Iannis Xenakis in 1975.

Iannis Xenakis (Γιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 - February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer and one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century. He was a major figure in the postwar development of musical modernism. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... is the 149th day of the year (150th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1922 (MCMXXII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday (link displays the 2001 Gregorian calendar). ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... Modernism in musicis characterized by a desire for or belief in progressand science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, politicaladvocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with tradition or common practice. ...

Biography

Xenakis was born in Brăila, Romania to Clearchos Xenakis and Fotini Pavlou, and was educated as a child by a series of governesses. At the age of ten he was sent to a boarding school on the Aegean island of Spetsai, Greece and later studied architecture and engineering in Athens. Xenakis participated in the Greek Resistance during World War II and, during the period of the British martial law, in the first phase of the Greek Civil War as a member of the students' company Lord Byron of the leftwing ELAS (Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos, Greek People's Liberation Army). He received a severe face wound from a British shell which resulted in the loss of eyesight in one eye. ^[1] In 1947 he fled under a false passport to Paris. In the meantime, in Greece he was sentenced in absentia to death by the rightwing administration. In Paris he worked with Le Corbusier. While his assistant, Xenakis designed the Pavillon Philips in Brussels, home of the première of Edgard Varèse's Poème Électronique at the 1958 Brussels International Fair. ^[2] The Pavillon's hyperbolic structure was, in fact, based on the formative structure of one of his most famous pieces, "Metastaseis," composed some four years earlier. The dual nature of "Metastaseis" and the Pavillon are an example of Xenakis' theory of meta-art – the concept that an artistic expression can be realized mathematically in any artistic medium. ^[3] Xenakis performed at many world expositions and fairs, and played annually in the Shiraz Art Festival in Iran. County Status County capital Mayor Constantin Sever Cibu, National Liberal Party, since 2004 Area 33. ... Spetses (Greek, Modern: Σπέτσες, Ancient/Katharevousa: -ai), older form Spetsai is an island in Greece. ... This article is about building architecture. ... Engineering is the discipline of acquiring and applying knowledge of design, analysis, and/or construction of works for practical purposes. ... This article is about the capital of Greece. ... A resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to fighting an invader in an occupied country or the government of a sovereign nation through either the use of physical force, or nonviolence. ... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... Combatants Hellenic Army, Royalist forces, Republicans United Kingdom Communist Party of Greece (ELAS, DSE) Commanders Alexander Papagos, Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos, James Van Fleet Markos Vafiadis Strength 150,000 men 50,000 men and women Casualties 15,000 killed 32,000+ killed or captured The Greek Civil War (Ελληνικός εμφύλιος πόλεμος [ellinikos emfilios polemos]) was... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... This article is about the capital of France. ... Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-born architect and writer, who is famous for his contributions to what now is called Modern Architecture. ... Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French-born composer. ...

Xenakis's primary teachers of composition were Aristotelis Koundouroff, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen. ^[4]His own early compositions, however, rarely followed the rules he was being taught ^{[citation needed]}. His first meeting with Honegger exemplifies his attitude toward formal instruction: asked to play one of his compositions on the piano, Xenakis was stopped promptly as Honegger pointed out parallel fifths and octaves. Xenakis had written them intentionally and refused to "correct" the piece. Honegger attempted to humiliate Xenakis, who simply left to study with Milhaud. However, he believed Milhaud's teaching also imposed restrictions he found arbitrary and inessential.^{[verification needed]} Aristotelis Koundouroff (Greek: Αριστοτέλης Κουντούρωφ) (1896 – 1969) was a Greek composer of the Modern Era. ... Arthur Honegger in 1921. ... Darius Milhaud Darius Milhaud (IPA: ) (September 4, 1892 – June 22, 1974) was a French composer and teacher. ... Olivier Messiaen It has been suggested that List of students of Olivier Messiaen be merged into this article or section. ...

