by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
There’s a moment of intensity in Iannis Xenakis’s work that always seems to be present in any of his compositions. For him, music was architecture, and architecture was music. It didn’t matter what perspective you heard it from – at the end of the day, sound is all about form. Xenakis spoke back in 1955 of a kind of “social turbulence” that informs his creative strategies, and the text excerpt below gives you a sense of what forces drove this composer to create a milieu where math, music, and high science were all seamlessly blended to create some of the most haunting music of the 20th century.
In his work one finds the turbulent aftereffects of a an encounter with something that seems to be a new artform, yet, conversely, one also is confronted with the echoes of ancient value systems as core elements of his compositional techniques: signal into music, music into concrete form, concrete form into transcendent engagement with the cosmos.
