Jonathon Keats, contributor
(Image: Collection of Francoise Xenakis/Adel Mann)
A Los Angeles exhibition shows how Iannis Xenakis used everything from geometry to set theory in his modernist buildings and music
WHILE auditing a musical composition class in 1940s Paris, Iannis Xenakis showed his work to his instructor, the great composer Arthur Honegger. "This is not music," Honegger informed the young man, and he was right. It was architecture.
At the time, Xenakis was working in Le Corbusier's studio, calculating the load-bearing capacity of concrete for low-income housing. His interest in music, and his recognition that music and architecture were both manifestations of mathematics, impelled him to see the geometric figures on his drawing board in terms of sound - and to set them in musical notation.
This radical idea would never be accepted by the classically trained Honegger, or even by avant-garde contemporaries such as Pierre Boulez, but by the time of Xenakis's death in 2001 at the age of 78, he had arguably done more to bring music back to its mathematical roots than anyone since Pythagoras. This superb exhibition of his working drawings at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, compellingly - if all too compactly - shows how he did it.
Xenakis's breakthroughs in music and architecture were deeply intertwined. Asked by Le Corbusier to design a pavilion commissioned by the Dutch Philips Corporation for the 1958 World's Fair, Xenakis began by considering the internal acoustics, and realised that the optimal design would be based on hyperbolic paraboloids. It was the first building of its kind and, supported from within by long stretches of cable, the saddle-shaped structure drew crowds as well as critical acclaim for Le Corbusier, who neglected to give Xenakis credit. Xenakis protested and was fired - but by then his name was increasingly known throughout Paris for his application of hyperbolic paraboloids to music.
The concept, first fully explored in his orchestral piece Metastasis, was to construct the composition on the musical equivalent of the Philips Pavilion cables: straight lines intersecting to define sweeping curves. In place of cables, Xenakis used glissandi, lines of rising pitch each assigned to a different instrument. In both the pavilion and the musical composition, he was "interested in the question of whether it was possible to get from one point to another without breaking the continuity", he later said.
But the glissandi did not become a characteristic sound for him. Each subsequent work was driven by a different question, a new area of exploration. For instance, Xenakis musically investigated the dynamics of game theory in his 1959 work Dual, which set two orchestras in competition within the same auditorium. Other pieces - increasingly musical rather than architectural, though always born from drawings - explored Markov chains and set theory, often with assistance from an IBM mainframe.
These varied approaches gave Xenakis access to sublime new soundscapes, yet he never considered the calculations subservient to his art. At the foundation of all he did was the profound idea that "the role of the musician must be to find answers to phenomena we don't understand". Music was his mathematics.
Exhibition details
Iannis Xenakis: Composer, architect, visionary
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center
Until 4 February 2011
Listening to Xenakis' Metastasis on headphones is a mind-bending experience - I found it quite life changing as a young composition major. Great story - thanks.
JM