Lines from Xenakis's "Mists"


I had more fun than anticipated with the results of raiding Scriabin for vocabulary, so I did it again with another piano piece I'm very fond of: Xenakis's "Mists".

Here's the actual piece:

As before, my lines just grab something from a few passages, and they even mangle that a bit. In "Mists" the way the rhythms work is a key part of the piece, and again I've erased all that to bring the pitch content into focus. And again I've added notations based on how I might have come up with these lines that don't at all reflect how Xenakis thought about composition. As always, my intention is to learn to generate material that sounds like this on the fly, not to memorize and reproduce these particular phrases.







I was saved from some drudge work by this site, which has a MIDI file of the piece and quite a few others.