My choice to study Iannis Xenakis was due to a of couple reasons. One, there was a wealth of material on his works. Articles, upon articles on a type of music which was quite foreign to me. I sampled a couple albums from the Uvic library, that of Gyorgi Lygeti, Pierre Boulez and downloaded some music from Karlhienz Stockhausen and John Cage. All of these composers, who are deemed geniuses of there era, that I Andrew Mensah, had never heard of. I found this interesting, because I had always looked at music with a one dimensional frame of mind. My thoughts of music were, it had to have a beat, and with a rhythm you could tap your feet or bob your head to. I could picture something soothing that would play out of the windows of your car, while you’re driving on a nice summer day. Or music that lifted your spirits while you were working out. With this idea in mind, I was in shocked that Iannis Xenakis could ever be branded as music, well, in my narrow-minded definition of music that is. As I searched through more information on Iannis Xenakis, I quickly found out that he was quite an interesting character. In fact, we had something in common, which was music and engineering. So being the aspiring electrical engineer that I am, thought it may be beneficial to me to look further into the life of the mysterious Iannis Xenakis.

My goal was to first find out some background information about Iannis Xenakis. Where he was from, what he did for kicks, and where exactly did he come up with this strange idea of stochastic music? It turns out that, Iannis Xenakis was born in Braila, Romania May 29th 1922, of parents of Greek Lineage. Due to troubled times in that era, he was caught up in fighting in world war two. He served as a resistance fighter, and in an attempt to fight off the Germans, Iannis lost sight in one eye. He often found himself in and out of prison, due to his participation in Communist resistance demonstrations. As I found out, this war had a great impact on his compositions. Iannis graduated in 1947 as a civil engineer in Athens, and illegally escaped to Paris in which he worked as an architect for Le Corbusier, a French architect. Le Corbusier greatly impacted Iannis because he now saw music with a more visual aspect. He opened his eyes to the architectural or technical approach to music. He would now apply the calculations learnt in mathematics and engineering, to music. He studied music and got a degree under the tutelage of Messaien at the Sorbonne University of Paris. Messaien advocated Iannis idea to compose stochastic music. In fact, it was both Le Corbusier and Messaien whom both had a profound impact in Xenakis moving forward with his idea stochastic music. Stochastic music, also called probabilistic, used natural sounds that were incorporated in a "game-like strategy". Stochastic music was described as “clouds” and “galaxies”, in which his music was not composed of specific notes, but for “clouds” of notes in a conglomerate. These clouds of sounds were in constant movement, by way of repetition and glissando. A composition called Metastasis shows a clear example of the structure of stochastic music. Stochastic music was his answer to undertake more complex textures, which he believed was not done adequately by the serial techniques. The serial technique used polyphony, basically a series of discrete voices or instruments played at the same time. To someone that has a trained ear, the instruments could be heard discretely, and would appear to be harmonized together.

From my research it seems that war had an effect on a lot of composer’s compositions. That includes the likes of Stockhausen, Berio, and Xenakis, in which unique sounds from the war carried with them for twenty years following. Musiq concrete was easily welcomed in these ages because it seemed to be a continuum on natural sounds that composers of that day had experienced. They could now formulate the violence and warlike sounds of these times into music.

Here is an excerpt from Xenakis in his book Formalized Music explaining some of these warlike sounds.

Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context... are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.

Xenakis focused his earlier works on sonic phenomena. He was inspired by the sounds from demonstration rallies he had been involved in, as well as sounds from a natural occurring event. A natural current event he described would have been that of a storm, or rain colliding on earth. Each event would form its own sound, and the total of all these sounds would form into a new event. The easiest way to put it is, his music was unpredictable but arranged after nature itself. The piece I choose was Metastasis. The critically acclaimed piece full of glissandos and repetitions. Here is the plot of the String Glissandi, (Bars 309-14) of "Metastasis". Glissandi of Metastasis, which illustrates the impact Le Corbusier, had on Xenakis. This plot was formulated on architectiual paper! This composition was done with an orchestra of 61 instruments.

To explain metastasis, Xenakis would use an analogy of the kinetic theory of gases to explain. The kinetic theory of gases just correlates temperature with displacement of molecules. His description was that the displacement of a molecule in space was analogous to varying pitch of String instruments. The molecules or strings would align itself with an arrangement of non-existent temperatures. The concoction would have voices which could not be deciphered discretely, but as a whole.

Xenakis died February 4^th 2001.

After reading about Xenakis, and listening to his compositions, I learned that music has guidelines for every genre. I tended to follow the guidelines that I was brought up upon, and accustomed to. The piece I chose to play for the class is called, Sarah Smile by Eric Gale a famous Jazz guitarist.

Source material:

http://www.furious.com/perfect/xenakis.html

http://www.karadar.com/Dictionary/xenakis.html

http://www.medieval.org/music/modern/xenakis.html

Chamber Music cd booklet.