Xenakis: Who is he?

A new piece on Arts Electric attempts to answer that question.

Shortly after Xenakis settled into his work as a civil engineer with Le Corbusier, he began his music career by looking for someone with whom he could study. After being turned down by Nadia Boulanger, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud, he followed the advice of Annette Dieudonné, a friend of Nadia Boulanger, who suggested that he seek advice from Olivier Messiaen. Noting Xenakis’ background in mathematics and civil engineering, Messiaen advised him not to study harmony and counterpoint but rather to develop his mathematical ideas. Xenakis attended Messiaen’s class at the Paris Conservatory regularly through 1952 and less regularly in 1953.

Among many related and various theories and skills, civil engineering articulated for Xenakis the phenomenon of underlying complexity, as found, for example, in a multiplicity of miniscule causalities that are too numerous to be individually traced and, consequently, can be understood only as distributions and probabilities within a statistically-described whole. In 1953, he applied the principle in music by calculating the trajectories of individual stringed instruments, notated as lines rather than notes, in his orchestral composition Metastaseis. It was his first significant composition, and it proved seminal for other ideas and other projects—among them the Philips Pavilion and the UPIC system—throughout his life.

Read more at Arts Electric.

Tags: 20th Century Music, Arts Electric, Messiaen, Xenakis