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| Polymath who battled Nazis and
mediocrity |
A exhaustive study of the Greek polymath
Iannis Xenakis shows how he was far ahead of his time, writes Carol
Burns
Xenakis by Nouritza Matossian
Moufflon Publications, Cyprus. £18
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Iannis Xenakis beside his beloved Mediterranean
Matossian and Xenakis at Mycenea in Greece
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MORE than 3,000 people gathered at the Festival Hall in October
to attend a weekend of concerts, discussions, and a documentary
film on the Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis.
What drew them together to listen to this innovative musician? To
find out read a brilliant, recently published book, Xenakis, written
by his biographer and friend, Nouritza Matossian.
Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 to Greek parents in Romania. Traumatised
by the early death of his mother, he spent a lonely childhood in
boarding school on the Greek island Spetsai. As an engineering student
in Athens he joined the resistance against Nazi occupation as a
left-wing student leader. He was imprisoned, injured by British
shrapnel, blinded in one eye, and sentenced to death by a Greek
war tribunal.
In 1948, he escaped with false papers to Paris. The architect Le
Corbusier employed him as a young engineer for L’Unité
d’Habitation de Marseille (“a machine for living”).
Working with him on the project, Xenakis compared space in architecture
with time in music.
He reasoned that as he’d calculated a pleasing series of proportions,
using the Golden Mean, for windows in Le Couvent de la Tourette
(1954-56), he could do so with rhythms and pitches in his first
orchestral composition, Metastaseis (1954).
Xenakis and Le Corbusier collaborated and quarrelled over the next
10 years, until Xenakis was dismissed, and was free to realise his
hidden passion for music. I visited Nouritza in her Arts and Crafts
studio in Hampstead, a kaleidoscope of exotic possessions collected
from many years of travel. She explains: “Xenakis was polymath,
engineer, designer, mathematician, philosopher as well as musician.
He brought music into line with the newest discoveries in science.”
She perches on a Victorian armchair, surrounded by art books, Armenian
wall paintings, Kaiseri kilims, gold and blue textiles, bunches
of red proteus and white lilies.
She points to photos of herself and Xenakis on a BBC film shoot.
“He was a pioneer who foresaw the digital revolution in music
and the arts,” she says. “He’s an arch linking two
millennia – and certainly the most radical composer of the
20th century.”
Nouritza’s dark eyes brighten as she recalls first hearing
Xenakis’ music in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1969. She was
a student when he was an unknown composer, shunned by his contemporaries.
She recalls how a shy, athletic Greek with a scarred cheek, invited
his small audience to move forward to the front seats of the auditorium.
“His elemental solo cello work, Nomos Alpha, based on the maths
of cube symmetries, just blew me away.”
Programme notes linked Xenakis’ music to philosophy, the subject
Nouritza was studying. She adds: “His music was intelligent,
systematic, yet passionate, and opened up all the exciting potential
of contemporary music. I was elated and walking on air, eager to
discover the hidden message.”
In 1970, Nouritza gatecrashed rehearsals of a new composition, Nuits,
for 12 voices. Hearing a score without words, she observed how Xenakis
orchestrated vowels and cries in a raw, emotional lament for political
prisoners. Invited by The Observer newspaper to write an article
on him, she went to Paris. They conversed in Greek. “Then I
had the audacity to ask if I could write a book on him!” she
laughs.
His quiet response delighted her. An exiled Greek and a Cypriot
Armenian, with a shared history of family suffering under the Turks,
bonded them for life. “For Xenakis, politics and music were
interlinked,” she says.
Nouritza describes the effect on him of anti-Nazi demonstrations.
“He heard the crowd shouting slogans, and the chaotic discontinuity
shifted to an ordered field of unison. Shots were fired.
“The cries became sporadic, and order fell apart. He considered
how he could replicate those changes with massed sounds.
“Then he used mathematical formulae, as if engineering the
very particles of sound.
“His mother was his muse,” Nouritza says, “and he
always carried her spirit with him.”
She explains how he drew inspiration from natural sources: sea storms,
galactic constellations and migrating birds in formation. Using
engineering skills, he adapted mathematical functions to recreate
natural phenomena in music, and link transitions from chaos to order.
He wrote about his invention ‘stochastic music’ which
adapted probability functions, now known as Chaos Theory.
Nouritza collaborated with Xenakis on his biography for more than
10 years.
When it was first published in French, he said he loved it because
it was ‘a thriller’.The clarity of Nouritza’s writing
has aided a new generation to appreciate his work in depth. The
results of his persistence and intensive labours were clearly heard
in the rapturous applause at the recent Festival Hall concerts,
four years after his death.
What next? She is writing a book that re-examines the huge vacuum
surrounding the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, that “delves
into the lost history of my family in a way that will have a universal
echo”.
Like Xenakis, her politics and the arts are inextricably interlinked.
• Nouritza Matossian discusses Xenakis, backed by music
and images, at 7pm on Sunday at the Hellenic Centre, 16-18 Paddington
Street, W1. The event is free. Call 020 7486 9196 for details. |
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