9/2/2018 A guide to Iannis Xenakis's music | Music | The Guardian

A guide to Iannis Xenakis's music

The Greek composer trained as an architect, and created works of shattering visceral power that still
astound today

Tom Service
Tue 23 Apr 2013 17.57 BST

It sounds like something out of a film script. A Greek man in his early 20s fights for his homeland as part
of the Communist resistance at the end of the second world war. Shrapnel from a blast from a British
tank causes a horrendous facial injury that means the permanent loss of sight in one eye. He is
sentenced to death after his exile to Paris (a sentence that was later commuted to a prison term, with his
conviction finally quashed with the end of the junta in 1974). By the time he returns, he has become
one of the leading creative figures of the century: an architect who trained, worked, and often
transcended the inspiration of his mentor and boss, Le Corbusier; an intellectual whose physical and
mathematical understanding of the way individual particles interact with each other and create a larger
mass - atoms, birds, people, and musical notes - would produce one of the most fertile and prophetic
aesthetic explorations in musical history; and above all a composer, whose craggily, joyously elemental
music turned collections of pitches and rhythms and instruments into a force of nature, releasing a
power that previous composers had only suggested metaphorically but which he would realise with
arguably greater clarity, ferocity, intensity than any musician, before or since. This is the music of Iannis
Xenakis.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/apr/23/contemporary-music-guide-xenakis 1/3
9/2/2018 A guide to Iannis Xenakis's music | Music | The Guardian

When you hear Xenakis's music – any piece of what we recognise as his mature work, starting with
1954's Metastasis, onwards – you're confronted with an aesthetic that seems unprecedented according
to any of the frames of reference that musical works usually relate to. You won't hear vestiges of things
like familiar forms, or shapes, or languages. Even the furthest-out reaches of early 1950s serialism
sound resolutely conventional next to Xenakis's works of the same period. It's music whose sheer,
scintillating physicality creates its own territory in every piece, whether it's for solo cello or huge
orchestra. As Ben Watson has put it, Xenakis's work is "an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the
West". When Xenakis approached Olivier Messiaen in Paris for composition lessons, Messiaen turned
him down, because, "I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much
out of the ordinary that I said… 'No, you are almost 30, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of
being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in
your music'."

And that's exactly what Xenakis would do, and was already doing - which is both one explanation of his
music's shocking otherness (it was heard as "alien" even by the hipsters of the early 1950s; the 1955
premiere of Metastasis at the Donaueschingen Festival was one of the scandals of postwar music) and a
revelation of this music's deep, primal rootedness in richer and older phenomena even than musical
history: the physics and patterning of the natural world, of the stars, of gas molecules, and the
proliferating possibilities of mathematical principles. Xenakis resisted the label of being a mere
mathematician in music just as surely as he refused the idea of his music's political or social message,
and it was of course how he used those scientific principles (outlined in his book, Formalized Music) to
create pieces of shattering visceral power.

His architectural output offers ways into his music's imaginative world. Take the Philips Pavilion that
Xenakis designed for the Brussels World's Fair in 1958 and for which he and Edgard Varèse wrote
electronic music to animate its still gorgeously futuristic-looking parabolas, swoops, curves. The maths
underlying its construction, and the shapes it makes, have a direct correlation in the way Xenakis uses
the instruments of the orchestra in Metastasis, organising the entries of the instruments, and the
pitches they play, according to the working-out of mathematical and statistical formulae, translating the
space of architectural planes into musical time. (Take a look at his near-contemporary design for a
"Cosmic City", a gloriously sci-fi vision of the metropolis of the future - and what happens when Dan
Dare meets curvy brutalism.) Xenakis also designed what he called "polytopes", high-art son-et-lumière
installations that involved his lighting designs, his sets, his music, and his sound projection to create
vivid multi-media experiences, in places from Canada to Iran to Greece. And he designed a system for
the conversion of graphic stimuli into sound, a programme he called UPIC and which has now morphed
into more sophisticated computer software like IanniX. (More than a decade before Boulez founded
IRCAM, Xenakis had set up his own institute for music-technological research in Paris called EMAMu,
which now exists as CCMIX.)

Those are some clues to the elemental concerns of his music. But what happens when you hear his
music goes beyond even the sensation of teeming natural phenomena or landscapes transmuted into
music. Listen to this piece - Synaphaï - for piano and orchestra. You'll hear a piano part of mind-bending
complexity, which has the unique distinction, as far as I'm aware, of having a separate stave for each
finger. You did read that right: Xenakis uses 10 staves in this piece. You'll hear clouds of minutely
detailed orchestral sonority wrap around the solo part, like flocks of small birds mobbing an avaricious
raptor; and you'll hear a near-continuous rhythmic intensity and textural violence that takes your
breath away. Hearing this piece is as awesome an experience as watching some life-changing natural
spectacle. Synaphaï has all the teeming unpredictable power of a glacier, the thrilling complexity of
shape and movement of a mass animal migration.

But there's something else as well. This music is expressive: not in a conventionally emotional way,
perhaps, but it has an ecstatic, cathartic power. Xenakis's music – and its preternaturally brilliant

https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/apr/23/contemporary-music-guide-xenakis 2/3
9/2/2018 A guide to Iannis Xenakis's music | Music | The Guardian

performers - allows its listeners to witness seismic events close at hand, to be at the middle of a musical
happening of cosmic intensity. (That's literally true in Terratektorh, in which the orchestra perform
from within the audience – it would have been fun to be part of this performance conducted by Matthias
Pintscher…) Xenakis has said that his war-time experience informed his desire to create his new kind of
sound-experience. (He described the play of sirens, gunfire, and spotlights in Athens in the 1940s as like
a "large-scale spectacle") Yet his music sounds, to me at least, to be purged – or perhaps to be a purging -
of the sort of existential darkness that György Ligeti's music, say, never escapes. (Among the closest
Xenakis comes to a direct emotional utterance is in his Nuits for chorus; music that sounds like a
primordial cry, an impassioned scream.)

There's a huge amount to discover in Xenakis's music, and much of his vast output is out there on
YouTube. Some highlights: the non-stop dynamism of Keqrops for piano and ensemble, the epic scale of
the 75-minute long Kraanerg for ensemble and tape; the dagger-like pointillism of Khoai for solo
harpsichord; or the devastating virtuosity of Tetras for string quartet. The piece that converted me,
though, was Jonchaies for orchestra, composed in 1977, and quite simply one of the most exciting
experiences you can have in music. Listen to it as loud as you can and convert all your neighbours to
Xenakis too.

Jonchaies embodies the elemental truth about all of Xenakis's music. Beethoven described nature in the
Pastoral Symphony, Sibelius was terrified by it in Tapiola, but it took Xenakis for music to become
nature. On holiday in Corsica, Xenakis would pilot his canoe into the teeth of the biggest storm he and
his paddle could manage. When you're listening to his music, you also go out there into the eye of a
musical storm that will invigorate, inspire, and awe. See you out there…

Five key links

Synaphaï
Jonchaies
Keqrops
Tetras
Terratektorh

Topics
Classical music
A guide to contemporary classical music

https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/apr/23/contemporary-music-guide-xenakis 3/3