The Wire

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."
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When I met him, Xenakis was visiting London to hear the ensemble Reservoir perform his 1969 composition, Kraanerg. Its densely-packed 75 minutes pits brass and the lowest of woodwinds (including bassoon and the rarely heard contra-bass clarinet) against a ferocious four-track tape montage. The mere timbre of the piece was spell-bindingly alien. Its lizard skin crawls with lurid life; like Ridley Scott, Xenakis grasps that immaculate attention to detail is required to make a monster movie in the mind. And although its texture is ruggedly distinctive, exposure to the whole piece revealed an astonishing variety of formal inventions.

During our conversation, it became obvious why Xenakis could not use the record industry to teach a non-classical audience: he retains the classical composer's focus on site-specific sonic events. Recorded product does not interest him. I showed him one of the 3" mini-CDs in the Metamkine label's Cinéma Pour L'Oreille series, which provides a showcase for state-of-the-art electroacoustic compositions: Xenakis's wonderful, hard-to-find electronic music would be perfect for the label. However, for Xenakis, a tape is a way of realising concerts, not an article for private consumption - and still less a priceless artwork. The tape for Kraanerg, for example, is administered alongside his instrumental score sheets by the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. At 1am on the morning of the performance, it was discovered that the master tape was in Sydney, Australia. A digital copy was quickly transmitted over the Internet to London for Reservoir's performance. Xenakis, meanwhile, remained blissfully ignorant of the drama surrounding his work.

Xenakis conceives of recordings as a means to realise specific events. "It depends on the acoustical means to listen to the music, what loudspeakers you have, what hall, the acoustics of the hall - it's a very complicated thing and more or less a failure!"

Did he think that domestic reproduction of sound was hopelessly impoverished? "Well, it's not safe. You don't know. It's like having something written for an orchestra and then the orchestra is not so good, the conductor is not so good, the hall is not interesting, and so it's a failure, it's not what you wanted. They are building all sorts of concert halls; sometimes they are acoustically good, the sound coming from the stage can be interesting, most of the time you cannot put loudspeakers on the ceiling, there are no means - if you put them on a balcony that is usually very poor. I have thought and designed concert halls which are different, these things were published somewhere - it is a thing nobody has solved yet."

What of virtual recreation of ambience in headphones? "In fact it's rather poor and it doesn't work. You have to make an abstraction when you make a recording, it's not the real acoustics. When you write music you have to have in mind that you'll only hear a sketch of it. You can listen to it, but bear in mind that it is not the absolute thing. There are so many variables. A composer has to judge - that should be about that, this effect, but you are never sure: what you have in your mind is something that is not real. Even the conductor doesn't know. If you have no conductor it's still more difficult - like with the string quartet. With the string quartet if the second violin is not loud enough, then what you have written is lost."

If recorded sound is no answer, how can we best hear his music? "I write especially for Germany, for Cologne, Munich, for Hamburg - the best way is to go and listen to these concerts. Why it's Germany, I don't know. Germany is divided in Länders, and so they are independent and try to act for themselves, which does not exist in France or England - it's much less centralised. And perhaps people who commission are wide open, they want something different."

Unlike virtually every other composer, Xenakis refuses to worry about the tastes of his audience; he believes any calculation in that arena would render his art inauthentic, a bad cross between art and politics. While his own opinions are radical - a 1967 pamphlet had him praising Lenin as a "philosopher, sociologist and demagogue", while Kraanerg was written to hail the "youth revolt" of 1968 - he wants music to be autonomous and objective, a primal enactment of natural forces.

