condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included. | A document of rare breadth and historical depth, spanning two decades of one of the most independent creative trajectories in European post-war music. Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994) - born in Burgas, Bulgaria, to Greek parents, formed in Vienna at the Academy of Music and Fine Arts - belongs to no school and claimed allegiance to none. He was, from the early 1950s, developing two parallel practices: an approach to graphic notation whose visual scores functioned simultaneously as artworks and as performance instructions, and a body of electroacoustic work that tracked the development of the medium from the tape studios of the 1950s through to computer music in the 1980s.

The three works on this Amadeo LP, issued in 1985 in the Österreichische Musik der Gegenwart series, map that arc. Anastasis (1961-69) is a "musical language adventure" - a work for voice and instruments, realized at the Arco Studio in Munich in 1971, in which the guitarist Siegfried Behrend and percussionist Siegfried Fink navigate Logothetis's graphic score through thirty minutes of concentrated, unpredictable motion. Behrend and Logothetis had collaborated since 1962; Styx (1968), dedicated to Behrend and originally written for plucked string orchestra, belongs to the same long partnership. Between them, on the B-side, sits Wellenformen (1981) - a computer composition programmed and realized by the composer himself at the EMS studio in Stockholm, one of the first major computer works by an Austrian composer. The LP includes a four-page booklet with notes in German and English and excerpts of the scores.

In 1962, Logothetis received first prize at the Athens Contemporary Music Competition - ex aequo with Iannis Xenakis. The pairing is instructive: both were operating at the outer boundaries of Western notation, and both found in visual form a way to think beyond it. Amadeo, 419 074-1, 1985.