At PMF 2024 we presented a performance of Xenakis' percussion piece Peaux – a rare experience. I hope you will enjoy the video, online for a limited time (you can listen while you read!)
Along with the video release, here is an essay about the life, mind, and work of Xenakis, including Peaux.
This is a partner piece to Pythagoras – All is Music and refers back to that often.
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Iannis Xenakis was legion. Born into a Greek family in Romania in either 1921 or 1922,1 he studied math and physics before the war, graduated with an engineering degree, then after the war worked as an architect (all before becoming a composer). His intellectual curiosity was fierce, and he was more drawn to the ancients than to his contemporaries, saying late in his life, “I felt I was born too late. I had missed two millennia.... But of course there was music and there were the natural sciences. They were the link between ancient times and the present, because both had been an organic part of ancient thinking.” Xenakis read Homer, Sappho, Plato, et al. in their original dialects. Much of his musical exploration stemmed from combining his compositional impulse with ancient sensibilities, mathematical processes, and modernist architectural designs used as compositional elements. Some have considered the latter especially incongruous with music. The music speaks for itself.
His insistence on pursing this type of “extra-musical” path in his composing made him a pioneer from the mid 1950s, when he exploded onto the scene with his partially architecturally based orchestra piece Metastaseis, followed soon by the mathematically (motion-patterns of molecules in gases) based Pithoprakta.2 There was nothing to compare this music to. It divided critics/audiences in the extreme, the strength of the reactions propelling his career. Incredibly, he kept finding new ways of pioneering, over and over again (4+ decades, ~150 pieces), retiring only as his mind receded, at 75 titling his final piece O-Mega.
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1. We have settled on 1922 for anniversaries and such, but it really isn’t clear. I'll use 1922 to calculate ages here.
2. If you can find the recording, Bernstein’s 1964 lecture on and recording of Pithoprakta is a cool introduction to Xenakis generally.
His aesthetic was shaped by trauma and war. Devastated by his mother’s death when he was 5 (related to measles complications), he developed what he called “defense mechanisms” against music he associated with her. At 22 he was part of an activist group in Athens, fighting against the occupation of Greece – first by Nazis, then the British – when a tank shell struck a building they were defending, killing his companions. He was left for dead with them in the rubble, but was later found to be still faintly alive. His jaw was shattered and the left side of his face was gone. He was not treated immediately as he was not expected to live more than a few hours, and when he rather miraculously survived, the treatments available were rudimentary, including one operation on his face without anesthetic. With a damaged inner ear and no left eye, his balance and depth perception were hindered, in addition to his hearing. At 25 when the political tides turned against him, he fled the country with a fake passport and was condemned to death in absentia by the Greek government. He kept details of these years to himself for decades,3 the trauma seemingly becoming a sort of fuel. 50 years later, nearing the end of his career, he offered this very uncharacteristically open statement: “For years I was tormented by guilt at having left the country for which I’d fought. I left my friends – some were in prison, others were dead, some had managed to escape. I felt I was in debt to them and that I had to repay that debt. And I felt I had a mission. I had to do something important to regain the right to live.”
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3. Nouritza Matossian wrote the first major book on his life and work in 1986. He offered these details to her only after she had spent 10 years with his family, just before publication.
By the mid-1950s he was capturing sonic aspects of his wartime experiences in his work, but his hyper-analytical mind was drawn to these experiences “from an aural point of view and detached from any other aspect,” pointing out similarities between the sounds of a street battle, for example, and the sounds of cicadas, or rain. His breakout pieces already made use of the quality of individually distinguishable sounds (a person shouts, a bullet whistles past) compiling with each other (shouting spreads across the crowd, gunfire erupts) to become a single new sound-mass (the battle begins in earnest). Individual sounds pop out momentarily from the mass, then are subsumed again. Waves form in the mass like a new chant slowly replacing the previous chant in a crowd. Rain pitter-patters in a little rhythm, then crescendos into a static rush. It is in this sense, thinking on a particle level, that Xenakis spoke of “the violence of clouds.” This detachment of the sound patterns from their narratives may be viewed as another defense mechanism, but it is also perfectly rational, even philosophically grounded.
