Avant-garde composer, architect
and music theorist Iannis Xenakis consistently pushed the boundaries
of music, mathematics, architecture and science in his work. From
the early days of his career when he was a student of French composer
Olivier Messiaen, Xenakis perfected his unique voice, which fused
the similarities between concepts such as rational geometry and
melody. Also during this time, he worked as Le Corbusier's
assistant and later his chief collaborator in projects that include
the Sainte Marie de La Tourette and the Philips Pavilion at Expo
58. After leaving Le Corbusier's studio, Xenakis worked
for the remainder of his life as a composer, architect and educator
in institutions ranging from the Sorbonne to Indiana University.
Xenakis was a true hybrid, at home in a variety of creative roles
whether it was working in Le Corbusier's architectural studio
or collaborating in research environments such as he did with
Pierre Schaeffer, et al. in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales
(GRM). As an early composer of musique concrète and as
a leading researcher in the field of avant-garde, experimental
and computer music, works such as Metastasis (1953) and
Diatope (1977) continue to influence artists working
in a variety of mediums today. Xenakis gave an interview to the
The UNESCO Courier in April 1986.(1)
In the interview, Xenakis discusses the intersection of music,
mathematics, architecture and science in his work, and gives many
insights into both his practice and his creative philosophy.
When considering an artist's work, a study of
the artist's treatment of the studio can often deepen our understanding
of the work and provide critical insight into their creative process.
When the artist in question is Iannis Xenakis, concepts like studio
and site become blurred. Taking into account his novel
approach to science, architecture and music, how can we properly
address Xenakis' studio practice in any traditional manner? Xenakis
was an unusual polymath and his creative process was correspondingly
unique. It is difficult to debate the role of the studio in an
artist's work without reading or hearing references to Daniel
Buren's seminal essay, The Function of the Studio.(2)
While Buren published the essay in part as a critique of his own
studio practice, the argument Buren makes against the system of
art being made in a studio and displayed in a museum helped to
create a movement known as post-studio. Buren defines the traditional
studio as "a stationary place where portable objects are
produced" and also "the place where the work originates."(3)
Buren in some ways was trying to expose the ills of the traditional
art system and also pointing toward his evolving practice of the
portable studio—one that is in varying places and takes
numerous forms, depending on what he is making. But what do studio
or post-studio mean in terms of an artist like Xenakis,
who begins any project in a manner similar to any architect or
composer? Architects are designers of ratios between negative
and positive space in site-specific works. The architect must,
from the beginning ideation to the final structure, dwell in a
labor that is entirely site-specific. Likewise, the composer envisions
their pieces from inception performed in specific places by predetermined
orchestration. It is therefore difficult to place Xenakis in a
studio or post-studio—he was, for his entire career, engaged
in projects that were by their very nature site-specific. In this
way, Xenakis' process is very much what we would expect from an
architect: whether at home, dining or sketching on the train,
he is engaged in a kind of virtual process with a specific place
and structure. When on-site, he is conducting the kind of large-scale
project that Frances Stark defines as a very male type of art
practice, that she describes as having to do with "elaborate
extensions, disruptions and transformations into and of material
reality."(4)
When asked by The UNESCO Courier interviewer
about his most recent project, Xenakis detailed some aspects of
an experimental concert hall he was designing with architect Jean-Louis
Veret for the Cite de la Musique music community centre at La
Villette, in Paris. The brief description of this project sheds
a great deal of light on how Xenakis worked. Xenakis detailed
a concert hall with a "potato-shape" and "a spiral
gallery," running around the inside of the walls, "which
can accommodate the audience and also musicians, so as to produce
a three-dimensional soundscape."(5)
From the beginning of the project, Xenakis shapes the environment
of the concert hall around a specific piece of music, which he
develops concurrently. Beyond the specific piece he might create,
he envisions the hall as a modular, plastic environment, ideal
for numerous experimental sonic applications. Although this project
was never realized, in the context of the Courier interview it
serves as a jumping off point to a deeper discussion about the
connections Xenakis sees between science, architecture and music.
At this juncture it is useful to point out that
Xenakis had studied architecture and engineering at the National
Technical University of Athens and had simultaneously studied
composition with a series of composers that culminated in his
time with Olivier Messiaen. It is natural that Xenakis, through
a deep study of all three fields, would become increasingly aware
of the connections between them. The interviewer moved from the
concert hall concept to ask Xenakis about his opinion on how the
creative activities of music and architecture are involved. He
responded with an example concerning the three-dimensionality
of architectural space, and relates it to musical composition
in this way:
Composers, for example, have used symmetrical
patterns which also exist in architecture. If we want
to discover the equal and symmetrical parts of a rectangle,
the most informative way of proceeding is to rotate it.
There are four directions in which a rectangle can be
turned, and no more than four. Such transformations also
exist in music: this is what was invented in the melodic
field during the Renaissance. You take a melody: (a) you
read it upside down; (b) you invert it in relation to
the intervals; (c) that which rose towards the upper part
of the scale now descends towards the lower, and vice
versa. To this you must add (d) the recurrence of the
inversion, which was used by the polyphonists of the Renaissance
and which also occurs in serial music. In this example,
we find the same four transformations carried out in architecture
and in music.(6) |
He also cited the Phillips Pavilion, designed with Le Corbusier,
in which he was exploring ways to create a modular, changeable
space. Influenced by Debussy, Bartok and Stravinsky and their
use of experimental devices such as parallel fifths and octaves,
Xenakis designed this malleable space using various displacements
of a straight line. The effect was the production of curvilinear
shapes known as hyperbolic paraboloids in architecture and glissandi
in music.(7) He gives further
examples of the convergence and coincidences of architecture and
music, specifically Bartok's use of the golden section (which
is typically a visual geometric proportion) to achieve certain
harmonies.(8)
Referencing Goethe's famous statement that "Architecture
is frozen music," Xenakis provided a more concrete example
of the relationship between the two. He points out the existence
of rhythm in each:
What is rhythm? It consists of chosen
points along an axis, namely, the axis of time. The musician
measures time as the walker counts milestones. The same
thing is found in architecture--with a facade, for example.
