Iannis Xenakis

Romanian-born French composer

• Born: May 29, 1922
• Birthplace: Brăila, Romania
• Died: February 4, 2001
• Place of death: Paris, France

Xenakis was one of Europe’s most prestigious avant-garde composers during the second half of the twentieth century. His works exhibited a new and individual kind of musical thinking based on physics, mathematics, and architecture. Especially important for Xenakis was the mathematics of probability. He introduced the term “stochastic music” for music utilizing probabilistic processes, and he sometimes used computers to aid in the elaborate calculations demanded.

Early Life

Of Greek parentage, Iannis Xenakis (YAH-nees zeh-NAH-kees) was born in Braăila, Romania. His father, Charcos Xenakis, was a wealthy businessman with a passion for opera; his mother was Fantins Parlou Xenakis. Xenakis early became familiar with the rich folk music of his native region of the Lower Danube, and he was influenced considerably by the Byzantine music of the Orthodox rite. As a boy, he also demonstrated a fascination with unpitched sounds. In 1932, his family moved to Greece. There, he was reared and educated, eventually attending a Greek-English college on the island of Spetsai. Xenakis’s first exposure to music from Ludwig van Beethoven to Johannes Brahms dates from this period. In 1934, he began studying composition with Aristotle Koundourov, a former pupil of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov.

Xenakis divided his time between the sciences and music, spending hours reading about astronomy, archaeology, ancient literature, and mathematics. In fact, he neglected his schoolwork for his own reading program and left school at age sixteen. Still, he successfully passed the entrance examinations for the Polytechnic Institute in Athens in 1940; there he studied harmony and counterpoint with Koundourov. His studies in Athens were prolonged by the Nazi invasion of Greece, for he spent much of his time fighting with the resistance. Xenakis became secretary of a resistance group at the Polytechnic Institute in 1941, and he was jailed and tortured several times. His face was disfigured, and he lost completely the vision in one eye when struck by a tank during street fighting in Athens on New Year’s Day, 1945. He was captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to die as a terrorist but managed to escape. He completed his studies at the Polytechnic Institute in 1947 and received a degree in engineering. In September of that year, he left Greece on a forged passport, eventually entering France illegally as a political refugee and a stateless person. Xenakis would become a French citizen in 1965.

In Paris, Xenakis became interested in architecture, studying with Le Corbusier , one of France’s best-known modern architects. From 1948 to 1959, he worked as Le Corbusier’s assistant and closest collaborator in planning housing projects in Nantes and Marseilles and a number of ambitious structures in Europe and elsewhere, including the assembly building at Chandigarh, India, and the Baghdad Stadium. Though Xenakis earned his living from architecture during this period, music was not put aside. Both Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger turned him down as a pupil in composition in 1949, but he managed to get advice and criticism from Darius Milhaud. In 1950, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied composition under Olivier Messiaen . Messiaen was struck by the fecundity and originality of his largely self-taught pupil’s musical ideas. He advised Xenakis to draw from his knowledge of mathematics and architecture when composing. In 1953, Xenakis married Françoise, a novelist and a former heroine in the French Resistance. Her Christian name, Françoise, is all she would take from her family, choosing to be known by her married name only. Iannis and Françoise Xenakis had one child, a daughter, Mǎkhi.

Life’s Work

The key to Xenakis’s creative awakening was an identity of approach in architecture and music; indeed, he saw no cleavage between the theories of music and architecture. To satisfy the unity of thought and the sense of cohesion that his intellect demanded, Xenakis located problems that were common to both architecture and music. He could develop his architectural ideas by articulating them in space, while in music he could arrange his ideas in time. Xenakis was also concerned with a major difference between architecture and music: The experience of space in the former is reversible, but time in the latter is not. In 1954, within a month of starting design work on the Couvent de St. Marie de la Tourette a Dominican monastery and the most ambitious project assigned him thus far by Le Corbusier he jotted down ideas for Métastasis , the first of a major series of compositions that would challenge the existing body of contemporary music.

The remarkable parallel in method of design between Métastasis and the monastery is clear from the hundreds of plans and sketches drawn and signed by Xenakis and scattered with notes by Le Corbusier. Different functions were allotted to the various portions and levels of the ensemble. Extraordinary sculptural forms were designed for the different elements, severe geometric solids, arranged in a free-flowing open form around the basic square. Space was used dynamically, freeing elements such as the sharp pyramid of the oratory to soar into the sky from the hollowed square of the courtyard surrounded by flat roofs, in a vigorous display of positive and negative space. No chronological order emerges in the design work for the monastery. Xenakis worked on several parts at the same time, stopping to develop a new idea and returning months later to make modifications. He found such an approach attacking problems from both ends, detailed and general useful in music as well as architecture.