Around the early 1960s he slowed his frenetic composition pace and entered a period of more research and lecturing (including at Tanglewood), codifying his new techniques, theories, and principles, and connecting composition now not only to architectural and statistical models, but to philosophy and ancient Greek worldviews, particularly those of the Pythagoreans. There he found much more than precedents for music being drawn out of mathematics. The rational, wholistic Pythagorean approach to all things, the boldness of their exploratory science, these too bolstered him on his path. Pythagorean→Byzantine pitch organization proved to be a much deeper well for him than that of the (Pythagorean→) Gregorian→classical tradition (think Kassia > Hildegard) and he would draw from that well for decades to come. He compiled the results of this period into a book first published in 1963 called Formalized Music, encompassing a daunting range of disciplines, each enriching the other, each being subsumed into what you could almost consider his own philosophy, but lasered in on a new set of fundamentals for creating music, which he wrote should “draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing their consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal.” The book is dense and technical (infamously off-putting to some), with lots of math that I do not understand, but the prose is rich, and I often return to it. His scientific tone serves as an anchor for flights of absolute fancy:
“...the Pythagorean concept of numbers affirmed that things are numbers, or that all things are furnished with numbers, or that things are similar to numbers. This thesis developed (and this in particular interests the musician) from the study of musical intervals in order to obtain the orphic catharsis, for according to Aristoxenus, the Pythagoreans used music to cleanse the soul as they used medicine to cleanse the body. [...] We are not far from the day when genetics, thanks to the geometric and combinatorial structure of DNA, will be able to metamorphise the Wheel of Birth at will, as we wish it, and as preconceived by Pythagoras. It will not be the ek-stasis [ecstatic state] (Orphic, Hindu, or Taoist) that will have arrived at one of the supreme goals of all time, that of controlling the quality of reincarnations… but the very force of the “theory,” of the question, which is the essence of human action, and whose most striking expression is Pythagorism. We are all Pythagoreans.”
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Near the beginning of De architectura, 1st century BC Roman architect/engineer Vitruvius writes “The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by their judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory.” He later gives a surprisingly detailed summary of the 4th century BC music theory of Aristoxenus (Xenakis’ favorite Pythagorean?4). Vitruvius is apparently known among architects still today, and so I wonder if Xenakis encountered this encompassing of music theory into the oldest surviving treatise on architecture. While studying in Athens he surely saw the Parthenon, built hundreds of years before Vitruvius, and we know that he went to it after the fall of the Greek junta, which allowed him to finally return to Greece in 1974. Xenakis spoke of the Parthenon’s structure as having made use of a Pythagorean scalar structure – architecture from music.
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4. The one he likes to mention, anyway. Having read a bit of Aristoxenus’ Elementa harmonica, I get it. Aristoxenus writes like Xenakis (so yes, vice versa).
And a possible precedent for music from architecture; in 1436 AD, architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s famous cathedral dome in Florence was completed, and composer Guillaume Du Fay was commissioned to write a piece of music for its consecration. The result was Nuper rosarum flores. It has an immediate beauty and directness, but there is something odd about its proportions, which are clearly designed with intent. We have no record of Du Fay’s intentions, but in the 1970s a musicologist noticed a possible relation between its proportions and those of the dome for which it was written, proposing that the unusual balance was a musical representation of the architectural structure.5 I like to imagine Du Fay standing inside the dome: the tiling under his feet is a dizzying optical illusion, a seeming cone descending into the Earth.6 From there he’s looking up at the dome’s concentric rings, each smaller than the last approaching the top, maybe his eyes are starting to swim among the swirled paintings of heavenly creatures, maybe he’s feeling tiny in relation to this immersive representation of the cosmos, and then he thinks “hey wait, here’s something.”
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5. It’s a contested theory, but it remains popular. It’s a nice idea!
