Home | Archive | Spring 2001 | In memoriam

Iannis Xenakis 1922–2001

Achorripsis, Bohor, Terretektorh, Krannerg, Gmeeoorh ... For those twentieth-century composers who, like Xenakis, were driven into exile from their home countries, the analogy with the romantic image of the Wanderer, for whom contentment always lies elsewhere, would have been a source of outrage rather than comfort. Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Ligeti all shared Xenakis’s experience to some extent, but none matched the Wagnerian extremity of his role as a resistance fighter under sentence of death escaping from Greece with a false passport and entering France as an illegal immigrant.

That was in 1947 and, at the age of twenty-five, Xenakis fell back on his training as a civil engineer, working on architectural projects with Le Corbusier. He only gave this up in 1959, though he had been studying music seriously since the early 1950s, working with Milhaud, Honegger and Messiaen. By 1967 he was well-established enough to be invited to teach at the University of Indiana, and from then on, though rooted in Paris, Xenakis travelled as and when teaching or composing opportunities came his way. But the tragi-comedy of those early musical encounters, vividly preserved in his conversations with Bálint Varga (Faber & Faber: London, 1996), remained decisive. Xenakis never lost his iconoclasm in face of orthodoxy, tradition and conformity (however progressive): for example, while admiring Bach he found most of Mozart ‘trivial’. Yet his musical development involved above all the excavation and exploration of relationships with his personal tradition, and a uniquely explosive confrontation between the mythic aura of the Greek lord of misrule, Dionysus, and the ever-expanding law-governed potential of computer routines and ‘stochastic synthesis’.

Theraps, Jonchaies, Komboï, Keqrops, Jalons, Taurhiphanie ... With typical bluntness, Xenakis asserted that the orchestral piece Metastasis (1953–54), ‘the starting point of my life as a composer, was inspired not by music but rather by the impressions gained during the Nazi occupation of Greece’, and this defiant avowal of an extra-musical essence set the pattern for what followed. The challenge of providing informed musicological and critical commentary on Xenakis’s large output is only now beginning to be met, and James Harley’s forthcoming study should provide a significant breakthrough. The kind of critical response (not Harley’s!) encapsulated in the designation of The rite of spring as anti-humanist in its relishing of Dionysian rituals, its alleged contemplation of self-destruction without pathos, can also be deployed to pronounce Xenakis artistically complicit in the very oppressiveness and violence that, as a young street fighter, he so vehemently resisted. Yet to argue that the precepts of group theory, sieve theory, random paths, arborescences, granular synthesis and stochastic synthesis served merely to facilitate the musical expression of revenge – Xenakis getting his own back on German and Greek fascists and all those who subsequently resisted his work – is to impose a feeble, pseudo-psychological straitjacket on a range of expression that, at its most compelling, reaches far more deeply and ambiguously into collective human consciousness.

Waarg, Oophaa, Dox-Orkh, Trookh, Ergma ... Did any other twentieth-century composer set up quite such powerful reverberations between ancient, primitive mythic themes and contemporary technical resources? Even the price Xenakis himself believed he had paid – ‘I do lack lyricism. Maybe life killed it in me – but it’s possible that I was born without it’ – seemed to promote a defiant recourse to chant-like melody in his later years, as if to suggest that lyricism, as conventionally understood, was merely a debased form of numinous incantation: of oppressive, priestly invocation. But how fair is it to claim that statements like ‘I use ideas in composing that are completely alien to music’ are merely defensive rhetoric? Why shouldn’t Xenakis be allowed to go down to posterity as a composer who had little patience with ‘music’? That would please his detractors, and could easily be linked to other extreme remarks, like ‘it’s nonsensical to set any meaningful text to music, because one can’t make out what’s being sung’. Yet, for as long as he made inscriptions on music paper, Xenakis could not erase the personal voice, the distinctive, enraged and enraging ego. Nor could he resist the chance to involve large numbers of performers and audience-members in dramatic manifestations of sound and light like the Polytope and Diatope enterprises.

The engineer-architect turned visionary composer continued to search for environments in which self-expression could have the widest and most far-reaching impact. Thus, although ‘when you’re trying to do something you should feel absolutely alone, like a spark in the blackness of the universe’, this does not exclude the kind of permanence in which ‘ideas invented thousands of years ago remain valid, in our beliefs, in our appreciation. Who knows what rules have kept these ideas alive and powerful?’. It is the tacit response to those ‘rules’ that should make it possible for Xenakis’s music to find and retain a place in a multivalent culture where establishment values are accepted as openly as they are challenged. The real tragedy will be if, as new composers search for different, and probably more ‘classical’ forms of expression and construction, the turbulent voices of an earlier modernism are suppressed. A culture concerned entirely with insiders would be complacent, trivial in the extreme, and while only rarely will artists be able to emulate Xenakis’s determined cultivation of extreme tension between exile and rootedness, there is much for all of them – even the most timid – to learn from the uncompromising, irresistible expressive world which he created.

Arnold Whittall

Iannis Xenakis: born 29 May 1922; died 4 February 2001