Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 01:21:57 +0100 (CET)
From: Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106-AT-ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>
Subject: [silence] Iannis Xenakis obituary (fwd)




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 18:38:46 +0000
From: John Whiting <john.whiting-AT-which.net>
To: Silence list <silence-AT-metatronpress.com>
Subject: [silence] Iannis Xenakis obituary

Iannis Xenakis 

Composer who brought a passion for maths to his music

Ivan Hewett
Monday February 5, 2001
The Guardian

Listening to the music of Iannis Xenakis, who has died aged 78, is like
being flung back into some fierce atavistic world before culture existed. 

The passion in a work such as Eonta is not altogether human - it has the
impersonal quality of a natural force, untrammelled by
conventions of language or style. Such magnificently innocent music is
bound to be out of place in our oblique, knowing age, so
obsessed with its past, so fastidiously ironic, so concerned, in its art,
to layer ambiguity upon ambiguity. That Xenakis could have
denied this pervasive cultural trend for 40 years is an amazing feat.
Perhaps only someone who had no need of the western tradition,
someone whose roots lay elsewhere, could have done it. 

Xenakis's spiritual roots lay in Ancient Greece, his musical ones in Greek
orthodox chant; in fact he once described himself as "an
Ancient Greek living in the 20th century." The solitariness that implies
seemed to be written into his fate - the name Xenakis actually
means "little stranger" in Greek. And a stranger is indeed what he remained
throughout his life - literally so, in that from 1947 he
lived as a political refugee in France. He fled there from Greece, where he
had been sentenced to death in absentia for joining the
fight against British troops sent to preserve the country from encroaching
communism. 

Xenakis was born in Romania and at the age of 10 was taken to Greece by his
wealthy Greek parents. He later took an engineering
degree at Athens Polytechnic. During the second world war he joined the
resistance against the German occupation, losing part of
the left side of his face, including his left eye, in a street battle. 

After the war he fled to Paris where the great designer Le Corbusier got to
hear about this formidably gifted young refugee with a
passion for, and a sophisticated understanding of, engineering and
mathematics, and took him on as an assistant. Xenakis soon
found himself involved in some of the master's most important projects,
including the convent at la Tourette and the Philips pavilion
for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. 

It must have seemed as if architecture had claimed him. But all through the
late 40s and 50s Xenakis was nursing an ambition to
combine his mathematical passions with his musical one. Not until the
mid-50s did he discover convincing ways of doing this. One
was to dispose sounds in "clouds of points", crepitating bursts of
pizzicato strings and wind: mass events whose detail is random
but whose overall shape can be grasped by the ear. 

The effect is beguiling and suggestive, like raindrops or migrating birds.
Another way was to create "curved spaces" in sound,
analogous to the curved surfaces of a building such as the Philips
pavilion: swarms of "glissandi" - pitches moving up and down by
"sliding" (like an air raid siren) and moving in many directions at once. 

It's now a familiar part of the modernist composer's arsenal, but in 1955,
when Xenakis's opus 1 Metastasis for orchestra was
premiered, it must have seemed shocking. As must his Concerto PH, a piece
he composed for the Brussels Fair using amplified
burning charcoal as his single sound source. By this time Xenakis was 32
and had lost "much time and also much hope." But
through the 60s he laboured to bring more and more mathematical tools into
music. 

Xenakis would have been the first to admit that not all these experiments
worked. As the decades passed he relied less and less on
calculation and more on intuition, bringing human empathy to his work. But
although the rigour may have been relaxed, the passion
and strangeness of the music intensified. Through the 1980s and until his
death he continued to produce four or five pieces a year, in
all sizes and in all media, including Bohor, where he used the sounds of
both jingling jewellery and freight cars coupling; the
percussion ensemble The Pleiades, and several vast multi-media works
involving lights and music created for outdoor sites such as
Persepolis. 

In between, he found time to direct a research institute in Paris, and to
write a formidably difficult book called Formalised Music. As
he became older, honours came to him from all round the world including
France's Academie des Beaux Arts (1984); Italy's Turin
Critics Prize (1990); and Japan's Kyoto Prize (1997), but some how he never
quite became part of the contemporary music
establishment. This softly-spoken and exceptionally courteous man was
wrapped in an essential solitude. 

In some ways his lack of formal musical training was a strength, freeing
him from the constraints of good taste and craftsmanship
and setting him apart from such an eminently tasteful modernist as Boulez,
who once summed up Xenakis thus: "Fantastic brain -
absolutely no ear." But his isolation imposed an obligation to be entirely
self-created, musically speaking. 

There's no doubt Xenakis succeeded in creating a cohesive and instantly
recognisable musical world of his own; more debatable is
the size and scope of that world. If in many of his pieces - Eonta, Tetrus,
Ais - too much seems to have been sacrificed in order to
return to a kind of primal innocence, the price seems worth paying; they
are certainly among his best and show the enduring worth
of Xenakis's improbable and heroic enterprise, one often dedicated to
political prisoners and "the thousands of the forgotten". 

He is survived by his wife Francoise and daughter Mahi. 

• Iannis Xenakis, composer and architect, born May 29 1922; died February 4
2001 

          Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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