Primal Architect

Since the death in 1965 of Edgard Varèse - the sole composer to translate Futurism into sound - all classical music has sounded disappointed, vitiated as an artistic force by its social role as an emblem of high-grade cultural 'value'. Snob appeal does not encourage recognition of the realities modern life. Of all the composers now operating within the parameters of art music, the one who has attempted to further Varèse's project most has been Iannis Xenakis.

Almost uniquely, Xenakis adheres to the tenets of 1920s abstraction: insistence on the here-and-now of the material artwork; trust in an egalitarian human psyche addressable by primal signs; an overriding concern with innovation ("I try not to repeat myself. I am not interested in repeating myself, or other people's music"). All of which adds up to a blunt refusal of ideological or cultural collusion. Though the force and directness of his music is acknowledged even by conservative critics. Xenakis's vast oeuvre - over 100 fullblown works by 1993 - suffers terrible neglect. His rationalist intransigence, his insistence on hearing the music he wants, resists the marketing cliches, the conformist niches like 'mystic seer' or 'national treasure' or 'soundtrack maestro'.

Xenakis was born in Braïla, Romania on 22 May 1922. During the Second World War, he joined the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation at the age of 18. I met him in London on the day that the scandal of the Churchill papers hit the headlines, and Xenakis told a story that served as a rebuff to the jingoistic celebrations being planned for VE day.

In October 1944, with the fascists beaten, Xenakis and his resistance comrades found themselves fighting a new set of invaders - British troops ordered by Churchill to suppress the Communist-led partisans and secure Greece for the West. Unarmed civilian demonstrators were shot down in the street, and Xenakis fled to Paris in 1947 under sentence of death from the new regime, an American-backed oscillation between authoritarian monarchy and military dictatorship which lasted until the mid-70s.

In the fight against the British, part of the left half of Xenakis's face was shot away; he only survived due to the heroism of a woman called Mâkhi (after whom he named his only daughter). But his experiences also had musical import. Just as Varèse - with his sirens, percussive blocks of sound and cataclysmic climaxes - made music cognisant of the realities of trench warfare, so Xenakis was fascinated by the noise of crowds and of gunshot sounds in space.

"I discovered things about sound that I was not taught, that no one had told me. People shouting in waves, it's a very special experience. I was there in December 1944 when the Communist resistance was suppressed by the British troops. I was fighting against the British as I fought against the Germans. What was interesting were the bullets in the night, whistling, and explosions here and there, and also the searchlights trying to spot the planes - that was with the Germans. It was a large-scale spectacle that was very interesting."

Such aestheticisation of war and suffering has a sinister side, though with Xenakis it has more to do with a strict idea of the objectivity of musical event than contempt for the suffering of the masses. In order to make music that could apply his observations, Xenakis needed to master traditional technique: in Paris he studied music with Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Olivier Messiaen. He also worked for the architect Le Corbusier and (along with Varèse) supplied tapes for the Philips multi-speaker pavilion at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958. He developed an interest in maths, a discipline of relevance to both music and architecture, especially the 'calculus of probabilities' pioneered in the early eighteenth century by Jacques Bernouilli. Xenakis used Bernouilli's 'stochastic' method (the word means 'target', and refers to the gradual accumulation of definition in calculating probabilities - the more you flip the coin, the closer you get to 50 per cent) to assign notes to players, distributing huge 'events' across the orchestra. This was an eminently reasonable way to plot the movement of sounds, as logical yet tradition-defying as the Neo-Plasticist painters' elimination of everything from their canvases apart from black, white, the right-angle and the primary colours (during the interview, Xenakis talked approvingly of the artist Piet Mondrian). The stochastic method enabled Xenakis to emulate the unpredictable-yet-patterned forms found in tree branches, clouds and coastlines (anticipating popular interest in Chaos Theory by 40 years).

"The stochastic method was necessary in the 50s, when I started writing Metastasis or Pithoprakta especially. I used systems that scattered formal notes from the string orchestra all over the spectrum. That was the vision that I had of music like the rain, or like the clouds - and the human mind is made out of these things, so it was not a translation, but a personification of these kind of thoughts."

Early on, Xenakis did himself an unwitting disservice by trying to explain such mathematical procedures in interviews. He was branded with a reputation for formidable intellectualism when his real aim was to evoke primal experiences. As so often in classical music, the fact that his sensibility was alien to genteel concertgoers was held as evidence of elitism - actually he deserved the audiences that were later wowed by the (comparatively impoverished) sight-and-sound spectacles of Hawkwind or Jean Michel Jarre.

"It has to be music otherwise you are lost. The imagination of what you put in art can be very close to what scientists find out in mathematics or astro-physics, but if you fall into the trap that you must bring mathematics into music, then you are lost, it is impossible. Of course I made mistakes, I don't know where, but I did make mistakes, thinking that this mathematical logic is interesting in itself, but it has to be separated. I have from very early on developed a sense of sound, as opposed to the ideological principles that you could put inside. Music has to be sound, otherwise you are lost. Sound goes into the inner part of the human soul - in a more powerful way even than painting."