As far as we, in the Grew sense, are concerned, his work stands head and shoulders above not just that of the others in the 1920s generation, but that of the second half of the twentieth century in general.

While he's on record as having a great admiration for Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, they don't seem to have had much tangible impact on his work. His very earliest extant compositions owe something to Bartók and Stravinsky (but the same could be said of almost anyone in his generation) but otherwise I'd see his work in a sense as the full flowering of the promise embodied by Varèse. Having said that, it would be very difficult to find any kind of precedent for Metastaseis (although some of it is distantly reminiscent of serial music), or his electronic music. I reckon his rethinking of musical composition went to a more fundamental level, and was applied more consistently and with more sense of perceptual reality, than in the case of any of his contemporaries, in whose work (with the exception of Morton Feldman) he seemed mostly uninterested. At the same time, though, as devising new methods of synthesizing electronic sound and of composing with it, he was happy to work within seemingly old-fashioned musical media like the piano quintet or the Schubert Octet instrumentation

It's rarely that I hear a piece by Xenakis without the experience being intensely moving.

Since I've already mentioned Feldman, here's an amusing record of a public conversation between him and Xenakis at the Middelburg Festival in 1986:

http://www.nieuwe-muziek.nl/ianmor1.htm

Thanks for that ringing endorsement, Richard - exactly what I was expecting from you! I don't want to divert this thread away from its ostensible subject before it's even got going, but just wanted to say that the only other C20th composer I can imagine speaking of in such terms - and indeed, many of the details of what you say would apply to him too - is Messiaen. Not an obvious comparison (except for the teacher link), but perhaps an appropriate one?

I've never really got Varèse myself. My loss, no doubt.

Could Howard Skempton be persuaded to join these boards, even if only briefly? He did materialise on the old boards - in the middle of a somewhat bizarre argument which involved (in turn) me, Ian and Paul Griffiths, IIRC! - and reappeared a few times with some pithy words on Webern and other subjects.

OK, I'll put my head above the parapet here, but I've yet to get Xenakis.

I can't pretend that I've involved myself enormously in his music - I've got three or four CDs-worth and seen several pieces live - but for a composer who is so often talked up as being the most immediately, even unavoidably, engaging of his generation almost all of it has left me cold. Psappha is the most notable exception I think, from which I do get a huge sense of latent energy.

Having got that off my chest, can anyone suggest a remedy?

(As for most successful of the 1920s generation - his name has already come up, but can I put in a word for Feldman?)

Maybe it's an either/or thing and I should stop worrying.

I said it first, Bryn. [/color]

Eh? Can't we scroll in colour?

Well, I know the majority of Xenakis's works, and have done for some time, also play Evryali and Mists regularly (also played Herma, Eonta, Palimpsest, Dikthas, Akea, Akanthos, etc.), also have written an article on his harpischord works. I still like him very much, but somehow the impact the music used to have upon me has dimmed a little. It's extremely visceral, powerful, etc., but nowadays I want a bit more than that. I don't find a great deal more to discover when I've heard the works a few times. Nowadays I'm more drawn to Boulez, Barraqué, Stockhausen, Nono of those born in the 1920s. Boulez I was somewhat luke-warm about for a while (still have reservations about some of the later pieces, including Derive, some of the versions of Répons and in particular Sur Incises, but was re-listening to Explosante-fixe recently, excellent piece), but now I'm coming back to him, appreciate it more.

I suppose in Xenakis I find his very broad brush approach to pitch and rhythm ultimately a bit limited. He could create archetypal effects very well, but his particular techniques didn't really allow for many more subtle things.