IannisXenakis

In 1951 Iannis Xenakis, an engineer in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio, took some of his scores to Olivier Messiaen. Nadia Boulanger had declined to teach him and had sent him to Annette Dieudonné, a harmony teacher at the Conservatoire, who recommended Messiaen. Messiaen no longer gave private lessons but let him sit in on his class. According to Nouritza Matossian’s biography, he told Xenakis that he was Greek, an architect and trained in advanced mathematics: “Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.”

1922–⁠47Brăila, Athens and Paris

1947–⁠59Le Corbusier’s studio

On the recommendation of the architect Georges Candilis, Xenakis joined Le Corbusier’s atelier in December 1947, where his first work was computing the concrete elements of the Marseille housing unit. From 1954 he was the main collaborator on the convent of La Tourette. “The general shape is Le Corbusier’s, while the internal structure was developed by me,” he told Bálint András Varga. For La Tourette Xenakis designed window panes of unequal lengths, which Le Corbusier called “musical glass panes”. In music, Arthur Honegger objected to parallel octaves in a piano piece by Xenakis. Xenakis replied that he liked them and stopped attending Honegger’s class.

1953–⁠59Metastaseis and the Philips Pavilion

Metastaseis, finished at the end of 1954, was the third piece of the triptych Anastenaria. On 6 July of that year Messiaen wrote to Pierre Schaeffer recommending his “student and friend” as “very extraordinarily gifted for music and rhythm”. The conductor Hermann Scherchen read the scores in his hotel and told Xenakis, as Xenakis reported: “you don’t approach music as a musician. You look at it from a different point of view, from the outside.” Hans Rosbaud conducted the first performance at Donaueschingen on 16 October 1955. Xenakis recalled that the critic Antoine Goléa dismissed it as a piece crammed with glissandi.

Le Corbusier at first declined to credit Xenakis, who wrote to Philips in 1957 asking to be named beside him; the pavilion was finally credited to both. Le Corbusier’s answer, as Xenakis told Varga: “What do you think you invented? All these shapes are well known!” In the summer of 1959 he dismissed Xenakis and two colleagues, Augusto Tobito and André Maisonnier.

1955–⁠63Probability and computers

In 1962 he used an IBM 7090 to calculate the ST pieces. Herma, for piano, was given at the Domaine Musical on 24 April 1963. Boulez had written to Suzanne Tézenas on 16 April that he expected it to be boring, and the pianist Georges Pludermacher had to repeat all of it as an encore.

1963–⁠72Tanglewood, Berlin and Bloomington

In 1963 Aaron Copland telephoned to ask whether Xenakis would teach at Tanglewood. Xenakis, a political refugee, obtained permission to travel, taught there that summer and began Eonta. Copland conducted Pithoprakta in San Francisco in 1966 and wrote an endorsement for the jacket of Formalized Music (1971) that calls Xenakis “the possessor of a special and original method of composition”. From autumn 1963 to spring 1964 Xenakis lived in West Berlin on a Ford Foundation grant, wrote Eonta and worked out sieve theory and the distinction between structures outside time and in time. The Domaine Musical gave Eonta its first performance in Paris on 16 December 1964; Pierre Boulez, who conducted, divided the five brass parts among ten players.

Terretektorh (Royan, 1966) seats eighty-eight players among the audience, and Nomos Alpha (Bremen, 1966), for solo cello, orders its sections by the rotations of a cube. From 1967 to 1972 Xenakis taught at Indiana University. He accepted its offer on condition that he could found a centre for mathematical and automated music, and he said later that the music department wished to have little to do with new music.

1967–⁠78Polytopes and the UPIC

Xenakis called his spectacles of sound, light and architecture polytopes, from the Greek meaning ‘many places’. The first, in the French pavilion at the Montreal World’s Fair of 1967, used 1,200 flashes hung on cables. The Polytope de Cluny, in the Roman baths in Paris from October 1972 to January 1974, used 600 flashes and lasers reflected by 400 mirrors under computer control; nearly 100,000 tickets were sold. The Polytope de Mycenae, on the ancient site from 2 to 5 September 1978, was his first creation in Greece after the amnesty of 1974 ended his exile.

His Paris research group, founded in 1966 as the EMAMu and renamed the CEMAMu in 1972, completed the first full UPIC, a drawing tablet connected to a computer, in 1977. Xenakis began to explore it with Mycènes Alpha (1978), made for the Mycenae polytope and his first work made entirely of computer-generated sound.

1976–⁠2001Later years

Xenakis defended his doctoral thesis, Arts/Sciences: Alliages, at the University of Paris I on 18 May 1976 before a jury that included Messiaen. Jonchaies, for 109 players, was first played in Paris on 21 December 1977; its scale of intervals between a minor second and a major third repeats after an octave and a fourth. He received the Kyoto Prize in 1997. His last work, O-Mega, was first played at Huddersfield on 30 November 1997 by Evelyn Glennie and the London Sinfonietta. Illness stopped him composing in 1998, and he died at home in Paris on 4 February 2001.