Metastaseis by Iannis Xenakis

On October 16, 1955, the world of contemporary music was violently upended. At the Donaueschingen Festival, a young Greek-French architect and engineer named Iannis Xenakis presented Metastaseis. Conducted by the Hans Rosbaud with the SWR Symphony Orchestra (then the Südwestfunkorchester), the performance was a "succès de scandale" that signaled the end of the post-war obsession with rigid serialism.

Metastaseis (meaning "dialectical transformations") was the first major work attempting to treat sound as a physical mass rather than a collection of individual notes. Xenakis, then an assistant to the architect Le Corbusier, applied mathematical and architectural principles to the score:

The Glissando Cloud: The piece famously opens with 46 string players starting on a single unison G natural, before peeling away into a massive, "hyperbolic" cloud of glissandi. Xenakis drafted the piece using graphic notation that resembled blueprints. These same geometric curves later became the physical basis for his design of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.

Moving away from traditional melody, the work focuses on density, temperature, and pressure—concepts Xenakis drew from his memories of the chaotic sounds of the Greek Resistance during WWII.

This release restores much of the spatial information and dynamics of the original 1955 broadcast tapes. While later studio recordings offered cleaner acoustics, this premiere capture contains the raw, visceral energy of an orchestra grappling with a "new language" for the very first time.

"I wanted to find a way to get from one point to another without breaking the continuity. The only solution was the glissando."
Iannis Xenakis

OTRJ 研究所 is a research center dedicated to the study, preservation and dissemination of the foundational works of 20th century contemporary and conceptual art music. An accompanying series of critically restored recordings will be released from 2020 onwards.