Synergy Percussion presents Iannis Xenakis’ Pleiades

Overview

Music has an underground relationship with math and science. Few musicians attribute their success to a life-long obsession with the more measurable arts, but the numbers are there in the octaves, the kilohertz and the flanging. Tom Leherer briefly interrupted a successful career in mathematics with a successful career as a singing satirist. For Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, the companion to music was architecture. Working with famous designer and tower-block progenitor Le Corbusier, he helped design the famous Philips Pavillion in 1958, basing the building on parabolic mathematics he'd put into his early music.  Sydney percussion group Synergy are bringing his music to the City Recital Hall, performing the whole of his symphony for six drums, The Pleiades.

His symphony is named after a cluster of stars that hangs around the night sky near Orion, and which has a place in lots of mythologies around the world. Synergy did just an excerpt from Xenakis' Pleiades in 2008, and they're returning now to give you the whole story. The Pleiades contains many, many stars, only a few of which are visible to the naked eye. This symphony's six drummers are similarly small in number, but they'll connect you to hidden things in Xenakis' dark energy.

Original image by write_adam.