Iannis Xenakis

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Edited December 10, 2007 by 7/4

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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.

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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

Edited January 15, 2008 by 7/4

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February 5, 2001

Iannis Xenakis, Composer Who Built Music on Mathematics, Is Dead at 78

By PAUL GRIFFITHS, NYTimes

Iannis Xenakis, the Greek-French composer who often used highly sophisticated scientific and mathematical theories to arrive at music of primitive power, died yesterday at his home in Paris. He was 78.

He had been in poor health for several years and lapsed into a coma several days ago, said Charles Zacharie Bornstein, a conductor who has championed his music.

By training, Mr. Xenakis was an engineer and architect; his musical education came late. This enabled him largely to ignore conventional techniques of composition. He rejected the idea of intuitive or unreasoning randomness in composition, for example, and by constructing his works on laws and formulas of the physical sciences, he sought to control his music at every instant. He once said, ''This is my definition of an artist, or of a man: to control.''

At first he depended on the use of mathematical models of disorder. By using calculations derived from, say, the numbers of different-sized pebbles on a shore, Mr. Xenakis could determine the pitches of notes or their placements in time. In this way he could create music with chaotic inner detail but a decisive shape or impulse. Typical examples of such partly randomized effects in a Xenakis composition might include a bundle of nonaligned upward slides on orchestral strings.

Once computers became available to him in the early 1960's, Mr. Xenakis was able to work much faster. And however far removed he was from the tradition of Western classical music, he inevitably began to create a tradition of his own in composing so abundantly.

Iannis Xenakis (pronounced YAHN-nis zen-NAHK-ess) was born into a prosperous family of Greek origin on May 29, 1922, in the Romanian town of Braila. His mother died when he was 6, and he was sent to the Greek island of Spetsai to be educated at a British-style boarding school.

His musical studies began at the age of 12, and even then he intended to study both science and music. In 1938 he moved to Athens to prepare for admission to the Polytechnic School, where he enrolled in 1940 and graduated in 1947 as a civil engineer.

He lived in Athens during the Italian and German occupations of World War II. For much of this time he was a member of the Communist resistance, which was directed at first against the Germans and Italians and then, when they were defeated, against the British. In 1945 he was struck by a shell fragment from a British tank and lost an eye and part of his cheek, leaving the left side of his face deeply scarred.

''In Greece, the resistance lost, so I left in 1947,'' he once recalled. He moved to Paris (''In France, the resistance won''), where he found a job in architecture at Le Corbusier's studio. He was there from 1947 to 1959, and contributed to some of the studio's most important projects, including the pavilion for the Philips electronics company at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. He always maintained that the Philips Pavilion was entirely his own design, and certainly its simple but strikingly original geometry of curves and planes is worked out on principles very similar to those he had used in his first published composition, ''Metastasis'' for orchestra (1953-4).

''Metastasis'' came at the end of a period in which he studied with some of the leading composers in Paris. But he was a mature student, and perhaps all he could learn at this stage was how to avoid banality.

His alternative was the extraordinary busy textures and clean shapes of ''Metastasis.'' He showed this score to the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who became a fervent supporter. The first performance of ''Metastasis,'' however, was led by Hans Rosbaud at the 1955 festival in Donaueschingen, Germany, one of the important meeting places of the European musical avant-garde.

''Metastasis,'' largely built on glissandi of rising volume that could recall an airplane rising during takeoff, caused a sensation. Many young composers were impressed by Mr. Xenakis's sense of music as pure sound, but other musicians, notably Pierre Boulez, detected a lack of craftsmanship. Mr. Boulez was eventually persuaded to commission a score from Mr. Xenakis for his Domaine Musical concerts in 1963. He was rewarded by one of Mr. Xenakis's strongest pieces, ''Eonta'' for brass quintet and piano. But the antipathy between the two remained.

Mr. Xenakis did not lack champions, however. Mr. Scherchen conducted the premiere of ''Pithoprakta'' for trombones, percussion and strings in 1957 and the premiere of ''Achoripsis'' for small orchestra the next year. A little later Gunther Schuller gave the composer his first American performance. George Balanchine stiched together two of his scores to create the ballet ''Metastasis and Pithoprakta.''

