Thursday 10 July 2014

The man who used maths to make music

Exiled from Greece, Iannis Xenakis worked for the architect Le Corbusier before devoting the rest of his life to creating music as a kind of aural sculpture, says Ivan Hewett

Culture these days can be a burden for creative artists. There are so many accumulated memories, so much to be influenced by, so much to live up to. Not to be bothered by it needs a special kind of purity, innocence and single-minded passion.

The Greek/French composer Iannis Xenakis had all those things. His music hits you like a whirlwind, its hard, harsh melodies and granite-like chords coming direct from some fierce distant past. In the knowing world of new music, it seems magnificently out of place, a pure voice of nature.

Of course, it can't literally be that. Xenakis's music is a construct like any other, often of truly astounding elaboration. But the means of elaboration have nothing to do with the Western tradition. There are no harmonies, no fugues, none of the conventional vocabulary of expressivity. Nor does Xenakis have much in common with the other great modernists born in the 1920s, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. For the whole of his career, from the early 1950s up to his last completed works in 1997, he was the perpetual outsider.

It was a fate written into his very name. "Xenakis" means "little stranger", and most of his life Xenakis lived as an exile. After becoming an active Communist during the Second World War, he found himself, at the age of 25, a penniless illegal immigrant in France, sightless in one eye (the result of an injury in a street battle), with a death sentence passed on him in absentia for his political views.

Fortunately, his talent for maths and engineering brought him to the attention of the architect Le Corbusier. He soon became the great man's closest collaborator, and stayed with him until 1959.

Music hadn't been forgotten. In fact all through the 1940s and early '50s, Xenakis composed pieces in a kind of modal-modern style not so far from Bartók. But this was hardly appropriate for a man who described himself as an "Ancient Greek living in the 20th century".

What fascinated Xenakis about that ancient culture was the stark opposition between mathematical Pythagorean order and irrational Dionysiac frenzy. He wanted that fierce tension in his music. It was only in the early 1950s that he found ways of doing it, by treating music as a kind of aural sculpture

In Xenakis's first mature piece, Metastaseis, what you hear are dense "sound masses" with curving sides, and clouds of sound made of myriad tiny bursts. They recall natural sounds such as raindrops on a roof, or the waves of shouting that pass across a crowd (a haunting memory of anti-Nazi demonstrations).

The normal techniques of composition were no use, so Xenakis adapted mathematical tools he'd been using in his engineering work. Metastaseis began life as ruled lines on architect's graph paper, which were only later translated into notes.

Having started late, and lost "much time and much hope", Xenakis now worked with feverish energy to find how mathematical ways of thinking could be applied to music. By 1963, he was able to lay them out in a book entitled Formalised Music. For a non-mathematician, it makes fearsome reading, bristling with references to Gaussian distributions, Markov chains and Game Theory.

It could have condemned him to a life on the musical margins but, in later works, melody is rediscovered with the aid of Sieve Theory, which allowed him to invent ordered but exotic-sounding scales. Counterpoint appeared in the form of "arborescences", tree-like branchings out of a single line.

Meanwhile, his life had broadened in other ways. He'd married a heroine of the French Resistance by whom he'd had a daughter. He also nursed grand visions of a total-art synthesis involving spectacle and light. Some of these, like the immense Diatope for the ruins of Persepolis, became a reality; others, like the plan to generate an artificial Northern Lights, never got beyond graph paper by the time he died in 2001.

He created a computer and electronic research institute in Paris, where he created a system for generating sounds by drawing wave-forms. Having created a new-sound world through maths, Xenakis eventually felt confident enough to abandon calculation and compose "by hand". The best of the later works, such as the magnificent string quartet Tetras, have a marvellous fluency and an infallible sense of dramatic timing.

But the old abandon and fury is still there. Hearing Xenakis is like walking at mid-day on a Greek island; no shadows, no thoughts, just an eternal sun-baked present.

  • 'Xenakis: Architect in Sound' takes place at the South Bank Centre (0870 382 8000 or, Oct 7-9.
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