Meanwhile, he continued to work full-time as an architect in Le Corbusier's employ, composing only as a hobby. Xenakis was a creative architect, exploring the possibilities of new materials and shapes in construction, and was frequently entrusted with important projects that called on his technical and artistic skills. Le Corbusier, who came from a musical family (and pretended to hate music) also mentored Xenakis as a composer; he regarded Xenakis and Varèse as two of France's most innovative and promising.^{[verification needed]}

Later, Xenakis approached Olivier Messiaen for compositional advice, expecting to have to start his musical studies again from the beginning, but was told "No, you are almost thirty, 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." Messiaen, whose own compositional style did not follow established precedents, did not try to impose the limitations of baroque counterpoint or serialism as previous teachers had, but rather let Xenakis find his own musical ideas and guided them along. Xenakis attended Messiaen's Paris Conservatoire classes regularly, and his confidence grew along with his compositional skill; he would shortly thereafter combine the mathematical ideas he had been developing in Corbusier's studio with the musical tools he had been honing with Messiaen to produce his first major work. Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music which were in widespread use between approximately 1600 and 1750. ... The references in this article would be clearer with a different and/or consistent style of citation, footnoting or external linking. ... Conservatoire de Paris, or Paris Conservatoire, has been central to the evolution of music in France and Western Europe. ...

He is particularly remembered for his pioneering electronic and computer music, and for the use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases in Pithoprakta, aleatory distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, Gaussian distribution in ST/10 and Atrèes, Markov chains in Analogiques), game theory (in Duel and Stratégie), group theory (Nomos Alpha), and Boolean algebra (in Herma and Eonta), Brownian motion (in N'Shima). In keeping with his use of probabilistic theories, many of Xenakis's pieces are, in his own words, "a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions." Unlike most of his contemporaries (i.e. Milton Babbitt, Schoenberg), Xenakis did not want the listener to be aware of the forms and theories used to produce his compositions.^{[verification needed]} For other uses, see Electronic music (disambiguation). ... Computer music is music generated with, or composed with the aid of, computers. ... Stochastic, from the Greek stochos or goal, means of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture; conjectural; random. ... For other meanings of mathematics or uses of math and maths, see Mathematics (disambiguation) and Math (disambiguation). ... Probability is the likelihood that something is the case or will happen. ... Look up aleatory in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The normal distribution, also called the Gaussian distribution, is an important family of continuous probability distributions, applicable in many fields. ... In mathematics, a (discrete-time) Markov chain is a discrete-time stochastic process with the Markov property. ... Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is often used in the context of economics. ... Group theory is that branch of mathematics concerned with the study of groups. ... Nomos Alpha (1966) is a piece for solo cello composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1965, commissioned by Radio Bremen for cellist Siegfried Palm, and dedicated to mathematicians Aristoxenus of Tarentum, Evariste Galois, and Felix Klein (DeLio 1985, p. ... Boolean algebra is the finitary algebra of two values. ... Three different views of Brownian motion, with 32 steps, 256 steps, and 2048 steps denoted by progressively lighter colors. ... Milton Byron Babbitt (born May 10, 1916) is an American composer. ... Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948 Arnold Schoenberg (the anglicized form of Schönberg — Schoenberg changed the spelling officially when he left Germany and re-converted to Judaism in 1933; September 13, 1874 – July 13, 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer. ...

In 1962 he published Musiques formelles, a collection of essays on his musical ideas and composition techniques. This was later revised, expanded and translated into Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition in 1971.

In 1966, Xenakis founded the Centre for Automatic and Mathematical Music in Paris and subsequently set up a similar centre at Indiana University. Year 1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full calendar) of the 1966 Gregorian calendar. ... Indiana University is the principal campus of the Indiana University system. ...

From 1975 to 1978 he was professor of music at Gresham College, London, giving free public lectures. Sir Thomas Greshams grasshopper crest is used as a symbol of the College Gresham College is an unusual institution of higher learning off Holborn in central London. ...

In 1982 Xenakis developed his now renowned Music Timbre and Cadence Scale which is used throughout the research of modern music for quantifying musical styles.

He was married to writer Françoise Xenakis, née Gargouïl. They had a daughter, painter and sculptor Mâkhi Xenakis.

He died in Paris in 2001. This article is about the capital of France. ...