In 1954, while working on the designs for the Couvent de St. Marie de la Tourette, Xenakis began to develop his own method of musical composition, one that he called“stochastic,” from the Greek root meaning “straight aim.” In actuality, it involved controlled improvisation. As a mathematician, he evolved his method from the laws of mathematical probability, probability calculus, set theory, and symbolic and mathematical logic. Thus, his music was worked out according to the probabilities of certain notes, sonorities, and rhythms recurring in a given work. Instead of thinking in terms of harmony, which composers have done for centuries, Xenakis thought in terms of sound entities that have the characteristics of intensity, pitch, and duration, as associated with one another by and within time.

The stochastic method is related to Jacques Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers, which maintains that as the number of repetitions of a given chance trial (such as flipping a coin) increases, the probability that the results will tend to a determinate end approaches certainty. A stochastic process, then, is one that is probabilistic in the sense of tending toward a certain goal. Unlike John Cage and others who have used the contingency process in music to undercut the primacy of the composer by pursuing the ideal of indeterminacy, Xenakis maintained the principle of indeterminacy and the dominance of the composer. His goal was the expression in music of the unity he saw as underlying all activity, human and nonhuman, scientific and artistic.

Xenakis’s first important composition in his stochastic method was Métastasis (1954), for an orchestra of sixty-one instruments, each required to play its own music. Clear musical ideas occur and merge into nebulous, unidentifiable states to give birth to new phenomena in an uninterrupted chain of destruction-construction, or metastasis. The piece begins with the strings sustaining several measures of the note G; meanwhile, gliding glissandi in the rest of the orchestra and expanding dynamics help to create an eerie effect and to arrive at a dramatic climax. The possibilities of simulating electronically produced sounds with conventional instruments are explored. Textures are dense, and sonorities are overpowering.

In October of 1955, at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, Hans Rosbaud introduced Métastasis. Many in the audience were scandalized, and Xenakis had to wait another four years before his work could be performed in Paris. A second work, Pithoprakta (1955-1956), for an orchestra of fifty musicians and similar in nature to Métastasis, was first performed in Munich in March, 1957, under the direction of Herman Scherchen. Xenakis received the Geneva Prix de la Fondation Européenne pour la Culture for these two compositions in 1957; both were used by the New York City Ballet in 1968 for a ballet entitled Métastasis and Pithoprakta, choreographed by George Balanchine.

Diamorphoses , developed in the studios of the Groupe de Recherche Musicale de la Radio-Télévision Française in Paris in 1957, marks Xenakis’s earliest experiment with electronic music on magnetic tape. His interest in electronic music increased after meeting Edgard Varèse in 1958 at the Brussels World Exposition. Still working in Le Corbusier’s office, Xenakis designed the Philips Pavilion at the exposition, where Varèse’s Poème Électronique on magnetic tape was regularly projected through four hundred or more speakers. Xenakis wrote Concret PA , a short electronic piece for magnetic tape, intended as a welcoming piece at the Philips Pavilion.

From its very inception, the Philips Pavilion raised one controversy after another: It vexed its sponsor by its extreme conceptions; it annoyed Le Corbusier, who came into conflict with Xenakis over its authorship; it outraged critics with its weirdness; yet, it delighted the public by the thousands. In conceiving the form and mathematical expression of the Philips Pavilion, Xenakis invented an architecture constructed entirely from surfaces derived from the hyperbolic paraboloid. A graph of ruled surfaces plotting the string glissandi of Métastasis demonstrates that the architecture of the pavilion orginated in Xenakis’s composition.

Having not seen eye to eye with Le Corbusier for some time, Xenakis decided to strike out on his own in 1960. Though still intermittently active in the field of architecture, he devoted himself almost entirely to music after that time. By the early 1960’s, he had considerable support among the more radical of contemporary musicians and found himself a focal center at modern music festivals and the recipient of a number of commissions.

