Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 into a Greek family residing in Romania. He studied civil engineering at the Athens Polytechnic, but after the German invasion and the British occupation he joined the Resistance, through which his activities led him to be severely wounded and later condemned to death.

Xenakis fled for Paris, earning a living working as an engineering assistant for Le Corbusier. With encouragement from both Le Corbusier and composer Olivier Messiaen, Xenakis had his first major success with the premiere of Metastasis at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1955, and by 1960 he was able to devote himself entirely to composition.

Critical of other developments in contemporary music at the time, dominated by serialists such as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Xenakis followed his own path, aided by his background in mathematics, engineering and design, and by his interest in complex sonic phenomena (rainstorms, street demonstrations, etc.). He incorporated probability theory into his compositional approach, as a means of generating and controlling large-scale events composed of massive numbers of individual elements. He also adopted the sonic entity (texture) as the primary material for the construction of musical form, rather than themes or pitch structures.

Along with his acoustic works, Xenakis produced a number of important electroacoustic pieces, and a series of multimedia creations involving sound, light, movement, and architecture. In the domain of computer music, Xenakis was a pioneer in the area of algorithmic composition, and also developed an approach to digital synthesis based on random generation and variation of the waveform itself.

Xenakis passed away in 2001, having achieved a tremendous impact on contemporary music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.