He was a literal revolutionary who altered our perception of music.
Iannis Xenakis was a Communist who came from wealth, an intellectual who was half-blinded, disfigured, and broken-jawed by shrapnel from a tank blast while rioting in the streets of Athens. He helped to drive the Axis out of Greece, opposed the restoration of the monarchy by the British, and was sentenced to death in absentia by a conservative regime. He fled the country using forged papers. He settled in Paris, illegally, where was hired by the architect Le Corbusier.
There, he applied himself seriously to composition. He was refused as a student by Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honegger. His lessons with Darius Milhaud went nowhere. It was Olivier Messiaen who at last recognized and acknowledged his unique genius. But understanding his special gifts, even Messiaen refused to spoil him with the humdrummery of drills in harmony and counterpoint. Instead, he gave him his benediction.
“I understood straight away that he was not someone like the others…. He is of superior intelligence…. [T]his 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.’”
Xenakis took that freedom and ran with it. He explored music from the perspective of architecture, mathematics, and physics, yet his creations could be searingly visceral. He experimented with spatial effects, pushed the boundaries of electroacoustics, and devised computer systems that could translate graphical images into sound.
Xenakis may have been a towering intellectual, but he was also a force of nature. His death sentence, which had been commuted to a ten-year prison term, was finally lifted in 1974. Finally, he was able to return home, where he was received as the avant-garde Odysseus and intellectual Colossus he was.
His music has been described as wild, terrifying, raw, primal, primordial, and elemental. He made the serialists of mid-century seem hidebound, which in a sense they were, and positively tame by comparison.
Is Xenakis a man for all seasons? It depends on how you like your Sunday mornings. Any Xenakis worth playing is worth playing loudly.
Happy birthday, Iannis Xenakis, on what would have been your 100th birthday.
“Pléiades” (1979)
“Metastasis” (1953-54), with graphical score
“Pithoprakta” (1955-56), with graphical score
“Serment-Orkos” (1981)