that he developed a particular appreciation for Xenakis' music in the late 1960s, when Russia invaded his home country, Czechoslovakia. 48 Kundera describes the strange kind of comfort that the music granted him, and dubs Xenakis a prophète de l'insensibilité: something like a 'prophet of detachment'. Kundera explains that emotions are too easily mobilized in the cause of violence and repression. By contrast, Xenakis seemed to him to have successfully broken with the history of European music in order to pursue an objective, 46 Barthes (1977: 188). 47 Wolff (2010: 304). 48 Kundera (1981). rather than subjective, description of the brutal turmoil of the post-war years in Eastern Europe, and this rationalism spoke far more powerfully and truthfully to Kundera than any artistic histrionics.
In the foreword to Kassandra, six years later, Xenakis writes only one instruction for performance: 'The performance must avoid all emotional expression. For there is a serious danger of imposing modern clichés on Aeschylus' text.' 49 The prophète de l'insensibilité demands that his musicians should restrain their emotions in performing his work, in order to avoid anachronistic perversions of Aeschylus' Greek words, whose ancient pronunciation he was so determined to replicate. In this effort to remain faithful to the Cassandra of the past, Xenakis takes what Kundera sees as the only legitimate approach to their turbulent contemporary world. Xenakis' presentation of Cassandra's estranged voice neither translates nor explains Aeschylus' text for his listeners. Instead he allows the ancient prophet to speak for herself through, over, against, and alongside the music that delivers her words.
At the same time, any performance demonstrates how impossible it is to channel the voice of this Cassandra without making a huge physical effort that inevitably takes an emotional toll on the performers and the audience alike. Cassandra's voice remains that of the swallow, the barbarian woman, the political exile, and the anachronistic prophet, but her voice is 'also part of us'. It is part of a sympathetic wider community that cannot stay detached, but identifies with the 'naked cry' of Woolf's reading, the delirium of Sakkas' singing, and the visionary sound of Xenakis' creating.
her work on Xenakis' Polytopes, and Richard Rawles took the trouble to check a score for me. Above all I am grateful to my parents, Edward Pillinger and Suzanne Cheetham Pillinger, for sharing their musical world with me.