The output of Xenakis is polymorphous, and there are many possible points of entry into his universe. One could choose the composer, the theorist, the architect—just as one could choose between the inventor of stochastic music, the demigod of seismic shocks, the user of automatized musical cells, the multimedia artist of polytopes… This universe is rendered recognizable only through the composer’s pronounced penchant for originality¹—making Xenakis one of modern music’s most representative figures—which permits, through its plurality, sometimes strongly contrasting interpretations. With this plurality in mind, the following analysis juxtaposes four of the most crucial concepts of Xenakis’ musical and theoretical work.

Formalization

Xenakis embodies Varèse‘s dream of a “art/science alloy.”² “Nothing prevents us from foreseeing a new relationship between science and the arts, especially between art and mathematics, a domain in which the arts could consciously pose problems for which mathematics should and will have to forge new theories,” he writes. Though this affirmation has remained largely utopic, Xenakis would come to pioneer scientific applications in music—which is why one could say he overturned the Pythagorian approach. It is the primary sense of the word formalization and “formal music” which gave him the title of his first book, published in 1963. One could make a nearly exhaustive list of these applications: probability for instrumental composition (“stochastic “ or Markovian music, “free”—music composed “by hand” and with the program ST), game theory, symbolic logic, set theory (from which a core Xenakis “theory of cribles” was derived), probability for sound synthesis, automatized cells; to this list we could add “arborescences” and musical translations of Brownian motion.

A second sense of the word “formalization” recalls the idea of “mechanism.” In this sense, it means the construction of a sort of “black box” which after being fed certain data can produce an entire musical work. One must also understand the search for “fundamental phases of a musical work” and of a “minimum of constraints” concerning Achorripsis (1955-56). Realized with the help of the program ST (in the early 1960s) and again, nearly thirty years later, with the program GENDYN, where he reworked the material of Achorripsis: “…the challenge is to create music by beginning with, as much as possible, a minimum of premises, but which will then result in something “interesting” from a contemporary aesthetic point of view, without borrowing from or being trapped on previously explored paths.”³ This is why Xenakis was one of the first composers to the use the computer as an aid to composition.

Concerning the question of formalization, two crucial precisions must be made. On one hand, whether speaking of applications or the quest for automatization, formalization, in the strictest sense, applies to very little of Xenakis’ music. For the most part—with a few notable exceptions, such as Nomos alpha (1965-66)—this consists of a few experimental passages, where the composer tests an application’s pertinence. As a general rule, when he makes use of his discoveries in later works, his point of departure is the generated material of the earlier work itself, which he then transforms; he does not recalculate from scratch each time. Taking just one example, measures 10-18 of Horos (1986) are composed with the aid of automated cells; in Ata (1987), measures 14, 10, and 17 of Horos can be found in retrograde (measures 121, 126, and 131) and measure 16 of Horos in its original format (measure 133). On the other hand, Xenakis’s do-it-yourself approach has always posed several problems. As opposed to Pierre Barbaud (another computer-assisted composer from the early 1960s), he always defended moving back and forth between computer calculations and working by hand. To the question “Is it important that you be able to intervene by hand?” Xenakis always responded: “Yes. There is a limit to what can be obtained through calculation. It lacks an internal life, unless very complicated techniques are employed. Mathematics usually leads to results that are too regular, that fail to meet the standards of the ear and the brain. The larger idea is to be able to introduce the idea of chance in order to break the periodicity of mathematical functions, but we are only at the beginning of understanding this. The hand itself is situated between chance and calculation. It is both a messenger of the spirit—close to the head—and an imperfect tool.”⁴

Energy

Besides the question of formalization, which could be considered as an apollonian dimension of his music, Xenakis also has a violently dionysiac side: as many commentators have pointed out, his music often subjects the listener to “seismic shocks,” chains of sound storms, sonic “cosmogonies…” He promises, speaking of Terretektorh (1965-66), that “the listener will be perched upon a mountaintop in the midst of a storm approaching from every direction, or a frail skiff being demolished in open water, or in a world of pointillistic sonic sparks, moving in compressed or isolated clouds.”⁵ His search for immediate expression is tempered by the fact that he refuses to treat music as a language. “Music is not a language, nor a message… If we truly reflect upon the nature of music, it is something that escapes definition as a language and if we want to apply linguistic techniques to music, I believe it is a mistake, nothing will be discovered, or very little: a tautology. The effects produced by music exceed our rational methods of investigation. The movement is created within you, whether you are conscious or not, control them or not, they are there within you. This is why music has a profound effect on a person.”⁶

This dionysiac dimension of Xenakis manifests itself on another level: in his conception of music as a perpetual battle. One could say that he requires his performers to function as high-level athletes, who never get a chance to rest. But this is because the composer, marked by World War II and the Greek civil war, often thinks of himself as a fighter. “The point of departure is my desire to live—to create something, with my hands and with my head,” he says.⁷ “Composing is a battle… a struggle to produce something interesting.”⁸ Hence the extraordinary and sometimes frightening energy that bursts through in Xenakis’ music.

