Xänorphica.

Xanthoudakis, Haris

Xenakis, Iannis

Xeres, Hurtado de.

Xhosa music.

Xian Xinghai [Hsien Hsing-hai]

Xiao.

Xiao, Shuxian [Hsiao, Shu-sien]

Xiao Erhua [Hsiao Erh-Hua]

Ximénez [Jiménez], José

Ximeno, Fabián Pérez

Xinda [Xindas, Xinta], Spyridon.

Xirimía [chirimía]

Xuares [Juárez], Alonso

Xu Boyun [Hsu Po-Yun]

Xu Changhui.

Xu Lixian

Xun.

Xu Shuya

Xylo-marimba.

Xylophone

Xylorimba [xylo-marimba, marimba-xylophone].

Xylosistron.

Xyndas [Xyntas, Xinda(s), Xinta(s)], Spyridon

Xänorphica.

See Sostenente piano, §1.

Xanthoudakis, Haris

(b Piraeus, 18 June 1950). Greek composer and musicologist. He studied with Varvoglis at the Hellenic Conservatory, Athens (harmony, 1964), privately with Papaïoannou (composition, 1966–71) and with Adamis (electronic music, 1972–3). After working under Hadjidakis at the Third Programme of Hellenic Radio, he undertook further studies in France with Xenakis, at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et d'Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu) and at the Group de Recherches Musicales (1979–85). After returning to Athens he taught at the National Conservatory (1985–6) and the Athenaeum Conservatory (1987–93). In 1989 he co-founded (with the composer Kostas Moschos) the Institute of Research in Music and Acoustics. As a professor and coordinator of its music department, at the Ionian University, Corfu (from 1993), he gave a new impetus to research on Greek art music after the fall of Constantinople (1453) and 19th-century Ionian music.

Initially shaped by his keen interest in serialism and electro-acoustic technology, Xanthoudakis's compositions are characterized by emotional restraint and profound humour. By applying serial procedures to tonal material, in works such as the widely performed Tango Plus-Minus and the double bass concerto (1991, rev. 1996), he has found an unorthodox way in which to recover the trajectory of musical tradition. Such procedures aim, according to the composer, to unmask the fraud inherent in the aesthetic position of the serial avant garde.

WORKS

(selective list)

WRITINGS

‘Mia ennoiologhiki anadifissi sti theoria tis moussikis’ [Semantic research in music theory], Echos, no.13 (1974), 56–9

‘Kinimatografos ke moussiki: i periptossi tou Mauricio Kagel’ [Cinema and music: the case of Mauricio Kagel], Film, no.18 (1979), 111–19

Aspects de la signification du timbre dans la musique du XXe siècle (diss., U. of Paris, 1981)

‘Les origines de l'orchestration moderne’, Revue internationale de musique française, no.18 (1985), 22–8

‘Et in Arcadia ego: metamodernismos ke paradossi sti simerini moussiki’ [Et in Arcadia ego: postmodernism and tradition in today's music], O politis, nos.81–2 (1987), 110–11

Keimena ya mia litourghiki theoria tis moussikis (Athens, 1992)

‘Mantzarou tychae’ [Destinies of Mantzaros], Porphyras, no.75 (1995), 25–34

‘I proti istoria tis neoellinikis moussikis’ [The earliest history of modern Greek music], Porphyras, no.79, (1996), 83–90

GEORGE LEOTSAKOS

Xenakis, Iannis

(b Braïla, ?29 May 1922). French composer of Greek parentage. He belongs to the pioneering generation of composers who revolutionized 20th-century music after World War II. With the ardour of an outsider to academic musical life, he was one of the first to replace traditional musical thinking with radical new concepts of sound composition. His musical language had a strong influence on many younger composers in and outside of Europe, but it remained singular for its uncompromising harshness and conceptual rigour.

1. Early life.

2. Architecture.

3. Musical research.

4. Works overview.

5. Early works.

6. ‘Metastaseis’.

7. Macroscopic stochastic music.

8. ‘Symbolic music’.

9. Ancient theatre and Polytopes.

10. Microscopic stochastic music.

11. ‘Morphological’ compositions.

