The Briish double bassist recalls his irst encounters with Iannis Xenakis’s solo work Theraps – including some frank exchanges with the composer himself

The composer Iannis Xenakis wrote one work for solo bass: the twelve-minute heraps, in 1976. I discovered it just a couple of years later, when I was looking to expand my repertoire and thought it was perfect: it’s an intense work, one that demands you throw yourself into it wholeheartedly, as well as containing moments of great beauty and fragility. At the time I was working on a programme of solo works – among them Jacob Druckman’s Valentine, which I was planning to perform in a red leotard, and Hubert Stuppner’s Rondo for a clown, which meant I had to run ofstage and come back in a clown outit. When the score for heraps arrived I thought it would be an excellent foil for the other two: it was music of great strength; the opening instruction is en écrasant (‘crushing the string’) and then the third bar goes from ff to pp, so it sets itself up as a piece of extremes right from the start.