IANNIS XENAKIS
Born in Romania of Greek parents in 1922 and raised in Greece, Xenakis was that rare phenomenon, an artist of important capabilities outside his art, and of important moral stature. His first ambition was to be an engineer: that hope was dashed with the closing of the university during the war; but he retained a lifelong interest in the field. Under the German occupation, he became an active member of the Resistance: as such, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and was condemned to death; but he managed to escape, and went underground. These experiences confirmed and hardened in him a passion for freedom, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. It could not leave him indifferent to the issues embroiling Greece in civil conflict after the war, but his engagement made him a wanted man and he had to flee for his life — arriving in Paris in 1947 and remaining in France from then on, eventually taking French citizenship. He was happy in his adoptive land, but his love of Greece never faltered; and when that country fell under the tyranny of the colonels, in the nineteen-sixties, he and many others grieved aloud. His French wife, Françoise Xenakis, wrote an outstanding play about the fate of a fictional, but typical, political prisoner of the regime. His fellow-Greek and fellow-French citizen, Costa-Gravas, made a compelling movie, “Z”, about the abuse of power in Athens. And Xenakis himself, at that time, composed a choral work, “Nuits”, with a dedication that reads, “For you, unknown political prisoners… and for you, the thousands of the forgotten whose very names are lost”.
By this time, Xenakis was recognized as a composer of international importance, with a highly original style and technique. His music, obliquely, draws upon the distant past: he had a fondness for the ancient Byzantine tradition and for the Athens of antiquity, setting texts by Aeschylus and Sophocles. But essentially, his music is strikingly modern, and in a creative way it incorporates ideas that reflect his profound interest in mathematics and architecture.
In musical terms, one can find in Xenakis’s works the influence of several mathematical formulations: among them, the laws of probability, game theory, and group theory. Architecturally, his music shows an obsession with spatial relations, and with the correlation of planes of sound. Internally, many of the compositions are enormously complex, having a shifting complexity like that of molecular reality. But while this can be an exacting problem for the performers, it is not so for the audience: externally, the music is aesthetically rich.
Xenakis always placed music, and musical experimentation, in the foreground of his life. But mathematics and architecture were never far behind. In 1958, for the Philips pavilion at the Brussels Exposition, he invented an architecture constructed entirely from surfaces derived from the hyperbolic paraboloid. Le Corbusier invited him to make some engineering calculations for some of his buildings on housing projects in Marseille and Nantes: these were socially progressive complexes and were intricately designed; both qualities must have appealed strongly to the composer. The new Dominican monastery of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette is widely acknowledged to be one of Le Corbusier’s major masterpieces, but the credit for it should not be solely his. Granted, the overall concept was his, and the execution was magisterial, both in the building itself and in the imaginative deftness of its setting, on a slope in wooded countryside. But one of its most successful details is in the lighting of the monastic church: this, in daylight, is achieved by the use of glass panels spaced, as one commentator has put it, “at musical intervals to achieve a lyrical effect”: the effect is, indeed, both lyrical and inspiring; and there can be little doubt that this is where the mind of Xenakis was at work.
Musician, mathematician, architect: Xenakis’s career, in many ways, echoes two historic aphorisms: in the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras said, “All is numbers”; and in the nineteenth century CE, the German philosopher von Schelling said, “Architecture in general is frozen music”.
With both statements, Xenakis’s works are clearly and eloquently in agreement.
