Exhibition on Iannis Xenakis: The Tone Poet as Engineer

"Révolutions Xenakis" is the title of the exhibition with which the Parisian Cité de la musique is celebrating the alleged centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis - presumably because even Mâkhi Xenakis, the daughter of the Greek-French architect and composer who died in 2001, did not find out whether this saw the light of day on May 29, 1921 or 1922.

The mood of wartime conflict reverberates audibly in many of his scores, especially in the early ones.

Whether in the mass demonstrations against the Nazi occupiers from 1941 or those against the British from the end of 1944 – the young engineering student took part.

The orchestral piece Metastasis (1953/54), commonly regarded as Xenakis' opus one, is said to be inspired by the sounds and rhythms of these front-line clashes (shrapnel had robbed the future composer of his left eye in 1945).

With its crazy glissandi and its cluster surfaces shredded by percussive pizzicati and glaring flashes of drums and brass, it ventures into – literally – unheard areas.

His conception process using drawings on graph paper is similarly revolutionary.

The exhibition brings together dozens of these graphic scores, some of which are unusually large, and which Xenakis used throughout his life as a working aid.

They evoke abstract waves, color spectrums created by children's hands, myriads of pinheads connected by lines.

Taming math through music

Equally fascinating and confusing, Xenakis' compositional methods often remain hermetic, even for professional musicians.

A show is certainly not the appropriate medium to present them to the general public.

But the exhibition in the Cité de la musique at least mentions the mathematical tools that the tone poet and engineer used in a personal union: stochastics and statistics, game and probability theory.

And symbolizes their complexity with calculating machines and computer programs from the distant past - Xenakis was already using IBM computers in 1962.

When listening to the Franco-Greek's compositions, which are often grippingly sensuous in sound and reminiscent of sonorous natural phenomena, understanding the calculations on which they are based is irrelevant.

Xenakis also relativized the meaning of the mathematical formulas: They would be "tamed and subdued by musical thinking".

Fifteen of the one hundred and fifty works written between 1953 and 1998 provide the audio visual material for the silent scores via playback device – thankfully in full length, between seven and forty-seven minutes playing time.

The selection is hardly representative: in addition to electronic pieces and pieces for large ensembles, she only performs two chamber music works and none with choir or purely for percussion (there will be a concert series in mid-March).

"Iannis Xenakis.

Un pere boulevard"

But the show goes even further and, like the material-rich catalogue, places the sounding work in relation to the built one.

After escaping civil war-ravaged Greece in 1947, Xenakis worked for Le Corbusier in Paris for twelve years – first as an engineer, then as an increasingly autonomous co-designer of modern icons such as the Cité Radieuse in Marseille and the La Tourette monastery near Lyon.

The Greek created the Philips Pavilion for Expo 58 in Brussels practically alone – when Le Corbusier ascribed himself the authorship of the building, which was influenced by “Metastasis”, the two broke up.

Mâkhi Xenakis dedicates the episode to the episode in her book “Iannis Xenakis.

Un père bouleversant” revealing pages.

After 1959, the building activity of the French-by-choice shifted to designing ephemeral structures for his polytopes.

He used this term to describe light and sound games that were up to date at the time.

The Philips pavilion had announced this: with electronic music by Xenakis and Edgard Varèse and a clip-art montage of colored black-and-white photos put together by Le Corbusier.

An undogmatic and versatile mix

In his polytopes and diatopes for Montreal (1967), for the Cluny thermal baths in Paris (1972 to 1974) and for the opening of the Center Pompidou there (1978), the all-rounder used light shows instead of image projection.

On a second screen, a slide show interspersed with film excerpts brings these events, which were attended by hundreds of thousands, back to life: three-colored laser sabers cross over flower children lying on the ground, while glistening little stars flicker from a sky made of taut metal cables.

The curators quickly beam the slightly yellowed spirit of what was then avant-garde multimedia show into the present.

The lights in the exhibition hall go out periodically and chains of illuminated dots race across the showcase tables to the electronic sounds of "La Légende d'Eer".

These rest on ruled surface feet, a nod to Xenakis' architectural vocabulary by the scenographer Jean-Michel Wilmotte.

As is the Neumes window, behind which one can see the creator's studio, crammed with art from all over the world and with books on whales and vibrations, Dionysus and dinosaurs, Corbu and chaos - a mixture as undogmatic and eclectic as the owner of the Library.

Revolutions Xenakis.