From magnetic tape, Xenakis went to the computer. He found the computer valuable in stochastic computations. Between 1956 and 1962, ST/Four for string quartet, ST/Ten for ten instruments, and ST/Forty-eight for forty-eight musicians playing forty-eight different parts were produced. “ST” represents stochastic; the adjoining number indicates the number of instrumentalists required. In these pieces, the program is basically a complex of stochastic laws by which the composer orders the electronic brain to define all the sounds, one after the other, in a previously calculated sequence. In reviewing a performance of ST/Forty-eight, one critic noted that bowed glissandi were used so frequently that the listener soon became saturated with the device. He noted that ST/Forty-eight has enough going on in it to hold one’s attention at first hearing, but repeated exposure caused the novelty to wear off. Xenakis’s Atrées (1956-1962), for ten instruments, was programmed and calculated on the computer.

Xenakis also experimented in the area of “games.” First performed in 1971 by Radio Hilvershum in Germany, Duel (1959) was a competitive “game” for two orchestras and two conductors. Each orchestra played different music mathematically devised from a single theory. The audience picked the winner. Stratégie (1962), which was premiered in April of 1963, was similarly constructed. Awarded the Prix Manos Hadjidakis in 1962, Xenakis also came to the United States for the first time. At the invitation of Aaron Copland, he taught composition at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Later in 1962, he served as artist-in-residence in Berlin at the invitation of the West Berlin Senate and the Ford Foundation.

Xenakis’s Eonta (1963-1964) was premiered in Paris in 1964 under the direction of Pierre Boulez. In this piece, the motor energy is provided by the piano, while the brass harnesses it. Similarly controlled power is generated by Akrata (1964-1965), commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and written for fifteen wind instruments and vibraphone. Terretektorh (1965-1966) and Vamos Gamma (1967-1968) required that orchestra members be scattered among the unsuspecting audience. A variety of sonorities, including noise elements, are then unleashed on the audience.

In 1965, the first Xenakis Festival was held at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. The following year, Xenakis was invited to participate in the Musicological Congress in Manila and to attend the Japanese premiere of Stratégie in Tokyo. In 1960, he also founded Équipe de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales in Paris. For Montreal’s Expo 1967, he conceived and realized a light and sound spectacle entitled Polytope de Montréal for the French Pavilion. In 1967, Xenakis was appointed associate professor of music at Indiana University, where he founded the Center for Mathematical and Automated Studies and directed it for five years.

In 1969, Xenakis received a commission for a ballet by the Canadian Arts Council. He wrote not only his own music but also his own story. Kraanerg is set in the year 2069, when the youth, who now control the world, decree that all persons over the age of thirty must be exterminated. It is filled with architectural buildings into aural space and with strange and chilling sonorities. Xenakis commented on his own music at the Composers Showcase in New York on May 11, 1971. His Bohor I (1962), for magnetic tape, elicited a strongly unfavorable response. One woman screamed throughout the final few minutes.

The 1970’s were to be productive and glamorous years for Xenakis. Commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, his Cendrées (1974), for chorus and orchestra, is a wordless chant. Erikhthon (1974), for piano and orchestra; Noomena (1975), for large orchestra; Empreintes (1975), for orchestra; Phlegra (1975), for eleven instruments; and Retours-Windungen (1976), for twelve cellos, all received premieres in the mid-1970’s. During the 1970’s Xenakis was the recipient of the Bax Society Prize in London, the Maurice Ravel Gold Medal in Paris, the Grand Prix National de la Musique in Paris, and the Prix Beethoven in Bonn. He was made an honorary member of the British Computer Art Society in 1972, and in 1975, he was made an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Xenakis was finally permitted to return to Greece in 1974; there, he received a hero’s welcome. In 1976, the Sorbonne conferred on him an honorary doctorate in humane letters and sciences, as did Edinburgh University in 1989.

Works of Xenakis in the 1980’s include Shar (1983), for large string orchestra; Khall Perr (1983), for brass quintet and percussion; Tetras (1983), for string quartet; Naama (1984), for harpsichord; Lichens (1984) and Thallein (1985), for orchestra; Oophaa (1989), for percussion and harpsichord; and Okho (1989), for chamber ensemble. In 1980, Xenakis was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences and of Arts and Letters in Paris and a member of the National Council of Hellonie Resistance in Greece. He became a member of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1984 and of the Swedish Royal Society in 1989.

Xenakis continued to teach and accrue honors through the 1990’s. He held the position of distinguished resident at the University of Southern California, was named professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, and received the Critics Prize of Turin, Italy. In 1991 he completed a computer program, GENDY, that used a stochastic algorithm in synthesizing sound. The same year he was named an officer in the French Legion of Honor and commander in the French Order of Arts and Sciences and in 1992 an honorary member of the Sainte-Cecilia Academy in Rome. In October, 1993, Seoul University held a Xenakis Day, the Museum of Modern Art in Strasbourg held a similar event in 1999, and the same year there were retrospective festivals in France and Cyprus. In 1995 he became a knight in the Greek Phoenix Legion and commander in the French National Order of Merit. He received the Kyoto Prize from Japan in 1997.

