System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Xenakis, Architect of Sound
By Matthew Ostrowski
Of all the European composers of the second half of the twentieth century, Iannis Xenakis was perhaps the most original and uncompromising. Trained as an architect and engineer, with no real precursors and little musical education, he produced music of both obsessive mathematical rigor and overwhelming primitive force. Almost single-handedly, he broke the stranglehold of Schoenberg’s serial approach and its descendants on European music. More avant-garde than the avant-gardists, he continued pushing on throughout his life, his final works as complex, prickly, and severe as those which first garnered him attention in the 50s.
Born in eastern Romania of ethnic Greek stock in 1922, he was ten when his family moved to Greece. Although always interested in music, he studied to be an engineer at Athens Polytechnic. During WWII he was a member of the Communist resistance, and fought Italians, Germans, and finally the British, who supported the installation of a right-wing dictatorship in Greece after the war. Wounded in the face by British shrapnel in 1945, he fought on until 1947, when he was captured by the regime, and condemned to death. He managed to escape, first to Italy and then to France. He remained a political refugee until 1974, when his sentence was finally revoked. He spent the remainder of his life in France, and taught part-time at Indiana University.
Upon his arrival in France, Xenakis found work in the studio of Le Corbusier. So great was his commitment to a formalist vision that the very shape of the notes in his early scores resembles his architectural designs. He befriended many of France’s major composers, including Messiaen, who advised him against studying music, yet introduced him to electronic music pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, who invited him to work at his studio. There he met the only composer he considered an influence, Edgard Varèse, and the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who became an early champion of his work. Scherchen arranged to have is first major work, Metastasis, composed for string orchestra and performed at the Donaueschingen music festival, the stronghold of German serialism.
It created a sensation. Instead of the pointillist, detail-obsessed music dominant at the time, listeners were faced with an assault of glissandi moving in gigantic, sweeping, gestures. The crisis of serial music was at hand. Based on the mathematics of large numbers and probability theory, Metastasis was as intellectually rigorous as the most scholastic work then being written, but it had an undeniable visceral power and simplicity despite its complex compositional techniques.
Xenakis’s interest was not in the individual note, but in the effect generated by masses of small individual events. The precise pitch and duration of any one note was insignificant; it was the behavior of hundreds or thousands of these events in concert that carried the emotive effect. His theories were laid out in his book Formalized Music (1971), an almost incomprehensible tract laden with complex mathematics.
He also began composing for electronics at Schaeffer’s studio. His first major work in this genre was Concret PH, (using only the sound of burning charcoal) composed for the Phillips pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, which he designed in collaboration with Le Corbusier. Conflict over credit for the building led to the two parting ways acrimoniously that year. Shortly afterwards, Xenakis split with Schaeffer as well, as the Greek’s approach also did not toe the aesthetic line in the electronic music world.
He turned to computers to generate his scores beginning in the early 1960’s, producing the works ST/4, ST/10, and ST/48 in 1962 (a considerable rate of increase in his output). He developed an entire arsenal of mathematical techniques for handling masses of notes, including the use of set theory and the creation of scales based on prime numbers. He also based much of his work on ‘polytopes’, tree-like structures which he used to generate architectural and laser light structures as well as musical ones. His works were fiendishly complex and difficult to play. His massive solo piano work Evryali (1971) had such a dense score that it was written with ten staves — one for each finger!
He continued to produce new pieces throughout his life, constantly trying out new ideas and approaches, with varying success. He often returned to Greek drama as an inspiration, with such pieces as Ais (1979), based on texts from Homer and Sappho, and The Goddess Athena (1992). Many of his works have become classics of contemporary music: percussion works such as Pleiades (1978), Bohor (1960) for electronics, and orchestral works such as Dox-Orkh (1991).
His lack of formal musical training left him to pursue his own rigorous mathematical vision, leaving him both outside the mainstream of contemporary music and the traditional bounds of taste and delicacy. Much of his work has an impersonal quality, but in its sheer grandeur lies the awesome impersonality of an indifferent god. His ideas have filtered into contemporary music, and many are now part of the standard arsenal of techniques available to composers. The past few years, he has also become something of an icon, or at least a name worth dropping, among younger musicians working on the boundaries of pop and experimental music. This is perhaps best illustrated by a recent re-release of his 1978 work for orchestra and tape Kraanergh, for which the liner notes were written by no less a scholar of classical music than DJ Spooky.
He claimed that his fascination with sound masses was inspired by the noises of street fighting in Athens during the war, with the combined din of mobs shouting, motorized vehicles, and machine-gun fire. His mathematical and engineering bent provided the techniques, but the emotive content of his work always harked back to the Athens of December ‘44. When asked to describe his state of mind in an interview done on the occasion of his 75th birthday, he said it was “A desert...An endless desert... where nothing can grow any longer... A desert with a powerful but unbearable past.”