Like other of his works, ''Metastasis'' and ''Pithoprakta'' were regulated by Poisson's Law of Large Numbers, which implies that the more numerous the phenomena, the more they tend toward a determinate end -- as in flipping a coin. ''I have tried to inject determinism into what we call chance,'' said Mr. Xenakis, who used the scientific word ''stochastic'' to give a name to this idea of probability in music.

As the 1950's drew to an end, Mr. Xenakis started working in the electronic music studio of French radio, producing ''Concret PH'' for the Philips Pavilion. In 1961 he visited Tokyo for the first time and met the pianist Yuji Takahashi, for whom he wrote ''Herma,'' a work of cascading complexity for solo piano. In 1963 came his first trip to the United States, to teach at Tanglewood.

A Ford Foundation scholarship enabled him to spend 1964-65 in Berlin, and in 1966 he founded his own studio in Paris, the Équipe de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales.

After that he focused his activities on Paris, while returning to the Greek islands for summer holidays and traveling the world to lecture and attend performances.

His work with electronic music continued, notably in ''Bohor'' (1962) and in various projects combining electronic sound with laser projections. One of these was ''Polytope de Cluny'' (1972), devised for the Roman bathhouse in Paris. It was a good match. Rugged in construction, his music went well with ruins.

In other works, he combined his music with literary ruins -- texts from the Greek plays or other classical sources. One powerful example is ''Ais'' for amplified baritone, percussion and orchestra (1979), on lines from Homer and Sappho. Another piece in the same mode, ''The Goddess Athena'' (1992), for baritone and chamber ensemble, was performed late last month by the Met Chamber Ensemble at Weill Recital Hall. But Mr. Xenakis could also create a feeling of ancient drama, ceremony and intensity when using voices without words, as in ''Nuits'' for chorus (1967).

That same feeling often persisted in the instrumental works that form the bulk of Mr. Xenakis's output: solo pieces of extreme virtuosity, chamber music, compositions for the standard modern-music ensemble and works for symphony orchestra.

Percussionists enjoyed Mr. Xenakis's music for its vitality and drama, and the solo pieces ''Psappha'' (1975) and ''Rebonds'' (1988), as well as the sextet ''Pleiades'' (1978), became classics of the genre. His last work was a piece for percussion and ensemble, ''O--mega'' (1997).

Mr. Xenakis became a French citizen and married a Frenchwoman, the writer Françoise Xenakis, who had been decorated for saving the lives of resistance fighters. He is survived by his wife and by his daughter, Mâhki.

He wrote several books and essays on mathematics, architecture, town planning and music. These writings show how deeply he based his music on mathematics and logic.

He rejected criticism that he wrote ''a species of desensitized music.'' Asked once if he composed without sentiment, he answered: ''Yes, if you mean that kind of traditional sentimental effusion of sadness, gaiety or joy. I don't think that this is really admissible. In my music there is all the agony of my youth, of the resistance,'' as well as ''the occasional mysterious, deathly sounds of those cold nights of December '44 in Athens.''

''From this,'' he added, ''was born my conception of the massing of sound events.''

Edited January 15, 2008 by 7/4

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what brings this up now?

Because it's there.

Just lookin' for other members comments to see what they'll say. Sorta like the Partch.

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Mode's Xenakis Edition.

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Primal Architect

By Ben Watson

Since the death in 1965 of Edgard Varèse - the sole composer to translate Futurism into sound - all classical music has sounded disappointed, vitiated as an artistic force by its social role as an emblem of high-grade cultural 'value'. Snob appeal does not encourage recognition of the realities modern life. Of all the composers now operating within the parameters of art music, the one who has attempted to further Varèse's project most has been Iannis Xenakis.

Almost uniquely, Xenakis adheres to the tenets of 1920s abstraction: insistence on the here-and-now of the material artwork; trust in an egalitarian human psyche addressable by primal signs; an overriding concern with innovation ("I try not to repeat myself. I am not interested in repeating myself, or other people's music"). All of which adds up to a blunt refusal of ideological or cultural collusion. Though the force and directness of his music is acknowledged even by conservative critics. Xenakis's vast oeuvre - over 100 fullblown works by 1993 - suffers terrible neglect. His rationalist intransigence, his insistence on hearing the music he wants, resists the marketing cliches, the conformist niches like 'mystic seer' or 'national treasure' or 'soundtrack maestro'.

