For clarinet and percussion

The work Permutationen [Permutations] for clarinet and percussion, LWA[1] 64(1957) is one of the last works of the first creative period of Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994), about two years before he devoted himself exclusively to the graphic representation of his music. It seems that the great change in the expressive means that the composer used from 1959 to the end of his life was the basic reason why this work remained unperformed for more than half a century. The pointillistic technique of composition that Logothetis employs in this particular work is directly linked to total serialism, which was already completely developed in Europe at that time, and is fully attuned to the spirit of seeking new ways of organizing the musical parameters with the help of mathematical modelization. In this brief, 3½-minute-long piece, the composer tries to exhaust all possible transformations of rhythm, dynamics and distribution of musical instruments, upon a basic time unit of 1.33 sec, which is subdivided into a 7/16 bar. Seven permutation types were selected for the rhythmic organization of the duration of the notes and the pauses in each bar, in combination with all the permutation types of the subdivision of the same time unit into five equal component parts. The note sequences on the clarinet came from projections of intervals of fifth and fourth of particular groups of notes that were created by incorporating two twelve-note cycles and their inversions. The percussion include seven different instruments: six basic (triangle, cymbal, woodblock, snare drum, tenor drum and bass drum) and a gong. The distribution of the musical material among the six basic percussion instruments is done in an aleatoric manner, with a choice of 75 out of a total of 720 possible ways of allocating the musical material to 6 instruments (6!=720). The choice of dynamics of each note is made on the basis of a complex mathematical formula, the results of which are translated according to a number scale from 1 to 5, where 1 corresponds to the softest dynamics (pp) and 5 to the loudest (ff).
Yannis Samprovalakis