Iannis Xenakis wrote music with probability theory and designed buildings with Le Corbusier
Iannis Xenakis composed using set theory, game theory and the mathematics of chance, gave every player in an orchestra their own separate part, and scattered musicians among the audience. He was also an architect, chief designer of Philips's pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair while working for Le Corbusier.
Xenakis was born on 29 May 1922 in Brăila, Romania, then home to a large Greek community. His father, Klearchos, managed an English trading agency and was among the city's richest men; his mother, Fotini, was a pianist who gave him a flute. The family made repeated trips to the Bayreuth opera festival. Her death in 1927, when he was five, left him, in his words, deeply scarred. Governesses followed, and in 1932 he was sent to a boarding school on the Greek island of Spetses, where he shone at sport and study, learned notation, discovered Beethoven, Brahms and Homer, and memorised Mozart's entire Requiem in the choir.
He moved to Athens in 1938 to prepare for the National Technical University, drawn by physics and mathematics, while taking harmony and counterpoint lessons. He passed the entrance exams in 1940, but the Italian invasion that October and the German occupation that followed interrupted everything. He joined the National Liberation Front, first in protests and later in armed resistance, an experience he refused to discuss until late in life. He left Greece after 1947 and became a French citizen eighteen years later.
In France his two careers ran in parallel. With Le Corbusier he worked on the priory of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette and led the design of the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58. In music, Metastaseis, composed in 1953 and 1954, gave each orchestral musician an independent line. Terretektorh (1966) dispersed the players through the audience, and percussion works such as Psappha became staples. He invented the UPIC system for electronic composition and staged vast multimedia spectacles he called polytopes, combining everything he knew.
His book Formalized Music, published in French in 1963 and in English in 1971, set out his mathematical approach and remains one of his key writings. He shaped the development of electronic and computer music, designing spaces around specific pieces and pieces around specific spaces. He died on 4 February 2001.
Source: Iannis Xenakis
