| Title | 10. Jean-Étienne Marie and Iannis Xenakis |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | The Vision of an Artistic Engineer and a Theorist of Microtonal Music |
| Contributor | Judith Romero Porras (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0390.12 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0390/chapters/10.11647/obp.0390.12 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Judith Romero Porras |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2024-10-09 |
| Long abstract | Jean-Étienne Marie, French composer and artistic engineer at Radiodiffusion Télévision Française from 1949 to 1975, was in contact with the most prominent composers of his time, among whom Iannis Xenakis. In this context, Marie participated as a technical engineer in the Greek composer’s works Oresteïa and Bohor. Later, Marie took on the task of delving theoretically into Xenakis’s compositional process, thanks to his status as an artistic engineer, defined as: ‘the one who makes sound shots, creating the necessary balance for a good diffusion of a concert. But he is also a musician, who has a musical, scientific, historical, and musicological culture’. Marie considers Xenakis’s music to be ‘a music beyond art, whose evolution in time is closely adapted to the curve of a meditation’. At the time, the musical literature available on composers such as Xenakis was non-existent. However, Marie analyzed and studied the Greek’s music, becoming the spokesman for this new music to make it known both to the knowledgeable public and to neophytes eager to understand these new artistic expressions. His experience as a music promoter since the founding of the Cultural Circle of the Conservatory in Paris in 1947 made Marie a respected scholar of contemporary music. The aim of this chapter is to approach Marie’s vision from the perspective of sound realization, that is, to describe the technical challenges imposed by these works, and their value as innovative works in the field of composition. On the other hand, I address how the study of Xenakis’s music allows Marie to approach and understand the compositional theory of meta-music; that is Xenakis’s sieves, a theory that the former compares with the microtonal theory of composers such as Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Alois Haba and Julian Carrillo. |
| Page range | pp. 167–180 |
| Print length | 14 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Judith Romero Porras obtained a BA in Classical Music at the Conservatory of Music of the State of Puebla, Mexico. In France, she obtained the same degree in Music and Musicology at Université de Paris-Sorbonne. On returning to Mexico, she took up her previous post as a teacher of ear training, piano, and French. In 2010, she received a scholarship from the Ministry of Education of the State of Puebla to begin a MA in Musicology at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Her work concerned the construction of a musical identity in Mexico in the twentieth century. Then, under the supervision of Marc Battier and Julio Estrada, she obtained a double PhD from Sorbonne-Université and from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her current research relates to the French composer and artistic engineer Jean-Étienne Marie and his relationship with Mexican composers in the second half of the twentieth century, and the evolution of Mexican music and the introduction of new techniques of composition in the 1960s.