Xenakis’s compositions that premiered during the same period showed extraordinary diversity. Among them are Knephas (1990) and Sea Nymphs (1994), for chorus; Pu wijnuej we fyp (1992), for unaccompanied children’s choir; La Bacchantes d’Euripide (1993), opera; Zythos (1996), for trombone and percussion; La Déesse Athéna (1992), for baritone and percussion; Plekto (1994), chamber music; Voile (1995) and Ittidra (1996), for strings; Kuïlenn (1996), for winds; Zyïa (1994), for soprano, flute, and piano; Paille in the Wind (1992), for cello and piano; Hunem-Iduhey (1996), for violin and cello; Roscobeck (1996), for cello and double bass; Tuorakemsu and Kyania (1990), Roaï and Krinoïdi (1992), Koïranoï and Ioolkos (1996), and Sea Change (1997), for orchestra; Dox-Orkh (1991), for violin and orchestra; Troorkh (1993) for trombone and orchestra; and his last major opus, O-mega (1997), orchestral with solo percussion), performed in England by London Sinfonietta.

Since 1980 the Xenakis Ensemble, a Dutch group formed with Xenakis’s support, has specialized in performing his works. Xenakis died at home on the morning of February 4, 2001. He was survived by his wife and daughter.

Significance

Despite a plurality of approaches, Xenakis’s music is characterized by coherence, unity, raw creative energy, and an element of chance. The beginning point of each new phase of composition is analytic. Because his creative work is based on a strong theoretical foundation, analysis and creation are inseparable for Xenakis. In various compositions, he attacked the hierarchic structure of the orchestra, giving each player equal responsibility; in others, he pushed instrumentation to extremes, making nearly impossible demands on the players. It has been argued that Xenakis’s influence grew to the point that it changed popular understanding of what is “musical” in music to include the unthinkable and unplayable within its boundaries. The results of such a change now seem so natural and even necessary that few have taken the trouble to identify the specific influences of Xenakis and his work on this process.

Xenakis was one of the first of his contemporaries to reevaluate and articulate in writing and music the force of science, mathematics, logic, and philosophy in the center of a modern conception of the arts. He succeeded in clearing new ground for music in restoring it as a serious experimental discipline, one with a substantial body of theory that has vital connections with different branches of learning. In his work, he rendered a dynamic depiction of the universe informed by modern science. Within the bounds of the same composition, this depiction may be developed in sounds that are brutal, harsh, and jarring, yet also poetic, musical, and beautiful. As music critic Ivan Hewett wrote in Xenakis’s obituary in England’s Guardian, “The passion in a work such as Eonta is not altogether human it has the impersonal quality of a natural force, untrammeled by conventions of language or style.”

Bibliography

Bois, Mario. Iannis Xenakis: The Man and His Music. London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1967. Record of an extended conversation with Xenakis, along with a description of Xenakis’s works.

Harley, James. Xenakis: His Life in Music. New York: Routledge, 2004. Harley, a musician, recounts how Xenakis developed his compositional style. Examining Xenakis’s main works in considerable detail, he explains their formulation without recourse to mathematics or scientific theory but in detail best suited for readers familiar with the mechanics of music. With a bibliography and discography.

Hiller, Lejaren. The Computer and Music. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Chapter 4, on French experiments in computer composition, sets Xenakis’s work in this area prior to 1970 in perspective.

Matossian, Nouritza. Xenakis. New York: Taplinger, 1986. The best treatment in English of Xenakis and his work as of the date of publication. Includes a list of musical compositions, a catalog of architectural projects, a list of distinctions received by Xenakis, a bibliography of books and articles by and about Xenakis, and a discography.

Russcol, Herbert. The Liberation of Sound: An Introduction to Electronic Music. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. A good overview of developments in electronic music that leads to a better understanding of Xenakis’s work in this medium.

Taruskin, Richard. The Late Twentieth Century. Vol. 4 in The Oxford History of Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Taruskin, a musicologist, discusses the Apollonian strain in Xenakis’s music and his commitment to philosophical realism in the course of a lengthy section that also places him in the context of contemporary composers.

Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. First published in Paris in 1963 as Musique formelles, this is a collection of previously published essays. Now recognized as one of the most important theoretical contributions on composition to emerge from the postwar period.