Toward Infinity in Sound

Greece's avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis has a lofty artistic goal: to pre side over the marriage of 20th century science and music. "The two can no longer exist apart," he insists. "Musicians are being forced to recognize all kinds of technical advances. Their job is to catch up with them and guide them." This may be somewhat easier for Xenakis (whose full name is pronounced Yahn-nis Zen-nahk-ess) than for some of his peers. An accomplished architect, engineer and philosopher as well as a composer, he is enough at home with an IBM 7090 computer to use it in calculating his compositions, which owe a large intellectual debt to the universal language of science: mathematics.

Whistles and Whips. Most of Xenakis' ear-jarring music is an extension in sound of the calculus of probability, one of whose basic concepts is Bernoulli's law of large numbers. It says, in effect, that the occurrence of any chance event--the roll of a seven in dice, for example, or the random collision of stray molecules in the atmosphere--is more likely to conform to the prescribed statistical odds with each successive attempt. To Xenakis, this mathematical absolute has profound philosophical meaning: it implies that the changing structure of certain events in life, including the sounds that man creates, may tend ultimately toward a state of stability, or stochos (the Greek word for goal). Hence, he dubs his quest for mathematical orderliness in composition "stochastic" music. Xenakis describes his own music as "masses evolving and erupting, reshaping themselves, succeeding one another and then vanishing"--often in harmony with inflexible mathematical principles.

Despite its Pythagorean formality, however, Xenakis' music bears his ingeniously personal mark. For instance, during a composition called Eonta (which means "beings" in Greek) three trombonists and two trumpeters march to and fro about the stage while a pianist flays wildly away at the keyboard. In Terretektorh (one of the coined Greek words that he uses to title his pieces), the musicians blow whistles, rattle maracas, clap wooden blocks and crack small whips besides coaxing unearthly sounds from conventional instruments. As in Terretektorh, the entire orchestra will be scattered throughout the audience during the world premiere of Nomos Gamma at France's Royan Festival next month. Perhaps his most extraordinary composition is Strategic, which introduces mathematical game theory to the concert hall. Two full orchestras and two conductors literally duel for points on the same stage by improvising combinations in accordance with Xenakis' rules for the musical match.

Often the sounds of Xenakis' music--foghorn-thick brasses, squealing, creaking string glissandi--reflect the brutal images of his youth. Left motherless at the age of six, he lived in Athens during the Italian and German occupations, joined the Communist resistance during World War II and lost an eye and part of his cheek when he was struck by a shell fragment from a British tank in 1945. In Metastaseis, for example, the music seems to build on glissandi of rising intensity that might represent a roaring, surging crowd in Athens' Constitution Square. The sharp, rifle-like reports in Pithoprakta suggest the ping of bullets against the city's ancient stone masonry.

Enough of Gounod. Although Xenakis is dismissed as something of a showman by some of Europe's reigning serialists, he has influenced such younger musicians as Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki and Japan's Yuji Takahashi. He is also a hero to young intellectuals on the Continent. In Paris last spring, conservatory students marched through the streets with placards that declared: "Enough of Gounod. We want Xenakis." In part, the enthusiasm for Xenakis, who fled Greece in 1947, may stem from the fact that the Greek government has sentenced him to death in absentia for his guerrilla activites.

Xenakis is also benefiting from growing public interest in experimental music. The records of his orchestral and electronic works are finding an increasingly large audience in Europe and the U.S. Following the successful performances of Metastaseis and Pithoprakta last year (TIME, Jan. 26, 1968), George Balanchine hopes to choreograph three more of his pieces for the New York City Ballet. Xenakis has just completed a new ballet for the opening of Canada's new cultural center in Ottawa next June and has eight more major commissions on order.

Today Xenakis divides his year between Paris--where he lives with his French wife Franc,oise, a novelist, and their 13-year-old daughter--and Indiana University's School of Music, where he is the director of a new center for mathematical and automated music. Although he worked with Le Corbusier for twelve years, Xenakis now only occasionally practices architecture. Like a laboratory physicist, he has no clear idea where his musical experiments will take him--except to predict that his existing works, baffling as they are to the ear, will seem surprisingly tame beside ''the infinite sounds" of the future.

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