And piano keys are also architecture. They are regulated
in a constant manner. In one case it is a matter of time,
and in the other, of space. So there is a correspondence
between the two. And this is possible because there is
an underlying mental structure which mathematicians call
an "order structure". (9) |
So, we can see the natural way in which Xenakis would begin to
see the many connections between architecture and music, but Xenakis
did not stop there. Influenced by information theorist Claude
Shannon, Xenakis, already comfortable with statistical information
through the frequent use of tables to calculate stress and load,
began to apply these principles to music. The result of this revolutionary
transposition was what Xenakis called stochastic music, in which
random sonic events are generated through mathematical processes.(10)
Today, stochastic music in the form of techniques
such as granular synthesis have come to be associated with computers.
Xenakis had experimented with computational processes in music
from as early as 1962. However, inaccessibility of computers and
limited computational power prevented much experimentation during
that time period. By the 1970s Xenakis was creating multimedia
events that utilized more modern computers. When asked by the
Courier interviewer what role computers play in his process, Xenakis
described Le Diatope (1977):
In Diatope (1977), the entire programme of laser beams and electronic flashes co-ordinated with the music, which was also produced by computer, had been devised by programming in computation centres. There were 1,600 electronic lights which could flash on and off individually in one twenty-fifth of a second. This cannot be done by hand: it is too fast and the numbers are too high. Furthermore, computers and other new technology available to us can produce light, so that it becomes possible to transpose the musical composition into the visual sphere and experiment with shapes and movements. The effects of light become like visible sounds. You can play with them just as you play with sounds, but in a spatial dimension instead.(11) |
Le Diatope was commissioned for the inauguration of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. A multimedia piece housed in a vinyl and steel pavilion, Le Diatope was comprised of a matrix of 1,680 flashbulbs and 4 lasers guided by 400 positionable mirrors, which were coordinated with La légende d'Eer, a 7-channel electro-acoustic composition.(12) Xenakis later in the interview cautioned that "it should be borne in mind that computer technology is just a tool," and that he only uses it where it is necessary. He saw it as a natural evolution in music, just as 10th century musicians invented musical notation to formalize composition.(13) |
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The interview concluded with a question about
the central role of scientific thought in Xenakis' musical aesthetic.
Xenakis described several sources:
I drew my early inspiration from the
culture of ancient Greece, and especially that of Athens
in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. This was a period
of extraordinary creativity in the history of humankind.
It saw the birth of mathematics as we now know it. From
a structural point of view, this axiomatic, Euclidian
science is still continuing today. There has been no break.
Then there was philosophy. The other day, I was reading
an article about the formation of the universe. It said
that the whole of science up till now has been based on
causality. But, today, we are starting to ask the following
question: can the universe have emerged from nothing,
without a cause? Astrophysicists are tending to think
that it did. Accordingly, and this is the interesting
point, the Parmenidean tradition is capable of changing
and developing. |
The impression of Xenakis left by this interview is that of an
virtuosic artist very comfortable with the many ways architecture
and music are related. From this place of comfort he is able to
augment, transform, invert or rotate these forms simultaneously.
A deeper study of Xenakis shows how unusual it was that he continued
to develop as a composer while remaining innovative architecturally.
For example, the form of the exterior structure of Le Diatope
was designed to achieve the maximum interior volume with minimum
outer surface area. A common solution to this structural dilemma
would have been to create a spherical form a la Buckminster Fuller,
but Xenakis rejected this shape as failing acoustically and visually.(14)
Working brilliantly in projects that unite music, mathematics,
architecture and science, Xenakis embraced new ideas as he invented
them or as they came his way. Xenakis' process was truly hybridized
and interdisciplinary; many aspects of his collaborative nature
seem to echo modern ideas in the vein of the Open Source movement
and Creative Commons. In his writing, he was often transparent
in describing his techniques and conceptual framework, as is evident
in his deeply influential 1971 work, Formalized Music: Thought
and Mathematics in Composition. From the beginning of the preface
he seems a positive source of information, willing to share his
process with those who would listen and are eager to further the
advancement of innovation in music:
The formalization that I attempted
in trying to reconstruct part of the musical edifice ex
nihilo has not used, for want of time or of capacity,
the most advanced aspects of philosophical or scientific
thought. But the escalade is started and other will certainly
enlarge and extend the new thesis. This book is addressed
to a hybrid public, but interdisciplinary hybridization
frequently produces superb specimens.(15)
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(1) "Science and Music: An Interview with Iannis Xenakis."
The UNESCO Courier: Music on the Move. Apr. 1986: p.4-7
(2) Daniel Buren, The Function of the Studio (1971)
(3) Buren, 1
(4) Frances Stark, The Architect & The Housewife (Bookworks,
1999), p.12
(5) UNESCO, 4
(6) UNESCO, 5
(7) James Harley, Xenakis: His Life in Music (Routledge, 2005),
p. 17
(8) UNESCO, 5
(9) UNESCO, 5
(10) Harley, 13
(11) UNESCO, 6
(12) Harley, 110
(13) UNESCO, 6
(14) Harley, 110
(15) Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in
Composition (Pendragon Pr; 2nd edition, 2001), Preface
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