In conversation, Iannis Xenakis frequently distanced himself from being seen in too strict terms - like many other composers for whom method and structure were the easiest aspects of music to discuss verbally, he sees the role of such things as relative. One way to envisage this approach is that the method constitutes a thematic germ, a starting-point, and from there the normal musico-aesthetics, personal obsessions and practical considerations play their normal role in finishing and shaping the piece. Indeed from the 1970s onwards Xenakis' use of method became deeply assimilated into his general musical thinking and he reports in interviews from that time that the strict application of statistical processes was no longer necessary to produce the results he was looking for.^{[verification needed]}

Xenakis appeared easily bored in interviews when people attempted to take an overly simplistic view of him as 'complex' - the various clichés surrounding him appeared to greatly annoy him in interview and he would frequently make recourse to the wider aesthetics of music in general and the other arts, in order to contextualise his contributions to music-making. In a sense his early statements about "looking at music statistically" were a response to what he saw as the mistake of placing too much emphasis on the likely benefits of applying methodology too rigorously.^{[verification needed]} It is also important to note, however, that this does not constitute any true dichotomy between Xenakis and his peers - the application of single-minded rigour to composition in post-war music was relative and momentary, and as with his own work, the poetic and aesthetic significance of the gesture as a modern equivalent to programme-music, as well as the vital role played by musicality and music-editing/shaping has been widely undervalued in favour of simplistic characterisations of such music as purely intellectual. The Parthenons facade showing an interpretation of golden rectangles in its proportions. ...

Overall then Xenakis' contribution to the modernist aesthetic arose from the understanding that things which happen according to rules can be changed without loss of overall meaning, and developed (immediately) into a freeform polyphonic style focusing on large-scale emotional control and a generalistic approach to melody.^{[verification needed]}

Another glaringly obvious but often overlooked aspect of Xenakis' work is the kind of neo-classical naming convention. Many essays have been written about the formula titles of his numbered works but it seems very clear that his obsession in most of his titles was with ancient Greece.

Selected works

• Metastasis (Metastaseis B') (1953-1954), for orchestra of 61 instrumentalists
• Pithoprakta (1955-1956), for orchestra of 50 instrumentalists
• Achorripsis (1956-57), for 21 instrumentalists
• Eonta (1963), for piano and 5 brass instruments
• Oresteïa (1965-1966), on texts from Aeschylus, suite for children's choir, mixed choir with musical accessories and ensemble of 12 musicians
• Terretektorh (1965-1966), for 88 musicians dispersed among the audience
• Medea (1967), scene music on texts from Seneca, for male choir playing rhythms with cymbals and 5 musicians
• Nomos Alpha (1966), for solo cello
• Polytope de Montréal (1967), spectacle of light and sound for 4 identical orchestras of 15 musicians
• Nuits (1967), on Sumerian, Assyrian, Achaean and other phonemes, for 12 mixed solo voices or mixed choir
• Nomos Gamma (1967-1968), for 98 musicians dispersed among the audience
• Anaktoria (1969), for ensemble of 8 musicians
• Kraanerg (1968-1969), ballet music, for orchestra and four-channel tape
• Persephassa (1969), for 6 percussionists
• Persepolis (1971), for light and sound (eight-channel tape)
• Cendrées (1973), for mixed choir of 72 (or 36) singers chanting phonemes by Iannis Xenakis and 73 musicians
• Evryali (1973), for piano solo
• N'Shima (1975), on Hebrew words and phonemes, for 2 mezzo-sopranos (or altos) and 5 musicians
• Psappha (1976), for percussion solo (variable instrumentation)
• Dmaathen (1976), for oboe and percussion
• Kottos (1977), for solo cello
• Jonchaies (1977), for orchestra of 109 musicians
• Pléïades (1978), for 6 percussionists
• Pour Maurice (1982), for baritone and piano
• Shaar (1983), for large string orchestra
• Keren (1986), for solo trombone
• Jalons (1986), for ensemble of 15 musicians
• Keqrops (1986), for solo piano and orchestra of 92 musicians
• Kassandra (Oresteïa II) (1987), for amplified baritone (also playing a 20-string psaltery) and percussion
• Rebonds (a + b) (1987-89), for percussion solo
• Xas (1987), for saxophone quartet
• La Déesse Athéna (Oresteïa III) (1992), for baritone solo and mixed ensemble of 11 instruments