12. Globally tempered sieves and cellular automata.

13. Electro-acoustic works.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PETER HOFFMANN

Xenakis, Iannis

1. Early life.

The eldest child of a Greek businessman, he was born in Romania, and at the age of ten was sent to a boarding school on the Greek island of Spetsai. An outsider there, he immersed himself in science and Greek literature, both of which were to become lifelong interests. His early musical experiences were various: at home he heard classical piano music played by his mother and the music of gypsy bands; on Spetsai he encountered Byzantine liturgical music and Greek folk music and dance; he also sang in the school choir (whose repertory included works of Palestrina), and absorbed classical music from the radio. Later, during World War II, a comrade in the Greek Resistance was to introduce him to the music of Bartók, Debussy and Ravel.

In Athens at 16, while preparing for the civil engineering entrance examination to the Athens Polytechnic, Xenakis took lessons in piano and music theory. He entered the Polytechnic in the autumn of 1940, but it closed following the Italian invasion of Greece in November of that year, and closed again several times during the course of the war. At first Xenakis took part in right-wing nationalist protests, but at the end of 1941 he joined the resistance of the communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) against the German occupation (April 1941 to October 1944). He took an active part in mass demonstrations against, among other things, the German confiscation of all food supplies (which caused thousands of deaths in the winter of 1941–2) and the attempts to deport Greeks to carry out forced labour in Germany in February 1943. One photograph of this time shows Xenakis marching in the front row of a demonstration (Matossian, 1981). Later in his life, the composer was to speak of his experience of acoustic mass phenomena in these events, such as the way rhythmically regular shouts turned into chaotic screams of fear when the Nazis opened fire.

British forces arrived in Greece in mid-October 1944 to eliminate the EAM and restore the Greek monarchy; and in December of the same year, as a student in the ‘Lord Byron’ unit, Xenakis took part in street fighting against British tanks. He was seriously wounded when a shell hit him in the face. While he was in hospital, the EAM lost its political and military power, whereupon the ‘White Terror’ was unleashed on former Resistance members. In spite of his wartime experiences, Xenakis gained his diploma in February 1946. He was then conscripted into the national armed forces, where he heard for the first time of the concentration camps to which former Resistance fighters were being sent; he deserted and went into hiding. Condemned to death (his sentence was in 1951 commuted to ten years’ imprisonment) and stripped of his Greek citizenship, he managed to reach Italy with a false passport in September 1947, and illegally crossed into France in the hope of reaching the USA. However, he was forced to remain in Paris as an illegal immigrant with no material resources of any kind.

Xenakis, Iannis

2. Architecture.

To earn his living, Xenakis worked until 1959 in Le Corbusier’s studio, at first as an engineer, but gradually playing a greater part in architectural design. He designed the kindergarten on the roof of the residential block in Nantes-Rézé, parts of the government buildings in Chandigarh, India, the rhythmically articulated glass façade of the monastery of St Marie de La Tourette, near Lyons, and the greater part of the chapel there. Finally, he was responsible for the unique shape of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition Universelle, based on a sketch of Le Corbusier.

Most of his later architectural projects were intended for musical uses: a concert hall and studio for Scherchen’s musical centre in Gravesano (Ticino) in 1961 and the same for the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 1984; but the only design to be realized was the Diatope, one of his invented Polytopes. The space for a unique sound-and-light experience, it comprised a tent-like construction which was erected outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris for its opening in 1977 and later re-erected in Bonn for a Xenakis festival.

Xenakis, Iannis

3. Musical research.

In Paris, Xenakis tried to compensate for the musical education he had missed during the war through self-directed study by taking lessons with Honegger and Milhaud. He also attended Messiaen’s analysis course at the Conservatoire (1950–52). Between 1955 and 1966 Scherchen repeatedly invited him to Gravesano, where he met musicians and experts in electro-acoustics (including Max Mathews). The articles Xenakis contributed to Scherchen’s Gravesaner Blätter formed the basis for his book Formalized Music (the first edition, in French, appeared in 1963). From 1957 to 1962 he worked in Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM; until 1958, Studio d’essai de la Radio-Télévision Française), where he realized his early electro-acoustic works. Invited to Japan in 1961, he received there enduring impressions of Asian musical culture which strengthened him in his idea of ‘universal musical structures’. In 1962 Xenakis composed a group of instrumental works with the help of a computer at IBM Paris (Schmidt, 1995, Baltensperger, 1996). In order to extend his research into the nature of sound itself with the help of the computer, he founded EMAMu (Equipe de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales) in 1966, which in 1972 became CEMAMu (Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales). From 1967 to 1972, Xenakis taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he also directed a Center for Mathematical and Automated Music. He was a visiting professor at the Sorbonne (1973–89), and was awarded a doctorate there for his interdisciplinary research (Arts/Sciences: alliages) in 1976.

