Xenakis, Iannis

 (1922- )

 Greek composer known for his use of mathematical ideas in music.

Born in Braila, Romania, and reared in Greece, where he studied engineering, he fought in the Greek resistance movement during World War II, sustaining an injury in which he lost one eye. After the war he had to flee from Greece because of his political activities, and he went to France, where he has lived ever since (he became a French citizen in 1965).

He studied in Paris with the French composers Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen and was assistant to the French architect Le Corbusier in 1948-1960. As a member of Le Corbusier's office he designed the Philips pavilion at the 1958 Brussels International Exhibition—a design derived in part from analogies with his orchestral work Metastasis (1954).

A constant feature of his music has been this kind of cross-fertilization between music and ideas derived from physics, architecture, and especially mathematics. Xenakis's philosophy of “stochastic music” is based on mathematical concepts such as set theory, symbolic logic, and probability theory, with a goal of stochos, or evolution to a stable state. This has meant that his compositional process uses elements similar to the aleatoric procedures of John Cage, but within an overall framework of control so that the result is fully-notated music.

He established the School of Mathematical and Automatic Music in 1966. Another aspect of his music is its ability to evoke an atmosphere of ancient ritual, something which can be seen in his settings of texts from the Oresteia (1966) and Medea (1967), and in Persepolis (1971), a tape piece composed for performance in the ruins of the Iranian city of that name.