ヤニス・クセナキス
作曲
A dual master builder: as an engineer and architect, Iannis Xenakis was a long-time collaborator of Le Corbusier; as an uncompromising avant-garde composer, he created revolutionary sound sculptures. His works, sometimes static, sometimes explosively dynamic with tremendous power, enable spatial experiences in which sounds change their direction of movement, approach, recede or circle within themselves.
Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 to Greek parents in Brăila, Romania. After the family returned to Greece in 1932, he enrolled in engineering studies. On the day he began his studies at the National Technical University of Athens, Mussolini’s troops marched into Greece. Xenakis joined the communist resistance movement and fought first against the Italian, then the German and finally the British occupation. On New Year’s Day 1945, he was critically wounded by a British grenade during a street battle. Despite a disfiguring scar and the loss of an eye, he managed to complete his engineering studies before being sentenced to death for treason by the right-wing Greek government. Xenakis fled via Italy to Paris, where he arrived in 1947 with a forged passport, penniless and completely disillusioned. He received help from the world-famous architect Le Corbusier, who hired him as his assistant. Xenakis also took lessons from the composers Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud. But it was Olivier Messiaen, whose courses Xenakis attended in 1952, who first recognised his talent. Among other works, this led to the triptych Anastenaria for choir and orchestra, the third part of which Metastasis marked Xenakis’s breakthrough at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1955. Three years later, he used this composition as the basis for his design of the famous Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. As an avowed critic of serialism, Xenakis favoured a compositional approach influenced by probability theory and mathematical combinatorics, which heralded the spirit of the digital age. He founded the Centre d’Études de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales in Paris, and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1983. After suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for many years, Xenakis died in Paris in February 2001.
