Music and Architecture (review)

In the penultimate room of a recent major exhibition in Berlin on the life and work of Le Corbusier, the visitor stops short. She has already encountered Le Corbusier's early drawings, and photographs and models of his famous Unitéd'habitation in Marseilles; she has perused the architect's post-cubist paintings and sculptures and samples of the furniture that rounded off the interior of the buildings he designed. But the scale model that dominates this room is different. A mesh of geometric curves and peaks, this building marks a completely new departure from the wonderful, but rather angular designs of the previous rooms. The obvious explanation—to a musicologist, if not necessarily to someone reading the labels at the exhibition—is that this is not the work of Le Corbusier at all, but of his then employee, Iannis Xenakis.

The Pavilion commissioned by the Philips company to showcase their products at the 1958 EXPO in Brussels is the most famous example of Xenakis's 'other' career as an architect, but this book, the first in a planned series of five critical volumes on Xenakis's work, makes clear the extent not only of his involvement in other projects by Le Corbusier, but also of the independent architectural projects he pursued in the decades following his dismissal from Le Corbusier's studio. Although the naming of Xenakis as the author of the book implies that it is primarily a volume of writings by Xenakis himself, much of the actual text is written by the book's compiler, translator, and editor Sharon Kanach, who worked with Xenakis for many years and had fairly exclusive access to his archives. Kanach's texts are interspersed with Xenakis's own, distinguished by the initials 'SK' or 'IX' in the titles, whereas in a more traditional volume such commentaries would have been more clearly positioned as introductions or footnotes. This organization, which at times is slightly confusing, is probably inspired by the need to contextualize the sketches, correspondence, and other miscellanea presented, further major sources for which include the archives of the Fondation Le Corbusier. The book also contains several texts by Xenakis, most of which have previously been published but not necessarily in English, and not necessarily in publications easily available to the average scholar of Xenakis's music.

The book consists of four main sections, dealing respectively with Xenakis's work with Le Corbusier, his own writings on architectural topics, his independent architectural projects, and finally his Polytopes, the grand spectacles incorporating music, lights, movement, and masses (of people and of animals), which not only present the most obvious concurrence of Xenakis's spatial and musical imaginations, but often also required his training as an engineer to realize. There are also appendices comprising an introduction to the UPIC compositional tool, a chronological table of Xenakis's life and works (both musical and architectural), and a catalogue summary of all of Xenakis's architectural projects compiled by Sven Sterken.

From this initial summary of the book's scope, it would seem inevitable to laud it as a major contribution to the literature on Xenakis, not least considering how central to his entire oeuvre and way of thinking his 'other' career as an architect was. The material collated here certainly provides ample evidence of how the techniques of each of these distinct disciplines helped him reflect on the other. At several points, Xenakis refers to how musical composition and architecture start from opposite but complementary principles: in music, one proceeds from the detail (for example, a theme) towards construction of the whole, whereas in architecture, one proceeds from the global design to the local detail. We also learn not just about well-known architectural projects—such as the 'masses of string glissandi' (p. 72, Xenakis's own phrase) that was the defining idea behind the Philips Pavilion—but also more mundane elements such as the garbage disposal shelter that Xenakis designed...