Xenakis, Iannis

4. Works overview.

Unusually, Xenakis’s first compositions were for orchestra, a medium which enabled him to realize his conception of sound masses; only later did he turn to smaller ensembles and solo instruments. He initially preferred writing for strings because of their abundance of sound colours and ability to move seamlessly between pitches. But from the late 1960s on, he has also required woodwind and brass to play glissandos. He did not turn to the piano until he began to use ‘finite’ sets of pitches in Herma (1961).

Beginning with Nuits (1967–8), Xenakis treated the human voice like an instrument with pizzicato-like accents, consonantal and guttural articulation of abstract phonemes, and extremely demanding ranges in dynamic and pitch. At the same time he entertained an ideal of untrained, ‘peasant’ voices, especially for his musical conception of ancient theatre, in which singers also play bells, gongs, stones and so on.

His writing for percussion began in earnest first with Persephassa (1969) and then in a series of powerful, innovative works in the 1970s and 80s (for Pléïades he invented a new instrument – the ‘Six-Xen’).

Of singular importance to Xenakis’s work is the dimension of physical space. The first signs of this were in Pithoprakta (1955–6) in which the concluding unison is distributed around the string section in very high harmonics. The brass sounds are similarly treated in Eonta (1963–4), while in Terretektorh and Nomos gamma the audience is placed among the members of the orchestra who are dispersed around the performance space. Nevertheless, Xenakis subsequently concluded that the best way to control the spatial dimension was through the use of loudspeakers, as with the several hundred used in the Philips Pavilion, or in several of his later Polytopes, above all in the Diatope (1977).

Though Xenakis’s music is often extremely elaborate in detail, that detail is essentially at the service of the whole, this is particularly evident in the specific manner of the creation of the compositional algorithms ST (Free Stochastic Music) and GENDYN (Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis). Form never emerges from the development of thematic cells but from the collage-like succession or superimposition of segments that display strong internal connections, although heterogenous material is sometimes interpolated as well. The proportions of the parts and the ebb and flow of tension in a work are determined with an infallible instinct for musical dramaturgy.

Xenakis, Iannis

5. Early works.

This period includes everything before Metastaseis (1953–4), which was detached from a triptych called Anastenaria to mark the beginning of the ‘official’ output. (Anastenaria also comprised two other quite substantial works, Procession aux eaux claires and Sacrifice, inspired by northern Greek festivals of pre-Christan origin). Youthful essays in composition appear not to have survived, though among them Xenakis has mentioned the monodies Odes de Sappho (Varga, 1982). The early works have not been published (although they have been studied, by Mâche in Restagno 1988; Solomos, 1996; and Baltensperger 1997), with the exception of Zyia, which was printed and performed in 1994. These pieces reflect Xenakis’s early ambition to emulate Bartók by founding a contemporary ‘Greek’ music, and approaching the traditional musical heritage with a systematic analytical eye, without renouncing contemporary compositional techniques of Western modernism. This project was expounded in the article ‘Provlimata Ellenikis Mousikis Synthesis’ (‘Problems of Greek music composition’). The elements of Greek folk music that were adapted include the use of certain modes, parallel 4ths, the specifically northern Greek type of vocal polyphony, and the unequal additive rhythms (aksak). Xenakis’s sense of structure and ‘formalization’ reached its peak in Sacrifice, a ‘mechanism’ based upon a Messiaenesque mode de valeurs with the help of a Fibonacci series (see Fibonacci series). Fibonacci series also determine the time structures of Metastaseis, which resemble, in some respects, the rhythmic spacing of glass panels on the façade of the monastery of La Tourette (cf Baltensperger, 1996, p.303).

Xenakis, Iannis

6. ‘Metastaseis’.

Most of the fundamental musical problems, as he perceived them, were confronted by Xenakis in Metastaseis. In effect, he laid the foundation here for his entire musical career with the concept of ‘sound composition’, described in the essay ‘Les Métastassis’: ‘The sonorities of the orchestra are building materials, like brick, stone and wood … The subtle structures of orchestral sound masses represent a reality that promises much’. In the same essay Xenakis translates the Greek metastaseis as ‘transformations’, referring to the continuous evolution of massive glissando structures on the one hand and the discontinuous transpositions and permutations of pitches on the other. The concept of ‘transformation’ – in a strictly mathematical sense the interrelations between musical structures (where structure is to be understood as a set of relationships between musical parameters) – is central to Xenakis’s thought. Its manifestations include transformations of geometrical figures (group theory), scales (sieve theory), melodic outlines (random paths), polyphonic structures (arborescences), spectral screens (granular synthesis) and wave forms (stochastic synthesis).