Xenakis was born in Braïla, Romania on 22 May 1922. During the Second World War, he joined the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation at the age of 18. I met him in London on the day that the scandal of the Churchill papers hit the headlines, and Xenakis told a story that served as a rebuff to the jingoistic celebrations being planned for VE day.

In October 1944, with the fascists beaten, Xenakis and his resistance comrades found themselves fighting a new set of invaders - British troops ordered by Churchill to suppress the Communist-led partisans and secure Greece for the West. Unarmed civilian demonstrators were shot down in the street, and Xenakis fled to Paris in 1947 under sentence of death from the new regime, an American-backed oscillation between authoritarian monarchy and military dictatorship which lasted until the mid-70s.

In the fight against the British, part of the left half of Xenakis's face was shot away; he only survived due to the heroism of a woman called Mâkhi (after whom he named his only daughter). But his experiences also had musical import. Just as Varèse - with his sirens, percussive blocks of sound and cataclysmic climaxes - made music cognisant of the realities of trench warfare, so Xenakis was fascinated by the noise of crowds and of gunshot sounds in space.

"I discovered things about sound that I was not taught, that no one had told me. People shouting in waves, it's a very special experience. I was there in December 1944 when the Communist resistance was suppressed by the British troops. I was fighting against the British as I fought against the Germans. What was interesting were the bullets in the night, whistling, and explosions here and there, and also the searchlights trying to spot the planes - that was with the Germans. It was a large-scale spectacle that was very interesting."

Such aestheticisation of war and suffering has a sinister side, though with Xenakis it has more to do with a strict idea of the objectivity of musical event than contempt for the suffering of the masses. In order to make music that could apply his observations, Xenakis needed to master traditional technique: in Paris he studied music with Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Olivier Messiaen. He also worked for the architect Le Corbusier and (along with Varèse) supplied tapes for the Philips multi-speaker pavilion at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958. He developed an interest in maths, a discipline of relevance to both music and architecture, especially the 'calculus of probabilities' pioneered in the early eighteenth century by Jacques Bernouilli. Xenakis used Bernouilli's 'stochastic' method (the word means 'target', and refers to the gradual accumulation of definition in calculating probabilities - the more you flip the coin, the closer you get to 50 per cent) to assign notes to players, distributing huge 'events' across the orchestra. This was an eminently reasonable way to plot the movement of sounds, as logical yet tradition-defying as the Neo-Plasticist painters' elimination of everything from their canvases apart from black, white, the right-angle and the primary colours (during the interview, Xenakis talked approvingly of the artist Piet Mondrian). The stochastic method enabled Xenakis to emulate the unpredictable-yet-patterned forms found in tree branches, clouds and coastlines (anticipating popular interest in Chaos Theory by 40 years).

"The stochastic method was necessary in the 50s, when I started writing Metastasis or Pithoprakta especially. I used systems that scattered formal notes from the string orchestra all over the spectrum. That was the vision that I had of music like the rain, or like the clouds - and the human mind is made out of these things, so it was not a translation, but a personification of these kind of thoughts."

Early on, Xenakis did himself an unwitting disservice by trying to explain such mathematical procedures in interviews. He was branded with a reputation for formidable intellectualism when his real aim was to evoke primal experiences. As so often in classical music, the fact that his sensibility was alien to genteel concertgoers was held as evidence of elitism - actually he deserved the audiences that were later wowed by the (comparatively impoverished) sight-and-sound spectacles of Hawkwind or Jean Michel Jarre.

"It has to be music otherwise you are lost. The imagination of what you put in art can be very close to what scientists find out in mathematics or astro-physics, but if you fall into the trap that you must bring mathematics into music, then you are lost, it is impossible. Of course I made mistakes, I don't know where, but I did make mistakes, thinking that this mathematical logic is interesting in itself, but it has to be separated. I have from very early on developed a sense of sound, as opposed to the ideological principles that you could put inside. Music has to be sound, otherwise you are lost. Sound goes into the inner part of the human soul - in a more powerful way even than painting."

