Conversations with Iannis Xenakis

The music of the Greek-born composer, Iannis Xenakis, has been called brutal and violent. He first studied as an architect, but then turned to composition and put to musical use his knowledge of higher mathematics. In these conversations he talks about his life and music.

CONVERSATIONS WITH IANNIS XENAKIS records the interviews which Balint Andras Varga carried out with the composer in 1980 and 1989. The 1980 interview is the larger one, and delves heavily into Xenakis' biography. The composer recounts his upbringing in Romania and Greece, his student activism during World War II and his escape to France, and his life as both composer and architect. In discussing the music itself, Varga and Xenakis lead the reader to a deeper understanding of the theory and aesthetic behind such key early works as "Metastatis", "Pithoprakta", "Eonta" and "Herma". One also gets an idea of how Xenakis got along with major figures of new music such as Scherchen, Boulez, Messiaen, Milhaud, Honneger, and Yuji Takahashi. In the 1989 interview, Xenakis seems much less passionate. Comments are mainly limited to his general aesthetic. Varga notes that Xenakis' music had gotten much simpler over the proceeding decade, reduced to block-like sonorities slowly moving in pretty ordinary rhythms. Xenakis provides a defense of his latest music, but the question of whether his soundworld changed due to his increasing senility is still up in the air. There are a number of excerpts from the scores here, though not always in legible reproduction.

While James Harley's XENAKIS: His Life in Music is the best all-around description of Xenakis' works, CONVERSATIONS WITH IANNIS XENAKIS does give quite a lot of detail about his life and music that I have never seen elsewhere. Fans of the composer should seek it out, though it seems to be rather out of print.

Música