Iannis Xenakis
| Iannis Xenakis | |
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| Biography | Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was born on 29 May to Greek parents in Brăila, Romania. He trained as a civil engineer in Athens. In 1947, after three years of fighting in the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation, during which he suffered serious injuries, he escaped a death sentence and went to France, where he soon contributed to the cultural scene significantly. Initially, Xenakis worked as an architect and collaborated with Le Corbusier on a number of projects, not least the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, which he designed himself. Xenakis' first musical works were published in the 1950s. In 1952, he took composition courses with Olivier Messiaen, who encouraged him to add his scientific knowledge to his composition process. The style that emerged was derived from procedures in mathematics, architectural principles, and game theory and made Xenakis a central protagonist of the avant-garde movement - although never belonging to a grouping. Instead, he developed his own ways of structuring the dense masses of sound that characterize his first compositions. These stochastic procedures he later realized with the help of computers. |
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| Photo Credit | Wouter Hagens |
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