When I met him, Xenakis was visiting London to hear the ensemble Reservoir perform his 1969 composition, Kraanerg. Its densely-packed 75 minutes pits brass and the lowest of woodwinds (including bassoon and the rarely heard contra-bass clarinet) against a ferocious four-track tape montage. The mere timbre of the piece was spell-bindingly alien. Its lizard skin crawls with lurid life; like Ridley Scott, Xenakis grasps that immaculate attention to detail is required to make a monster movie in the mind. And although its texture is ruggedly distinctive, exposure to the whole piece revealed an astonishing variety of formal inventions.

During our conversation, it became obvious why Xenakis could not use the record industry to teach a non-classical audience: he retains the classical composer's focus on site-specific sonic events. Recorded product does not interest him. I showed him one of the 3" mini-CDs in the Metamkine label's Cinéma Pour L'Oreille series, which provides a showcase for state-of-the-art electroacoustic compositions: Xenakis's wonderful, hard-to-find electronic music would be perfect for the label. However, for Xenakis, a tape is a way of realising concerts, not an article for private consumption - and still less a priceless artwork. The tape for Kraanerg, for example, is administered alongside his instrumental score sheets by the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. At 1am on the morning of the performance, it was discovered that the master tape was in Sydney, Australia. A digital copy was quickly transmitted over the Internet to London for Reservoir's performance. Xenakis, meanwhile, remained blissfully ignorant of the drama surrounding his work.

Xenakis conceives of recordings as a means to realise specific events. "It depends on the acoustical means to listen to the music, what loudspeakers you have, what hall, the acoustics of the hall - it's a very complicated thing and more or less a failure!"

Did he think that domestic reproduction of sound was hopelessly impoverished? "Well, it's not safe. You don't know. It's like having something written for an orchestra and then the orchestra is not so good, the conductor is not so good, the hall is not interesting, and so it's a failure, it's not what you wanted. They are building all sorts of concert halls; sometimes they are acoustically good, the sound coming from the stage can be interesting, most of the time you cannot put loudspeakers on the ceiling, there are no means - if you put them on a balcony that is usually very poor. I have thought and designed concert halls which are different, these things were published somewhere - it is a thing nobody has solved yet."

What of virtual recreation of ambience in headphones? "In fact it's rather poor and it doesn't work. You have to make an abstraction when you make a recording, it's not the real acoustics. When you write music you have to have in mind that you'll only hear a sketch of it. You can listen to it, but bear in mind that it is not the absolute thing. There are so many variables. A composer has to judge - that should be about that, this effect, but you are never sure: what you have in your mind is something that is not real. Even the conductor doesn't know. If you have no conductor it's still more difficult - like with the string quartet. With the string quartet if the second violin is not loud enough, then what you have written is lost."

If recorded sound is no answer, how can we best hear his music? "I write especially for Germany, for Cologne, Munich, for Hamburg - the best way is to go and listen to these concerts. Why it's Germany, I don't know. Germany is divided in Länders, and so they are independent and try to act for themselves, which does not exist in France or England - it's much less centralised. And perhaps people who commission are wide open, they want something different."

Unlike virtually every other composer, Xenakis refuses to worry about the tastes of his audience; he believes any calculation in that arena would render his art inauthentic, a bad cross between art and politics. While his own opinions are radical - a 1967 pamphlet had him praising Lenin as a "philosopher, sociologist and demagogue", while Kraanerg was written to hail the "youth revolt" of 1968 - he wants music to be autonomous and objective, a primal enactment of natural forces.

"I write music because I am interested in what I am doing at that time, no matter what happens to it. Fortunately I have a publisher who takes care of it, and there are people who are crazy enough to perform it from time to time, but that is not really my problem. You have to be critical about the music you are doing, and not about the political aspect that is surrounding it - otherwise you are lost, you are not an interesting musician, nor a politician at all. If you want to be performed, maybe you have to be interesting for the listeners; you may think they are not just listeners but also politically minded, which is a mistake. Mankind is... you have the same brain as everybody, so if you do something interesting musically speaking, just that, people can understand that, can grasp it - because they are made as you are, you are not special. Otherwise, for instance, we would not be interested in Japanese music, traditional music, Indian or Chinese musics, which are very apart."