Energy: this is the crucial word to characterize this second aspect of Xenakis. In one of his last articles, titled “On Time,” he considers energy, in the scientific sense of the term, as essence, while time and space are regarded merely as epiphenomena. In a sketch for Pithoprakta, he writes: “Music is the sum of transformations of energy.”⁹ From a purely aesthetic point of view, his polytopes come to mind, whose numerous spectators/listeners often experience them as true cataclysms.

Sound

A third aspect of Xenakis could be considered, under certain circumstances, as a synthesis of the first two. In his music, he manages to transform a flood of energy into a purely sonic phenomenon, and to make use of formalization to construct sounds and not structures. But this third dimension is what counts for him: Xenakis is one of the pioneers of this evolution in which, to borrow a classic phrase from Jean-Claude Risset, composing sounds takes the place of composing with sounds—an expression which can be equally applied to his electroacoustic and instrumental works.

To Xenakis, composing sound means to work with it as a sculptor would. He often worked with graphics, until at least the late 1970s, allowing him, as he put it, “to achieve a tactile manipulation of sonic material.”¹⁰ Many of his sonorities, which he was the first to experiment with and which make him so original, were first imagined as pencilled diagrams on graph paper. The glissando, one of Xenakis’ signature gestures, quickly comes to mind. The composer generalizes his theory, insisting that “intermittent or granulated sounds are in reality particular variations of continuous sounds.”¹¹ But this obviously follows from the idea of drawing a straight line on graph paper, whose two coordinates represent time and pitch.

This aspect of Xenakis’ work - his interest in sound plasticity - could undoubtedly be related to his experience as an architect. In any case, the latter explains the special relationship that Xenakis establishes between the whole and the parts, between the global and the local: “In music, you start with a theme, a melody, and you have a whole arsenal of amplification, polyphonic and harmonic, more or less given in advance (as much for composing a classical sonata as a piece of serial music), you start from the mini to end up with the global; whereas in architecture, you have to conceive at the same time both the detail and the whole, otherwise everything collapses. This approach, this experience acquired with Le Corbusier, obviously influenced me, if not (I already felt it), at least helped me to conceive my music as an architectural project: globally and in detail, simultaneously. The strength of architecture lies in its proportions: the coherent relationship between the detail and the whole […]”¹²

Universalism

In the 1970s, Xenakis liked to present his music as a ‘generalisation’ of music from the past or from other cultures: ‘My music does not make a revolution; it embraces the forms of expression used in the past.”¹³ As a determinist, he argued that dodecaphony and serialism were merely a special case of stochastic music, based on the more general principle of indeterminism. More broadly speaking, one could mention a final characteristic of his universe: the quest for universalism. In terms of his musical references, it is becoming increasingly clear that he has frequently borrowed elements from many musical cultures. One can no longer listen to Nuits (1967) without evoking certain Balkan or Asian voices, Mikka and Mikka-S (1971 and 1976) without thinking of single-stringed violins from all over the world, etc. And he himself referred to his use (very systematically, from the end of the seventies onwards) of a pitch screen (scale) that would be close to the Javanese pelog (listen for example to the long beginning of Jonchaies, 1977) as well as to his indebtedness to the rhythm of certain African musics.

If these references have often gone unnoticed, it is undoubtedly because Xenakis has always made them abstract (we are at the antipodes of citation practice). According to him, universalism leads to an unheard-of music of the future: to the question of ‘identity’ - which has become topical again at the beginning of the 21st century - Xenakis replied: let us look ahead…

1. Cf. Xenakis, « Musique et originalité » (1984) in I. Xenakis, Kéleütha, p. 106-111. A disillusioned observation in another text : « No one can create a new world. It’s impossible to create something really different – no example of that exists in the history of art. It’s sad: we are prisoners of ourselves » (Xenakis in Varga,, p. 71).
2. This is the title of his book Arts/Sciences. Alliages, which came out of his doctoral thesis in 1976.
3. Formalized Music, p. 295.
4. Xenakis in Anne Rey, Pascal Dusapin, p. 95.
5. Xenakis, record cover ERATO STU 70529.
6. Xenakis in Raymond Lyon, p. 133.
7. Xenakis in Varga, p. 111.
8. Ibid., p. 202.
9. Carnet 23, Archives Xenakis, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
10. Xenakis, « Théorie des probabilités et composition musicale » (1956), in Xenakis, Musique. Architecture, p. 13, about Pithoprakta.
11. Xenakis, « Trois pôles de condensation » (1962), in Xenakis, Musique. Architecture, p. 27.
12. Xenakis, « Préface » (1987), in Xenakis, Musique de l’architecture, p. 120.
13. Xenakis in Varga, p. 50.

Translation: Christopher Trapani.