Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis (Ιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 Romania - February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer and architect who spent much of his life in Paris, France.

He was born in Brăila, Romania, and studied architecture and Engineering in Athens, Greece. Xenakis participated in the Greek Resistance during World War II and in the first phase of the Greek Civil War as a member of the students' company Lord Byron of ELAS (Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos, Greek Peoples Liberation Army). He received a severe face wound which resulted in the loss of eyesight in one eye. After the war, his involvement in the Greek nationalist movement in British-occupied Athens led to a death sentence. In 1947 he fled under a false passport to Paris where he worked with Le Corbusier. While his assistant, Xenakis designed the Pavillon Philips in Brussels, home of the première of Edgard Varèse's Poème Électronique at the 1958 Brussels International Fair. Later, he composed one of his most famous pieces, "Metastasis," based on the architecture of the Pavilion itself. It remains one of his biggest masterpieces. Xenakis played in many world expositions and fairs. He played annually in the Shiraz Art Festival in Iran.

He studied music composition with Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen. He is particularly remembered for his pioneering electronic and computer music, and for the use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases in Pithoprakta, aleatory distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, Gaussian distribution in ST/10 and Atrèes, Markovian chains in Analogiques), game theory (in Duel and Stratégie), group theory (Nomos Alpha), and Boolean algebra (in Herma and Eonta). In keeping with his use of probabilistic theories, many of Xenakis' pieces are, in his own words, "a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions." Unlike most of his contemporaries in the vein of mathematical music (i.e. Milton Babbitt, Schoenberg), Xenakis did not want the listener to be aware of the forms and theories used to produce his compositions.

In 1966, Xenakis founded the Centre for Automatic and Mathematical Music in Paris and subsequently set up a similar centre at Indiana University.

In 1962 he published Musique Formelles — later revised, expanded and translated into Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition in 1971 — a collection of essays on his musical ideas and composition techniques.

From 1975 to 1978 he was professor of music at Gresham College, London, giving free public lectures.

It is interesting to note that frequently in conversation Iannis Xenakis was keen to distance himself from being seen in too strict terms - like many other composers for whom method and structure were the easiest aspects of music to discuss verbally, he sees the role of such things as relative. One way to envisage this approach is that the method constitutes a thematic germ, a starting-point, and from there the normal musico-aesthetics, personal obsessions and practical considerations play their normal role in finishing and shaping the piece. Indeed from the 1970s onwards Xenakis' use of method became deeply assimilated into his general musical thinking and he reports in interviews from that time that the strict application of statistical processes was no longer necessary to produce the results he was looking for. It is also interesting to note that Xenakis appeared easily bored in interviews when people attempted to take an overly simplistic view of him as 'complex' - the various clichés surrounding him appeared to greatly annoy him in interview and he would frequently make recourse to the wider aesthetics of music in general and the other arts, in order to contextualise his contributions to music-making. In a sense his early statements about "looking at music statistically" were a response to what he saw as the mistake of placing too much emphasis on the likely benefits of applying methodology too rigourously. It is also important to note, however, that this does not constitute any true dichotomy between Xenakis and his peers - the application of single-minded rigour to composition in post-war music was relative and momentary, and as with his own work, the poetic and aesthetic significance of the gesture as a modern equivalent to programme-music, as well as the vital role played by musicality and music-editing/shaping has been widely undervalued in favour of simplistic characterisations of such music as purely intellectual. Overall then Xenakis' contribution to the modernist aesthetic arose from the understanding that things which happen according to rules can be changed without loss of overall meaning, and developed (immediately) into a freeform polyphonic style focusing on large-scale emotional control and a generalistic approach to melody.

Another glaringly obvious but often overlooked aspect of Xenakis' work is the kind of neo-classical naming convention. Many essays have been written about the formula titles of his numbered works but it seems very clear that his obsession in most of his titles was with ancient Greece.

Le Polytope de Cluny

Selected works

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