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He tells a story of asking an orchestra to listen to a Japanese musician playing Heike (traditional Japanese music) and being disappointed that they laughed at it, wouldn't treat it seriously. Xenakis wishes to reproduce the thrill of responding to forms of art without necessarily learning the code (compare Ezra Pound on Chinese characters, Charles Olson on Mayan glyphs or Anthony Braxton's diagram titles). The creation of new sounds is paramount, rather than a 'conversational' deployment of readily available elements.

"The post-Serial musicians like Boulez and Stockhausen and Nono and other people, they thought of music not in that kind of way, that is to transform the sound from the instruments, but just to play the sounds but put in a logical combination of melodic patterns. Varèse on the contrary tried to construct new sounds from the traditional ones by harmonics, not each sound for each instrument but by the combination of the instruments, and he was up to a point quite successful, though he didn't do much after the 30s."

This stance has led Xenakis to compositions of astonishing scope. The cello virtuoso Siegfried Palm's recording of a 13 minute piece for unaccompanied cello, Nomos Alpha (1966), introduced a staggering array of new playing techniques and attained the kind of visceral performance intensity associated with jazz and free improvisation. The same year Xenakis completed Terretektorh for 88 musicians distributed among the audience - the wind and percussion players were also equipped with a wood-block, whip, maracas and siren. Xenakis is also noted for his pioneering use of unusual vocal production in choral works - male falsetto, throat clicks and lip smacks. Whether concentrating on a single instrument and its capabilities, or arranging innovative events for massed ensembles, Xenakis maintains the integrity of his music by pursuit of the never-before-heard. This makes all the justifications for retread art - religious or political 'commitment', commercial accessibility, the declared desire to 'communicate' - redundant.

Xenakis may be uninterested in social contexts that always lead to 'imperfect' realisations of his musical ideas, but it is important that Reservoir is an ensemble committed to performing Xenakis. Exposure to his music is necessary if one is to gauge the degree of timidity and retreat that has infected art music today. As well as Kraanerg, they have already performed Epei (1976) and Palimpsest (1979) and are planning more in the future. Reservoir packed the Conway Hall for Kraanerg, and the programme - a delirious arrangement of a Carl Stalling Looney Tunes cartoon soundtrack called There They Go Go Go! and a piece by Erik Satie - was 'accessible' enough to attract the punters, but also provided an intelligent contrast to Xenakis (especially Stalling - his exhaustive and dizzying run-through of established emotional triggers provided the perfect foil to Xenakis's rugged refusal to manipulate). Fashionable interest in cartoon frivolity was not used as an excuse to ignore what 75 minutes of 60s modernism could offer: the players' commitment to Xenakis was palpable (other Reservoir composers include Barrett and Braxton, Zappa and Zorn). The performance didn't just vindicate Xenakis, it also vindicated the relevance of classical music to a discussion of new music of any genre: Reservoir are a musical force who can make genuine sense of The Wire's cross-cultural scramble.

Although Xenakis is still too little known and too little performed, his example - his willingness to carry compositional strategies beyond the confines of 'good taste', his openness to the untempered impact of exotic musics, his drive for new sounds, the terrifying emotional impact of his sonic objectivity - has inspired younger composers as diverse (yet crucial) as Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett and Hannah Kulenty. His focus on what can be achieved in site-specific locales has restricted his music to concert halls, denying him his rightful audience. Nevertheless, this narrow focus - in sharp contrast to those 'broadminded' post-minimalists who look over their shoulder at the sales figures achieved in pop/classical crossovers - has allowed Xenakis to develop a music of truly majestic otherness. It is an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the West.

© The Wire 2008

Edited January 15, 2008 by 7/4

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I made a post of the same information in the What "classical" music are you listening to right now? thread, but it's such an amazing album, I wanted to mention it here also.

Iannis Xenakis - Electronic Music

Iannis Xenakis is without a doubt one of the major figures in the development of music in the 20th century. In 1957, he joined Pierre Schaeffer and others at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and it was there that Xenakis composed his early works for electronic tape.

