16. A Myth of Recurrence in Iannis Xenakis’s La Légende d’Eer

Xenakis’s La Légende d’Eer has received much analytical attention, detailing the life stages of its cosmic soundworld: its origin, flourishing, and eventual disintegration. Many analyses have suggested a kind of symmetry between the beginning and ending, as if the soundworld has returned to its initial state. In contrast, in this chapter I argue that the symmetry and any corresponding ideas about closure are ultimately illusory, that the intimations of the opening sounds in the closing minutes in fact highlight the tragic impossibility of ‘recurrence’. The work enacts this theme on a smaller scale as well as it deploys rotations of shapes in an ‘epicyclic’ manner: cycles of the work’s constituent sounds layer on top of one another, creating fluctuations of intensity rather than being markers of forward motion. This intensity is a key component of the immersive character of La Légende d’Eer, and the source of its elusive temporal quality.