Iannis Xenakis began the journey of his creative life with a well nigh unreachable destination. After years of discovery and uncertain exploration, during the course of a youth both adventurous and tragic, he embarked simultaneously on the careers of composer and architect. This undertaking remains without parallel in the history of music.

His first composition to be recognized generally as mature work was Metastasis for orchestra, written at the age of 32, in the same year that Boulez completed Le Marteau sans Maitre. Thus on the one hand, the group of young composers who met at the celebrated Darmstadt Summer Courses (Berio, Boulez, Maderna, Nono, Stockhausen...) represented a radical movement to continue the still recent traditions of serial composition, Xenakis on the other hand, seemed to break violently with all tradition. He may seem to have taken a blind leap into the unknown; but in fact he was building on the foundations of a far older tradition, one hidden and obscured by its very age: that of Ancient Greece.

Music and mathematics

As an architect, and by implication, as a mathematician, Xenakis re-established the venerable connections made some two-and-a-half millennia before, by Pythagoras and Aristoxenes of Tarentum, between Music and Mathematics. These connections seemed to Xenakis the only way out of the apparent impasse of serial music. At the very moment when serialism seemed the most richly promising to young composers, Xenakis rejected it as obsolete. But escape to Neo-classicism or Post-Romanticism seemed to him equally unacceptable. As was the case for other geniuses who had no place in the main stream, such as Edgard Varèse and Giacinto Scelsi, there was for Xenakis no possible way forward to be found except by turning to the future.

In 1956 Xenakis had already defended his position in a famous article - The crisis of serial music - published in the Gravesaner Blätter edited by Hermann Scherchen. There he explained that in serial polyphony, the function of each sound was no longer audible or intelligible to the ear: this could only lead to acoustic chaos. Polyphonic structures of such complexity, he continued, could only be perceived in a global sense, and should henceforth be governed by statistical laws; only these were capable of affording a logical order to such massive blocks of sound.

Constraint and freedom

Xenakis therefore appealed to three areas of mathematical theory which could impose an orderly structure on these nebulae or galaxies of sound. Probability theory gave birth to something which Xenakis christened ‘stochastic' (i.e. ‘probabilistic') music. The first complete example of this compositional method is Pithoprakhta (1956), his opus 2. Game theory gave rise to a method of composition in which the introduction of sounds was determined by a game-like strategy. Set theory and group theory led to music where the sounds were treated as though part of an algebraically symbolic language. These three dimensions dominated the development of Xenakis' music until the 70s.

As if the rigidity of such structural laws were not enough for Xenakis, he went further: from the late 50s, he made increasing use of computers. All of this led to music which contains a striking paradox: though ‘calculated' coolly and rationally by mathematics and computer, it is music of a burning violence, of a force and expressive energy which apparently emanates not from the creative process, but from the finished product itself. Like a modern-day Beethoven, Xenakis seems to have felt it necessary to bind himself with iron-clad structures in order to master and control his inner demons. From this potentially terrifying constraint and imprisonment grows the fruit whose juice is true creative freedom.

Every commentator has been struck, however, by the peculiar fact that the starting point for Xenakis' thoughts seems by no means essentially musical; moreover, that it could have been expressed in other ways than through music. This is in fact what happened while he pursued his career as an architect. But as he gradually achieved mastery over his composition (let us not forget that he had enjoyed no formal instruction at a conservatory and was largely self-taught) he was able to move ever further from the ‘scaffolding' of his structural method and to follow more and more his free inspiration. It is for this reason that he has refrained almost entirely from writing analyses of his mature works.

Writing the music

From the beginning, Xenakis has always proceeded from graphic sketches (a technique developed during his time as an architect) to the writing of a musical score. From the 70s onwards, these sketches have increasingly taken the form of ‘arborescences', or tree-like, branching curves drawn on calibrated graph paper. Each of the branches of these tree-like structures then blossoms, as it were, into a melodic line, once translated into musical notation. 1979 saw the development of Xenakis' remarkable UPIC computer, which is able to take curves drawn on the screen and convert them, in real time, into sounds. Evryali, for piano, was one of the first pieces to be written in this way.

The effect of this unusual method of writing is to give a feeling of freedom and ever increasing musical impact, force and power. Xenakis' melodic figurations, infused from his earliest works with ancient modal scales, forged yet another link with the Greece of Antiquity. Starting from these modal scales, Xenakis developed a system of ‘non-octave scales', which in turn permitted the introduction of an even-tempered scale. These features remain to this day a crucial part of Xenakis' musical language, even though they exist side by side with micro-intervals and glissandi. Although the formation of harmonic patterns was never one of Xenakis' chief preoccupations, in his most recent works, such as Tetora, these non-octave scales have gone on to produce a striking harmonic system.

In the same way, even Xenakis' most complex rhythmic patterns grow out of relations formed with a simple, exact, basic pulse (his music is often written in simple time signatures such as 4/4). In short, the unique communicative power of Xenakis' music derives from the infinite complexity of his structures at the microscopic level, and also from the great, almost monumental simplicity of his large forms and their expressive content.

Since Xenakis, as we have seen, started from the use of statistical methods, it is no surprise that he began by composing orchestral music, and music for larger ensembles, only later moving to chamber - and solo instrumental music. His first work for a solo instrument, and perhaps his most complex, Herma for piano solo, was written when he was already in his forties, and is his twelfth published work.

Profile © Harry Halbreich

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