The radiance of Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001).

RUPTURE AND FUSION

IANNIS,

To elaborate upon the relationship that our works share, in these pages I will narrate the events that began with our meeting in 1968. Of the preceding period I retain only the lessons of Julian Orbon, whose first class sought to rectify my restless beginner's attitude in the face of the influence of Bartok: "Assimilate, rather than reject influences." This motto of Orbon gives me the opportunity to enter into subjects that touch on your beneficent influence during my formative period, which I will better clarify by going back to your origins.

Your project of autonomous searching kept you from citing your concrete roots in musicians of the past, making only casual mention of your preferences; for example, dramatic tone in John Dowland, your compulsory memorization of Mozart's Requiem, or what you placed at the opposite end of the spectrum, your veneration of Brahms ("I would never be able to make such music," you would claim). Your own absorption of contemporary sources does not impede associating your treatment of strings with Bartok's--glissandi, pizzicati-sfz or transformations of collective tone--and with Varese's by composing the same sounds--material contrary to the idealization of music as language. Said influences have been assimilated and appear intermixed in your music; though you do not cite them, they cannot be denied.

Additionally, in your case, one must refer to antecedents that go beyond the ethnocentric idea of a European music (such as the microintervallic scales in Byzantine music) and that explain your interest in another music. Or, in a search born in struggle, exile and loss, to the music of the ancient Greeks that your works so frequently invoke--through mythology and your imagination--in order to combat its silence. Added to this accumulation of diverse influences in your music is your scientific vocation--philosophical, mathematical, and technological--that gives an identity to the methods you developed in your compositions. Such heterogeneity of sources prevents placing a label on your work, instead emphasizing from an integral perspective the stochastic, probabilistic tone that characterizes it: a cloud of multiple broken voices assembled into a moving mosaic.

Rupture and fusion: the creation that alludes to a break and inquiry as a crossing path that repairs it.

Thus I will recall here a moment of friendly confidence, in which you revealed to me how the noises that appeared in your hearing (after having been injured in Athens in 1945) drove you, through desperation, to attempt to represent them musically. This last idea brings me to your relation with the psychic element: to transfer your loss from the imaginary towards the act of creation. Your rational mind was motivated to share your auditory torture, converting it into the discovery of a new music--much like Beethoven--made of inharmonic material that declares the beauty of imperfection.