Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Shaun Castle 06 November 2006
Xenakis is considered to be the most influential composer of the second half of the 20th century. His music is elemental, primordial, yet thoroughly of the present.
Xenakis’s mass conception, and in turn, stochastic music, was based upon what he called a “principle of indeterminism”. The explanation of the world, and consequently of the sound phenomenon that surrounds us, or sound which may be created, required an enlargement of the causal principle, the basis of which is formed by the law of the great numbers.
Natural events, such as the collision of hail with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field are sonic events made out of thousands of isolated sounds: this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new event. By using the statistical laws of these events, operating at a zero level of causality, Xenakis believed it was possible to create something entirely new that hadn’t existed before, but as with the familiarity of hail on the hard surface, it has the memory of something ancient, a Markov chain.
As the ancient Greeks used the structure of fugue to inform architectural order, Xenakis engaged in the translatability of stochastic method: “coda used in music and architecture are closely linked and can be substituted for one another”. Such cross-fruition emerged between 1948 and 1960 when Xenakis worked in the studio of Le Corbusier, designing in majority part the Couvent de la Tourette and Philips Pavilion. The undulating glass panes devised for the facade of la Tourette were the result of research into rhythmic patterns, whilst in the Philips Pavilion Xenakis realised the basic ideas of Metastasis, the seminal work which launched his new music to the world in 1954.
“His starting-point is not an artificial note that has detached itself from nature in order to give expression to subjectivity, but in an ‘objective’ world-noise, a ‘sound-mass’, which does not bubble up from the heart but comes upon us from outside, like rain or the voice of the wind. This world of noises in Xenakis’s compositions has become ‘beauty’ for me - a beauty without sentimental barbarism and purged of effective dirt” - Milan Kundera
Selected Discography
Synaphai-Aroura-Antikhthon - New Philharmonia Orchestra (explore)
Music for Strings - Ensemble Resonanz (mode 152)
Works for Piano - Aki Takahashi (mode 80)
Ensemble Music 2 - ST-X Ensemble (mode 56)
Kraanerg - ST-X Ensemble (Asphodel)
Iannissimo! - ST-X Ensemble (Vandenburg)
Anastenaria-Troorkh-Ais - Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks (WWE) Links to this post
