Mock-up of a chamber work in memory of Pierre Boulez.  Instrumentation: 2 flutes, violoncello, guitar, harp and vibraphone.

Seul dans un jardin de roses blanches, J'entends une mosaïque d'oiseaux - Homage to Boulez

Now as my men were on their way I said a word to them: ‘You think you are on your way back now to your own beloved country, but Circe has indicated another journey for us, to the house of Hades and the revered Persephone there to consult with the soul of Teiresias the Theban.’
	— Homer, The Odyssey

The name Nekyia is derived from the title of the 11th chapter of the Odyssey, at which point Odysseus and his crew have just escaped from Cerce’s island. But before they can return to Ithaca, they must make a ritual invocation of the Dead to obtain directions from the departed seer Teiresias. 
This composition conjures an image of the hero on the cusp of the transition from one adversity to another: first, enchantment, as on Cerce’s island; secondly, daemonic confrontation, as in the encounter with Teiresias. Alluring enchantment and terrifying confrontation merge and transform into one another. But in the end, they both recede like thunder rolling away, and we return “home” to our own here and now.
Nekyia was written in the late 1970’s at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), then a project of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). It was composed for the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer (also called the Samson Box after its creator, Peter Samson). Software written by myself and others at CCRMA directed the Samson Box to synthesize the composition in real time in quadraphonic sound. The piece won a prize in the 1979 Bourges Electroacoustic Music Awards. 
This composition has itself survived a strange oddyssey.  Soon after Nekyia was finished, the SAIL laboratory and equipment was disbanded, and it was several years until the Samson Box was operational again. Numerous trips to Stanford and the cooperation of several aging and infirm computer systems were required to capture the audio data of Nekyia in digital format before the Synthesizer was ultimately decommissioned once and for all. A stereo reduction of the quadraphonic original was produced from this data for Wergo Records Computer Music Currents #5. Like Odysseus, the data for Nekyia then slumbered for many years on a set of obsolete 9-track magnetic tapes, each the size of a serving platter. 
In the mid 1990’s, Perry Cook and I managed to locate (in the Chemestry Department) the only remaining tape drive on the Stanford campus that could read the Nekyia magenetic tapes. We used the newly invented Internet to transfer the data for Nekyia from that computer to one at CCRMA. Finally, we transferred the data to the newly invented CD-ROM optical media. Once again Nekyia had escaped from oblivion, reincarnated onto yet another transitory digital medium. 
The data slumbered for many years in this format. In 2002, thanks to Marsha Bowman, I discovered the only remaining copy of this master CD-ROM in CCRMA’s basement archives. (A year later this archive at the Knoll building was dispersed to make way for renovations.) A copy of Nekyia is now stored in the so-called Cloud. It has truely been an odyessian journey.

Gareth Loy is the author of Musimathics, a two-volume work published by the MIT Press on the mathematics of music. The photograph shows Gareth Loy in front of the backplane of the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1979.

Nekyia — Gareth Loy, Wergo 2025 - 2 Stereo Reduction Normalized

D. Gareth Loy

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