Metastasis, also Metastaseis (dialectic transformations), is an orchestral work for 65 musicians by Iannis Xenakis. ... This article is about the ancient Greek playwright. ... Bust, traditionally thought to be Seneca, now identified by some as Hesiod. ... Nomos Alpha (1966) is a piece for solo cello composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1965, commissioned by Radio Bremen for cellist Siegfried Palm, and dedicated to mathematicians Aristoxenus of Tarentum, Evariste Galois, and Felix Klein (DeLio 1985, p. ... Sumerian ( native tongue) was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BCE. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language in the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific... Akkadian (lišānum akkadītum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language family) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. ... Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BC, before the Dorian invasion. ... In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... Persephassa is a piece for six percussionists composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1969. ... Hebrew language most commonly refers to Modern Hebrew; in historical contexts, it commonly refers to the Biblical Hebrew language. ... A psaltery is a stringed musical instrument of the harp or the zither family. ...

References

Bibliography

• Amagali, Rosemary Tristano. 1975. "Texture as an Organizational Factor in Selected Works of Iannis Xenakis". M.M. Thesis, Indiana University.
• Baltensperger, André. 1995. Iannis Xenakis und die Stochastische Musik - Komposition im Spannungsfeld von Architektur und Mathematik. Zürich. Paul Haupt.
• Bardot, Jean-Marc. 1999. "Cendrées de Xenakis ou l'émergence de la vocalité dans la pensée xenakienne." Undergraduate thesis (equivalent). Saint-Etienne: Université Jean Monnet.
• Biasi, Salvatore di. 1994. Musica e matematica negli anni 50-60: Iannis Xenakis. Bologne. Università degli Studi di Bologna.
• Harley, James. 2004. Xenakis: his life in music. London: Taylor & Francis Books. ISBN 0-415-97145-4
• Mâche, François-Bernard. 2002. Portrait(s) de Iannis Xenakis Seuil. ISBN 2-7177-2178-9
• Matossian, Nouritza. 1990. Xenakis. London: Kahn and Averill. ISBN 1-871082-17-X
• Varga, Bálint András. 1996. Conversations with Iannis Xenakis. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17959-2
• Xenakis, Iannis. 2001. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (Harmonologia Series No.6). Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. ISBN 1-57647-079-2

See also

• List of Gresham Professors of Music
• Xenakis Ensemble
• UPIC
• IanniX

The Professor of Music at Gresham College is appointed by the City of London Corporation. ... The Xenakis Ensemble is a Dutch ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music, particularly the works of Iannis Xenakis. ... UPIC is a musical instrument designed by Iannis Xenakis. ... IanniX is a multi-formal and multi-temporal OpenSound Control sequencer, made at La kitchen from the UPIC (Iannis Xenakis). ...

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Iannis Xenakis

• Institute of Research on Music and Acoustics, Athens (Greece): Iannis Xenakis Pages (with several sound and score samples)
• Iannis-Xenakis.org by the Friends of Xenakis
• Centre for Composition of Music Iannis Xenakis
• Medieval.org: Modern Music: Xenakis
• Edward Childs, PhD. "Achorripsis: A Sonification of Probability Distributions" (5-page PDF)
• Luque, Sergio. 2006. Stochastic Synthesis: Origins and Extensions. Masters Thesis, Institute of Sonology
• soundaxis.ca
• Works catalogue (70-page PDF) from Xenakis' publisher Éditions Durand-Salabert-Eschig
• Iannis Xenakis: the aesthetics of his early works by Markos Zografos

Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. ... is the 149th day of the year (150th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1922 (MCMXXII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... County Status County capital Mayor Constantin Sever Cibu, National Liberal Party, since 2004 Area 33. ... is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday (link displays the 2001 Gregorian calendar). ... This article is about the capital of France. ...