The Electroacoustic Music of Iannis Xenakis

Of the close to 150 compositions that Iannis Xenakis created, only a handful involve electroacoustics (sounds directly produced by electronic, digital, or other studio means). Those works, however, are influential beyond their number. Any history of electronic music must place Xenakis as a central figure, both for his innovations and for the impact his music has had on successive generations. His involvement in the creation of multimedia "spectacles" brought him wide exposure, although his uncompromising aesthetic vision precluded fame and fortune on a popular scale.

Nonetheless, through his work, Xenakis (see Figure 1) presented a bold, charismatic persona: he was a revolutionary, both in politics and in art. The restive students of the 1960s, in particular, were drawn to him, to his peculiar mixture of forward-reaching modernism and noisy, pounding primitivism. There are many parallels between Xenakis's work and experimental elements of popular music, particularly in the embracing of technology and high-density/ high-amplitude sound set off by disorienting, hallucinatory light-shows. The electroacoustic music of Xenakis, Concret PH in particular, provided a link between the "academic" components of the 2000 International Computer Music Conference in Berlin and the club-oriented "off-ICMC" celebration, held concurrently. Additionally, a new Asphodel release of his massive electroacoustic work, Persepolis, is accompanied by "re-mixes" by, among others, Japanese techno artists.

It is my aim to present here a brief overview of Xenakis's electroacoustic music in the manner of a tutorial. Certain aspects or selected works from this area of his compositional output have been examined in some detail (Di Scipio 1998, 2001; Hoffmann 2000a; Solomos 1993), and a more detailed study of these works within the context of the rest of his output is found in Harley (forthcoming). While there is a strong unity of aesthetic and compositional technique running through his entire oeuvre, five stages in the trajectory of his studio output can be distinguished (see Table 1). In each, the technical means change somewhat, as do the aesthetic concerns. There are connections to the instrumental music he was writing around the same time, and there are also connections to the electroacoustic music being written by others (though surprisingly few). Throughout his life, as clearly exemplified in his electroacoustic works, Xenakis sought to "extend the limits of musical thought" (Robindoré 1996).

Stage One: Musique Concrète

Xenakis arrived in Paris as a 25-year-old refugee in November 1947. He decided, having barely escaped Greece (as a condemned insurgent) with his life, to devote himself to music, a dream he had guarded within himself but which had been sidelined by turmoil, both political and personal (see Matossian 1986 for fuller details of Xenakis's early life). As a trained civil engineer, Xenakis found himself working in the architectural studio of Le Corbusier, where he was able to earn a living while pursuing music in his spare time. He would have known virtually nothing of contemporary music, but the milieu he worked in was certainly cultured (Le Corbusier was acquainted with Edgard Varèse, for example), and he would no doubt have heard various broadcasts on Radio-France. He very likely listened to the early broadcasts of Pierre Schaeffer, who, in 1948, presented his first experiments in musique concrète on the radio and in concert.

Xenakis met Olivier Messiaen in 1951 and began attending his classes that year, a habit he would continue more or less regularly for the next two years. Messiaen was a central figure in the Parisian new music world; Pierre Henry, who began working closely with Schaeffer in 1949, had been his student between 1944 and 1948 (Boivin 1995). During this period (1951–1952), Messiaen himself visited Schaeffer's studio, producing a short piece, Timbres-durées. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who sat with Xenakis in Messiaen's class during 1951– 1952, also created a tape study during that time.

Table 1.

Xenakis's electroacoustic music

Figure 1.

Xenakis at the mixing console, Le Diatope. (Photograph by Mali; used by kind permission of the Xenakis family, along...