Iannis Xenakis

Photo courtesy Groupe de Recherches Musicales

This brief sketch of Iannis Xenakis' life and work is extracted from an article by Joel Chadabe at Arts Electric ... full article

< Index to Xenakis events

Iannis Xenakis:
Who Is He?

Iannis Xenakis is widely recognized as one of the most original and important of the post-World War II composers. Original and important because his music redefines the traditional principles of musical structure. Post-World War II because of the chronology of his career. But there's more to it.

Xenakis had experienced the war. In 1941, he joined the Greek Resistance. In 1946, despite his fugitive existence, he received a degree in civil engineering. In 1947, Xenakis' father was able to get him a forged passport, and in fear for his life, Xenakis left Athens for New York. En route, he arrived in Paris in November 1947.

Xenakis told me: "I got to Le Corbusier through an acquaintance ... "

In January 1956, Louis Kalff, an executive at Philips Corporation in Eindhoven, Holland, called Le Corbusier in Paris to invite him to design the Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. Le Corbusier answered: "I shall not create a pavilion, but a poème électronique. Everything will happen inside: sound, light, color, rhythm ... " Xenakis said: "They asked Le Corbusier to design something and Le Corbusier asked me to design something ..."

The World's Fair opened in May 1958. The multimedia spectacle in the Philips Pavilion, repeated several times every day, consisted of Xenakis' Concret PH ... Edgard Varèse' Poème Electronique ... and colored light forming a background to Le Corbusier's projected images ...

Xenakis left Le Corbusier's studio in 1959. He took with him the seminal experience of the Philips Pavilion as a total experience of vision and sound, a total immersive environment in which the space of the images and sounds was integrated with the architectural design. In his polytopes, as he called his spectacles of light and sound, he either designed the spectacle for the space or the space for the spectacle.

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Shortly after Xenakis settled into his work as a civil engineer with Le Corbusier, he began his music career by looking for someone with whom he could study ... Xenakis attended Messiaen's class at the Paris Conservatory regularly through 1952 and less regularly in 1953.

In 1956, he coined the term 'stochastic music' to describe music based on probabilities.

In 1961, some friends in Paris introduced him to IBM-France, and he worked with a computer for the first time ... In 1972, he re-formed an earlier organization to become CEMAMu, a center for research located in Issy les Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris, and began to develop the UPIC system to notate music as shapes instead of notes.

In later compositions, he extended his concept of stochastic music to computers, and his mathematical substructures to include game theory, Markov chains, group theory, set theory, and various other contexts for working with probabilities. In 1991, at CEMAMu, he began work on the GENDY-N program ...

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His probability calculations are underlying and rarely noticeable. Xenakis personalized his theories. They served him in providing detail and occasionally they led him to places, for better or worse, that no trained musician would go. It is, in a certain sense, paradoxical and interesting to note that although he went far and dug deep to justify his music in mathematical terms, it is the emotional strength in his music, the intuition, passion, and talent—in other words, traditional values—that win the day.