Home > Iannis Xenakis

He was born in Braila, Romania, and studied architecture in Athens, Greece. Xenakis participated in the Greek Resistance during the World War II and the first phase of Greek Civil War as a member of the students company Lord Byron of ELAS (Greek Peoples Liberation Army). He received a severe face wound and escaped a death sentence. In the '50s he fled to Paris and worked with Le Corbusier. While his assistant, Xenakis designed the Philips Pavilion, home of the première of Edgar Varèse's Poème Électronique at the 1958 Brussels International Fair. He is particularly remembered for his pioneering electronicElectronic music is a loose term for music created using electronic equipment. Any sound produced by the means of an electrical signal may reasonably be called electronic, and the term is sometimes used that way in music where acoustic performance is the and computer musicComputer music is music generated with, or composed with the aid of, computers. Much of the work on computer music has drawn on the relationship between music theory and mathematics. See also: Max Mathews Electronic music Computer music programming langua, and for the use of stochasticStochastic from the Greek "stochos" or "goal", means of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture; conjectural; random. A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that the next state of the environment is not fully determined by mathematicalMathematics is commonly defined as the study of patterns of structure, change, and space; more informally, one might say it is the study of "figures and numbers". In the formalist view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures techniques in his compositions, including probabilityThe word probability derives from the Latin probare (to prove, or to test). Informally, probable is one of several words applied to uncertain events or knowledge, being more or less interchangeable with likely risky hazardous uncertain and doubtful depend (Maxwell-Boltzmann kynetic theory of gases in Pithoprakta, aleatory distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, Gaussian distribution in ST/10 and Atrées, Markovian chains in Analogiques), game theoryThis article discusses the mathematical modelling of incentive structures. For other games (and their theories) see Game (disambiguation). Game theory is a branch of mathematics that uses models to study interactions with formalized incentive structures ( (in Duel and Stratégie), group theoryAbstract algebra Group theory Group theory is that branch of mathematics concerned with the study of groups. Please refer to the Glossary of group theory for the definitions of terms used throughout group theory. See also list of group theory topics. (Nomos Alpha), and Boolean algebra (in Herma and Eonta). In keeping with his use of probabilistic theories, many of Xenakis' pieces are, in his own words, "a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions". In 1962 he published Musique Formelles—later revised, expanded and translated into Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition in 1971—a collection of essays on his musical ideas and composition techniques, regarded as one of the most important theoretical works of 20th century music.