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On the one hand there is the portrait of Xenakis as a “pure mind,” an ultimate rationalist, hewing to the cool constants of mathematics and the ideology of the device. This is the Xenakis who applied Le Corbusier’s concept of “Modulor” to music (whereby architectural proportion was linked to human shape and tied firmly to the ratios of the golden mean). This is the Xenakis who mastered the unwieldy grammar of FORTRAN and created the graphic computer interface of UPIC. It is this logical and unsentimental Xenakis that the Czech novelist Milan Kundera praised for his “world of soothing objectivity, where the aggressivity of a soul seeking to express itself has no place.”
And yet there is also Xenakis the mythological, the terrible, in whose music a landscape of incantation and ritual is pockmarked by sudden and often inexplicable cruelty. How else can one understand the shattering silences of Psappha or the wailing sirens, sea stones and affolants at the end of Persephassa? (The very name “affolant” is an instrument whose provenance, according to Xenakis, is in a French word meaning “to terrify.”) Likewise, the sixxen swarms of Métaux and the spinning cross-patterns of Dmaathen do not come from a music of the mind alone. These musical structures, as Olivier Messiaen described them, “are not simply the ancillary side-effects of a thought; they are not radically new but radically other.”
Xenakis himself was other; the product of terrible incongruities that pulled him off of the mid-century grid. From the outset his music was rooted in contradictions that seemed always to stop him short of adherence to a single, unambiguous ideology. He preached the power of numbers, yet he never used the nearly ubiquitous numerical mechanics of serialism. He wielded his numbers with an almost virtuosic intuition, mating the intellectual and calculated with the visceral and explosive in a music that was ultimately among the most idiosyncratic statements of the 20th century.
The many contradictions of Xenakis – as simultaneously logical and mythological, mechanical and intuitive – define his conundrum. They are the “X” of Xenakis: the crosshairs of divergences so deep and constant that no unambiguous point of view can illuminate him.
