In Memorian Iannis Xenakis
4 February 2001, Paris
| Iannis
Xenakis, the most innovative and radical composer of the 20th century
lived to see the first days of the third millenium because he really belonged
in a new age. No other post war composer predicted and planned the future
of music and the arts dominated by the computer as clearly as he did.
He was the Bach of the modern age. An engineer by training who worked
alongside the great architect, Le Corbusier, for ten years on famous projects
such as Habitations de Marseille. He employed his knowledge of mathematics
to invent an utterly fresh new language. After the impact of Xenakis the
landscape of music was altered forever. His new works first performed
in 1954 were so raw and strident that he was instantly condemned both
by the academic musical establishment more so by the avant garde for being
too technocratic yet paradoxically he was the most intuitive of them all.
Xenakis was an outsider and he remained an outsider. His name means 'gentle
stranger'. As his young biographer barely out of university I was shy about confronting the great ogre but having Greek in common we bonded immediately. He gave me the freedom of his Pigalle studio and his scores, while his wife Francoise talked frankly about their life. Xenakis was ferociously private and embarrassingly honest. He refused a lunch invitation with President Mitterand with the words, 'I don't have time to lunch,' then invited to dinner he refused to wear a tie. He was born in Braila, Romania of Greek parents in 1921 in a prosperous Greek shipping family, the eldest of three boys. When his mother died in childbirth he was separated sent to boarding-school in Spetsai. The tall youth did not excel at studies only at sport. He loved the Mediterranean sea, became a champion swimmer, dove and kayaked. As a student of engineering in Athens the experience of the war changed his life. He found a cause and clung to the idea that Greece would be liberated by Communist Resistance with Platonic ideals. His teenage years were filled with organising mass demonstrations against the Nazi Occuppiers, "going to jail with a handful of raisins in one pocket and Plato's Republic in the other", and sometimes taking the occasional music lesson while he studied engineering at the Polytechnic. He described the not the sight of those events but the sound. The tramp of feet, slogans from different groups, meeting in Constitution square with the rhythmic chantingo f hundres and then the burst of gunfrire, the persistent response of chants breaking up and the terror of the people as some lay dead and others ran for cover. He transformed those memories into his musical compositions many years later. He led a student battalion against the British bombardment and air attacks on Greece and while guarding a house on the slope of the Acropolis a mortar shell exploded and smashed his left cheekbone and injured his eye. Xenakis was left for dead but his father found him on a heap of bodies and rescued him. Imprisoned by the Right wing this time he escaped jail and was smuggled to France under sentence of death. At 26 he was in Paris with a job in Le Corbusier's atelier doing engineering calculations but with few hopes for the future. Through the discipline of working in the most important architectural practise in Europe and soon with Le Corbusier himself he developed a faculty for visualising abstract concepts, he designed parts of Le Couvent de La Tourette, The Philips Pavilion in 1958 and became his most trusted collaborator. Another great Frenhc composer, Olivier Messiaen, encouraged him to compose without returning to music school, recognising in Xenakis an extraordinary person with an exceptional need to express the 'overwhelming atrocities' he had experienced in a parallel with ancient Greek theatre.. Xenakis was investigating music and theorising. Could he find a mathematical formula of a melodic curve like the one he had designed for the Philips Pavilion? Hand in hand with his architectural drawings he composed using the theory of large numbers with which he calculated 'sliding walls of sound' and clouds of pitches' which went from chaos to order. The young man whose life had been shaped by the turmoil of mass events, had been shattered by a chance event and save by another was trying to find his salvation by creating models in sound. Metastaseis, Pithoprakta were key works which hit the music scene of the 50s like meteorites, shocking everyone. Each new work would be a theoretical discovery in terms of music composition and an assault on the sensibilities of the post-serialist musicians after the war. Xenakis refused to be limited. He experimented with new scales, quarter tones, each instrument of the orchestra playing a different pitch and rhythm, creating cloud like forms like flocks of birds in the sky movig into formation, raindrops falling on a roof, leaves fluttering on a tree. The first to use the theory of chaos as a way of handling these mass sounds, introducing new timbres and instrumental techniques, colours and textures, structures never heard before which contained all the violence and beauty of the natural world and the war years he had known. He composed over 150 works, set up a computer centre in Paris, created Sound and Light spectacles using lasers and flashes with music and his own architecture. He never aged and his music sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did when he was a young man now ready to take on the world. Whenever we met he talked about escaping one's past in order to create boldly, 'The most important is to be free.' After a lengthy illness I hope he has found freedom at last. Iannis Xenakis, Nouritza Matossian Artheme Fayard, Paris, 1981 Xenakis, Nouritza Matossian Kahn & Averill, London, 1986 ISBN 1-871082-17-X Pro/Am Music Resources , New York, 1001 ISBN 0-912483-35-0(US) Paperback, Kahn & Averill, London, 1990 |