6. the title image near the top of this page ↑
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By the 1970s, Xenakis was a prolific master of his utterly singular craft. His research was fully integrated into his technique, and his ambitions were turning cosmic. His large orchestra piece Antikhthon (conceived for ballet) is titled after the Counter-Earth that Pythagoreans proposed also revolved around the “central fire,” locked in opposite synchronization with Earth, forever out of our view. Epicycles, for cello and 12 musicians, is titled after a strange aspect of Ptolemy’s planetary motion theory, small cycles within larger cycles, which Xenakis incorporates into the compositional technique. The large-scale electroacoustic piece La Légende d’Eer is titled after the story from Plato's Republic of the death of Er and his experience in the afterlife, including hearing the music of the spheres, and then returning to life to share his new knowledge with the living. (His biographer Matossian was shocked that Xenakis had never considered the parallels between Er’s story and his own – escaping death to bring a music to the people that only he had heard.) La Légende d’Eer was written to be played on speakers placed throughout his architectural space Diatope, with translucent vinyl walls, 1600+ flashbulbs, and hundreds of movable mirrors directing 4 lasers to create a densely patterned light show, including representations of galaxies etc. Xenakis created multiple other such immersive, cosmic architectural-musical works (Polytopes). There is a demiurgic feel to his work in this period. A professor of mine who had the opportunity to interview Xenakis around this time once remarked “by that time, I think he knew that he was a god.”
His 1979 work Pléïades (as in the star cluster) for 6 percussionists has 4 movements: Claviers (“keyboards”), Peaux (“skins”), Métaux (“metals”), and Mélanges (“mixtures”). You could be forgiven for thinking of Pythagoras’ hammers when listening to Métaux, which is for hammered metal instruments that Xenakis designed just for this piece. At PMF 2024 we presented a standalone performance of Peaux, which is ostensibly why I’m writing this – the video of that performance is available through May 14, 2026, and it’s fantastic:
While Peaux sounds “modernist” with its shifting polyrhythms (basically layering of multiple independent tempos) to create moments of extreme rhythmic complexity, it also calls to something deep in our past, something deep within us still, with its ritualistic, prehistoric pounding. I think this is what really gave me a buzz listening to Xenakis early on; you feel like you’re in a time warp, being pulled simultaneously toward some ancient past and toward some future. Jean Batigne of the Percussions de Strasbourg, who commissioned Pléïades, said of Xenakis, “Here is a man who, traversing time, would compel the centuries to join hands.”
Drumming is old, primal, and very human, so Peaux also feels universal. You may hear ties to west-African drumming or Indian tabla, for example. The sudden shifts in density might remind you of Japanese wadaiko. In a 1986 interview, Xenakis said “In the sphere of rhythm, which is the handling of temporal number in the pure state, no music has developed further than percussion in India. African types of percussion, which are different, are also remarkable. With these kinds of music, I feel perfectly at home. I would even say, perhaps, that I have felt Western music to be more ‘exotic’ than these.” Not to counter Xenakis but I do hear in Peaux a use of aligned vs. misaligned tempos akin to the Classical use of consonance vs. dissonance, with dissonances pulling toward consonances, and consonances given their “pleasant” feel because they are led to via dissonances. Tension and resolution, yin and yang. When after a “dissonant” cluster of beats there is suddenly a “consonant” alignment in Peaux, you feel it in your guts.
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In 2012, 11 years after Xenakis’ had passed away, NASA released a recording of radio waves in Earth’s upper atmosphere. I remember my eyes widening as I listened. It sounded like Xenakis. It was particularly similar to a gesture he used in pieces as early as the 1960s (it sounds just like a certain part of the 1965 large orchestra piece Terretektorh), and even felt akin to an electroacoustic piece from 1994, at the tail end of his career (S.709). To be clear, he had no intention of imitating what NASA deemed “Earth’s Song,” nor did he likely know it existed – that is not what gripped me. By incessantly slashing out his own compositional path, anchoring his wild creativity with a scientific basis, by harnessing the language of nature in mathematics, by applying insights from a multitude of disciplines to his composition, he had projected his reasoning into the cosmos, in this case inadvertently imitating a cosmic music unknown to him. There was simply a shared physical principle at work. It was perhaps bound to happen, and we are perhaps bound to find more such connections in time.