Xenakis' distinct sound is already apparent in 'Diamorphoses' (1957) which incorporates sounds of distant earthquakes, car crashes, jet engines, and other 'noise-like' sounds. His distinct sound is also apparent in 'Concret PH' (1958), based on the sounds of burning charcoal. 'Concret PH' was played along with Varese' 'Poème Electronique' in 1958 in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair , which Xenakis (also architect, mathematician and engineer) designed. 'Orient-Occident' (1960), commissioned by UNESCO as music for a film by Enrico Fulchignoni, uses the sounds of bowed boxes, bells and metal rods, sounds from the ionosphere, and a speed-altered excerpt from Xenakis' orchestral work 'Pitoprakta' are combined to create a work suggestive of the themes of the film, which tracks the development of civilization. 'Bohor' (1962), was composed mostly with the sounds of Middle Eastern bracelets.

'Hibiki-Hana-Ma' (1970, 'Reverberation-Flower-Interval'), composed for the Osaka World's Fair, was composed with the UPIC system, a graphical input device that Xenakis invented, using recordings of an orchestra, a biwa, and a snare drum. And 'S.709' (1992) is the first of two compositions created with the GENDY-N program at CEMAMu (Centre d'Etudes de Mathematiques et Automatiques Musicales / Center for Studies in Mathematics and Automated Music), Xenakis' research center near Paris.

Edited January 15, 2008 by 7/4

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Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis In Conversation

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A private collection of radio broadcasts I found:

IANNIS XENAKIS (1922-2001)

A Stochastic Portrait,

part 1 : Orchestral works

01 Metastasis (1953-4) (9:15)

02 Voile (1995) (4:47)

03 Aïs (1980) (17:30)

04 Horos (1986) (14:11)

05 Shaar (1982) (12:30)

06 Jonchaies (1977) (14:59)

07 Synaphaï (1969) (12:34)

08 Metastasis (1953-4) (8:08)

09 Ioolkos (1996) (7:03)

10 Empreintes (1975) (11:05)

11 Keqrops (1986) (19:17)

12 Jonchaies (1977) (14:49)

13 Metastasis (1953-4) (6:23)

14 Pithoprakta (1955-6) (10:24)

15 Dox-Orkh (1991) (16:10)

16 Kyania (1990)[excerpt](9:00)

17 Róaï (1991) (14:48)

18 Jonchaies (1977) (17:42)

19 Dammerschein (1993-4)(13:09)

20 Metastasis (1953-4) (8:18)

21 Pithoprakta (1955-6) (5:34)

22 Terretektorh (1965-6)(11:44)

23 Empreintes (1975) (15:30)

24 Jonchaies (1977) (16:01)

25 Sea Change (1997) (4:43)

Total : 5h

A Stochastic Portrait,

part 2 : Chamber Works

01 Khal Perr (1983) (10:11)

02 Herma (1961) (6:47)

03 Palimpsest (1979) (10:51)

04 Waarg (1988) (17:09)

05 Charisma (1971) (5:53)

06 Thallein (1984) (17:12)

07 O-Mega (1997)(3:52)

08 Nuits (1967-8) (9:59)

09 Phlegra (1975) (12:53)

10 Echange (1989) (16:55)

11 Epeï (1976)(14:54)

12 N'Shima (1975) (16:45)

13 Psappha (1975) (10:18)

14 Eonta (1963-4) (19:59)

15 Anaktoria (1969)(10:47)

16 Phlegra (1975) (13:49)

17 Dmaathen (1976)(9:35)

18 Psappha (1975)(12:20)

19 Herma (1961) (5:49)

20 Mikka (1971)(3:16)

21 Mikka S. (1976)(3:00)

22 ST-4 (1956-62)(11:50)

23 Tetras (1983)(15:27)

24 Tetora (1990)(13:39)

25 Nomos Alpha (1965-66) (16:45)

26 Herma (1961) (7:26)

27 Nuits (1967-8)(9:28)

28 Medea (1967)(22:42)

29 Pu wijnuej we fip (1992)(9:01)

30 A Hélène (1977) (10:56)

31 Zyïa (1952)(10:57)

32 Nuits (1967-8)(9:40)

Total : 6h

b/c France Musique, 1992-2005

fm > cass (MC) > wav > flac

Uploaded by Uncle Meat, 2008.

Edited February 29, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

In case any one is interested...new to me:

List of compositions by Iannis Xenakis.

[Christiern]

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[7/4]

You might be interested in this.

Thanks! I know about Oresteia, I just couldn't make the scene.