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a tribute to Iannis XENAKIS

1922-2001

First Thoughts About Iannis Xenakis

by Steve Layton (composer)

"Let us resolve the duality 'mortal-eternal': the future is in the past and vice-versa; the evanescence of the present is abolished, it is everywhere at the same time; the 'here' is also two billion light-years away...."

Iannis Xenakis, "Towards a Philosophy of Music" (1968)

I was really just a kid when I first "found" Iannis Xenakis for myself. Literally"found",

because at that time (the early 1970's) in the small town I grew up in there wasn't much opportunity to hear even Tchaikovsky, let alone the work of living composers! All I could do then was buy albums "blind", based on some interesting detail of the cover or back notes, and hope my intuition was good. What I bought that day was an Angel LP from the Music of Our Time series; what initially drew my interest was that the titles of the pieces all seemed to be either in Greek or, even more puzzling, simply some letters and numbers: "Polla ta dhina", "ST-10", "Akrata"... I had little idea what was going on before I put the record on, and just as little when I took it off. But something inside me had changed forever in that 45 minutes; something in this music wasn't speaking to me in the language of the past, but rather in its own language of the present moment. What it was saying I couldn't yet understand; but from the first I could hear that it spoke with the same self-authority and and sureness as any symphony of Beethoven. Again and again I listened; not because I wanted to, but because I needed to.

Xenakis was for me first a master of music as shape and mass; second, a master of music as our own ritual as a people. On the shape and mass aspect, others before (notably Varèse, Cage, and Messiaen) had experimented with an architechtonic approach, but in ways that more or less "filled in the boxes", or left them more-or-less tied to "the staves" (the traditional language) of the past. Coming from a mostly non-musical, structural / visual background, Xenakis was one of the first to really approach a vision that could translate pure shape into sound, with the necessary "tools" to create coherent structures in this form, on their own terms. That these shapes and structures were as often as not justified by probability theory and pure mathematics or logic seems less important with time; what emerges even more clearly over time is Xenakis' profound sense of man as the measure of all things; his history, reasoning, intuition, imagination, and place before nature. To me, his key achievments lie not so much in the theories themselves, but in the intuitive qualities of his thinking; qualities that provide the true spark, shaping force, and final meaning of each work. (Perhaps only Giacinto Scelsi possesed this to a stronger degree.) The time demanded theories, and Xenakis could certainly deliver those; often in such detail that many if not most composers of the time could only bow before a line of reasoning they could not hope to follow. Yet what was at the heart of these formal structures and mathematical justifications was something much more direct and even primitive: the visionary maker of both human-based objects, and the human-based ritual that required these objects.

In a sense, all "theory" is man; is the direct result of wonder at the powerful and mysterious forces both inside and outside the person, and by extension, a people. There is often in Xenakis' music the sense of the "monumental"; the subtle and the lyrical operate somewhere within some much larger and dominative enclosing force. Shapes are strong and direct, while the topmost rythmic layer is usually quite straightforward and even a little "square". There is a honesty that lays all of its elements bare, makes each piece an "open book", and provides a direct emotional path between the deepest layers of the piece and the mind of the listener. And those emotions are rarely of the sentimental or half-felt variety; rather they are the brightly glowing and violently dark colors of ecstasy and threnody, the strong colors of law and nature. Their message was not about "our time" only. They seem attempts to create music outside of any and every time, people, and culture; and so, to create music for any and every time, people, and culture.