Xenakis: ... tireless renewal at every instant, at every death ...(Iannia Xenakis)(Critical Essay)

XENAKIS WAS A MAN of keen intellect, with a sardonic, bird-of-prey character. He was by turns imperious or vulnerable, impish or implacably unforgiving, which is to say that--as is true of any complex being--he both represented himself and was represented by others in disconcertingly varied ways. From the early sixties until his death, I had the privilege of knowing him; we spent informal, personal time together, and also shared encounters in public, professional settings. And it was this contact which led me to undertake the present project.

The components of Xenakis's education were as uncommon as they were formatively decisive: a grounding in Greek philosophy and in the fixities and portentous conflicts of their ancient tragedies (modulated by the more humanely intricate worlds of Shakespeare in English); thorough training in engineering at the Athens Polytech (and a passionate apprenticeship with its application as architecture in the studio of Le Corbusier); and an autodidact's possession of the phenomenon of music. Music in his life (architecture also) served as an arena in which spiritual, aesthetic, and scientific currents intermingled in less categorically abridged form, in ways that suited the restless inclusivity of his mind.

During the 1950s, he manifested jointly in architecture (the Philips Pavilion) and music (Metastasis) an inextricably interwoven world of resource and inference. This conjunction was a signal illustration of the rare composite of forces which intersected in him: objective and mathematically principled knowledge conjoined with a raw emotional directness that could be at times alarming.

In the early stages of his compositional career, he was still living through the transmutation of engineering into music. This realignment was articulated, in part, through the writing of articles which argued the application of certain mathematical principles to musical opportunities. In these applications, elevated aesthetic goals were served through startlingly novel manifestations. Although the intent of his articles was to illuminate, even elicit art of ambitious and demanding character, they proved impenetrably daunting to all but the smallest minority of the artistic community. Their existence, first as occasional contributions to Hermann Scherchen's Gravesaner Blatter, later in collected and augmented form as Musiques Formelles, sent a message to the musical world as bewildering as it was unprecedented.

In the absence of the yet-to-be-assembled (and then incontestable) evidence of his life's work, Xenakis's early decades as a composer were shadowed by almost universal incomprehension, whether on the part of admirers or detractors. He assumed in his audience (readers or listeners) a breadth, depth, seriousness, and peregrination of mind of which very few beyond himself were capable. As a result, his written statements (articles, program notes and the like) often deflected more than enlightened their readers. And matters did not improve greatly as published interviews and monographs began to accumulate. At first, perhaps a bit unrealistic in his expectation that references to Greek antiquity, logic and stochastic principles would serve to enhance his listeners' experience, he little by little eschewed comment, in program notes, of more than the most rudimentary sort (the identification of a text, an indication of a rifle's intended resonances). He quite understandably preferred an auditor's direct grappling with sound patterns and the mental and emotional responses they aroused. All the more so given the often irrelevant and frequently ungenerous reactions that were elicited when he revealed the ideas that had in fact propelled his musical offerings.

Over the last decade of his life, Xenakis's output became, from a technical perspective, increasingly, and by the end (one thinks of the 1996 string sextet, Ittidra) almost ultimately reductive: howling, fortissimo blocks, immobilized screams. This to the consternation of many who had been his staunch supporters. Was the seeming essentialization--an increasingly literal primitivism--which overtakes the later works a deliberate adjustment in creative course on his part? Or was it a result of the progressive neurophysiological circumstances that eventually claimed his life? A definitive response to such queries is beyond reach, but their existence further complicates the picture which the musical world held (and holds yet) of this unprecedented figure.

Although the body of musical work that Xenakis bequeathed this world is as unparalleled and inimitable as that of any musical creator we have known, it is not the whole of his legacy. The music was accompanied by (and also attracted) a detailed and wide-ranging body of written explanation. Some of this textual record is didactic, explicit, and objective while some is interactive, inferential, and subjective. My purpose in this document is to posit the existence of a number of categories which his writing addresses, often in penetrating and persuasive fashion. I have selected passages which could fairly be called "non-technical." No formulas, charts, tables, or graphs are included. My categories begin with PHILOSOPHY / DEATH AND REBIRTH, move through COMPOSITION / COMPOSERS, ARCHITECTURE, and REPETITION / RENEWAL, among others, and end with CULTURE / EDUCATION. Their ordering is not primarily chronological, but aims at evolving revelation. The categories are almost all composites, because his capacious mentality seems to have been so inevitably, even obsessively integrative. The categories are numerous without pretending to be exhaustive. They identify and portray some of what I knew in him, what I hear in his work.