Xenakis's plotting of the massed glissandos of Metastaseis on ruled millimeter graph paper reflects his basic concept of a musical ‘space-time’: with pitch on the y axis ‘ordinate’, and time on the x axis, a two-dimensional space is created in which potentially time-independent musical structures can be contained in a temporal setting. As in Einstein’s theory of relativity, time becomes a mere dimension in a homogeneous, isotropic space, not distinguished in any way from the dimension of pitch. (This is very important for the later geometrical transformations of such structures as arborescences).

For the composition of the middle section of Metastaseis Xenakis developed a highly idiosyncratic dodecaphonic technique. In his space-time concept, the pitches are associated with ‘differential’ durations from the Fibonacci series. Pitch manipulation within 12-tone rows is determined by the systematic use of mathematical permutations of row segments; the transposition of rows through rotation; and the concept of the ‘diastematic series’ based on the six interval classes rather than the 12 pitch classes. Metastaseis is the first work in which Xenakis constructed ruled surfaces in a two-dimensional projection. These surfaces may be understood as straight line paths bent along curved trajectories. Besides their use in later works (such as Syrmos and Stratégie), they define the unique shape of the Philips Pavilion, conceived by Xenakis as the setting for Varèse’s Poème électronique, and Le Corbusier’s picture projections for the Brussels Exposition Universelle of 1958.

Xenakis, Iannis

7. Macroscopic stochastic music.

In his article ‘La crise de la musique sérielle’ (1994), Xenakis rejected serial method as unsuitable for his compositional objectives. At the same time, like the serialists, he followed Messiaen’s example in retaining the independent structuring of individual musical parameters. This manifesto was, in fact, less of a polemic against serialism and more the renunciation of traditional polyphonic part writing, in order to establish the complete independence of sound events within sound masses. This independence is the theoretical precondition for the applicability of the kinetic theory of gases to musical composition. (According to this theory, the temperature of a gas derives from the independent movement of its molecules.) Xenakis focussed his compositional process upon the large-scale features – such as outline, density or temperature – of whole ‘clouds’ of sounds, like the pizzicato-glissando clouds in Pithoprakta, and their alteration in time. By means of stochastic distribution functions the macroscopic properties of the mass are linked to its microscopic structure: each sound-particle of the score is precisely defined, yet contributes to the overall sound impression in its own individual way.

In Achorripsis (1956–7) Xenakis formalized his stochastic method to a point where it could be automated by means of a computer programme, with the help of which he was able to generate the family of ST compositions in 1962. In addition, he experimented with ‘injecting memory into the stochastic method’ (Varga, 1982): by means of transitional probabilities (the Markov chain), he established a dynamic equilibrium between musical ‘states’ and then disrupted it, following a predetermined plan (e.g. in Syrmos, Analogique A and B). Stochastics were also used to create sound textures employed in the musical ‘games’ Duel (1959) and Stratégie (1962), using a mathematical game theory developed for the simulation of situations of military or economic conflict (Schmidt, 1995); for the presentation of unordered pitch sets in Herma (1961); for the piano solo of Eonta (1963–4); and for the gigantic glissando fields of Nomos gamma (1967–8). Such ideas continue to play a part in Xenakis’s most recent music, though no longer necessarily applied with precise calculation.

Xenakis, Iannis

8. ‘Symbolic music’.

Stochastic music may have led to the control of sound masses, yet the determination of the notes themselves had no other foundation than the application of the kinetic theory of gases to musical objects. In this crisis of fundamentals, Xenakis turned to logic and sets – much as mathematicians had around 1900 (Eichert, 1994). The goal of this project, entitled ‘Symbolic Music’, was the foundation of a musical high-level calculus in which the concrete dimensions (i.e. the musical parameters) are abstracted and rendered into algebraic forms. Only after this process are they given a musical interpretation. This ‘syntactic’ treatment of musical structures entailed emptying them of any significance normally attributed by musical tradition. The abstract formalism underlying the manipulation of pitch sets in Herma, for example, was subsequently extended to the investigation of the regular proportions of complex scales (sieves), by imposing a group structure on the sets (the set of whole numbers). In ...