"I write music because I am interested in what I am doing at that time, no matter what happens to it. Fortunately I have a publisher who takes care of it, and there are people who are crazy enough to perform it from time to time, but that is not really my problem. You have to be critical about the music you are doing, and not about the political aspect that is surrounding it - otherwise you are lost, you are not an interesting musician, nor a politician at all. If you want to be performed, maybe you have to be interesting for the listeners; you may think they are not just listeners but also politically minded, which is a mistake. Mankind is... you have the same brain as everybody, so if you do something interesting musically speaking, just that, people can understand that, can grasp it - because they are made as you are, you are not special. Otherwise, for instance, we would not be interested in Japanese music, traditional music, Indian or Chinese musics, which are very apart."
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He tells a story of asking an orchestra to listen to a Japanese musician playing Heike (traditional Japanese music) and being disappointed that they laughed at it, wouldn't treat it seriously. Xenakis wishes to reproduce the thrill of responding to forms of art without necessarily learning the code (compare Ezra Pound on Chinese characters, Charles Olson on Mayan glyphs or Anthony Braxton's diagram titles). The creation of new sounds is paramount, rather than a 'conversational' deployment of readily available elements.

"The post-Serial musicians like Boulez and Stockhausen and Nono and other people, they thought of music not in that kind of way, that is to transform the sound from the instruments, but just to play the sounds but put in a logical combination of melodic patterns. Varèse on the contrary tried to construct new sounds from the traditional ones by harmonics, not each sound for each instrument but by the combination of the instruments, and he was up to a point quite successful, though he didn't do much after the 30s."

This stance has led Xenakis to compositions of astonishing scope. The cello virtuoso Siegfried Palm's recording of a 13 minute piece for unaccompanied cello, Nomos Alpha (1966), introduced a staggering array of new playing techniques and attained the kind of visceral performance intensity associated with jazz and free improvisation. The same year Xenakis completed Terretektorh for 88 musicians distributed among the audience - the wind and percussion players were also equipped with a wood-block, whip, maracas and siren. Xenakis is also noted for his pioneering use of unusual vocal production in choral works - male falsetto, throat clicks and lip smacks. Whether concentrating on a single instrument and its capabilities, or arranging innovative events for massed ensembles, Xenakis maintains the integrity of his music by pursuit of the never-before-heard. This makes all the justifications for retread art - religious or political 'commitment', commercial accessibility, the declared desire to 'communicate' - redundant.

Xenakis may be uninterested in social contexts that always lead to 'imperfect' realisations of his musical ideas, but it is important that Reservoir is an ensemble committed to performing Xenakis. Exposure to his music is necessary if one is to gauge the degree of timidity and retreat that has infected art music today. As well as Kraanerg, they have already performed Epei (1976) and Palimpsest (1979) and are planning more in the future. Reservoir packed the Conway Hall for Kraanerg, and the programme - a delirious arrangement of a Carl Stalling Looney Tunes cartoon soundtrack called There They Go Go Go! and a piece by Erik Satie - was 'accessible' enough to attract the punters, but also provided an intelligent contrast to Xenakis (especially Stalling - his exhaustive and dizzying run-through of established emotional triggers provided the perfect foil to Xenakis's rugged refusal to manipulate). Fashionable interest in cartoon frivolity was not used as an excuse to ignore what 75 minutes of 60s modernism could offer: the players' commitment to Xenakis was palpable (other Reservoir composers include Barrett and Braxton, Zappa and Zorn). The performance didn't just vindicate Xenakis, it also vindicated the relevance of classical music to a discussion of new music of any genre: Reservoir are a musical force who can make genuine sense of The Wire's cross-cultural scramble.

Although Xenakis is still too little known and too little performed, his example - his willingness to carry compositional strategies beyond the confines of 'good taste', his openness to the untempered impact of exotic musics, his drive for new sounds, the terrifying emotional impact of his sonic objectivity - has inspired younger composers as diverse (yet crucial) as Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett and Hannah Kulenty. His focus on what can be achieved in site-specific locales has restricted his music to concert halls, denying him his rightful audience. Nevertheless, this narrow focus - in sharp contrast to those 'broadminded' post-minimalists who look over their shoulder at the sales figures achieved in pop/classical crossovers - has allowed Xenakis to develop a music of truly majestic otherness. It is an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the West.

© The Wire 2009