Form & Function DYLAN COBURN GREY EXPLORES THE CREATIVE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LE CORBUSIER AND EXPERIMENTAL COMPOSER IANNIS XENAKIS
Iannis Xenakis’ life story is an Oscarbait biopic waiting to happen. He memorised Mozart’s Requiem in its entirety before he was sixteen; aged eighteen, fighting in the Second World War, he got hit in the face by an unexploded shell which nearly killed him; alive but blind in one eye, he nonetheless graduated as a civil engineer in 1947; having graduated, he fled to France to avoid being imprisoned in a concentration camp by the new Greek government. A busy old time of it, all in all.
Xenakis settled into his new French life with a job in the Le Corbusier architecture studio. He also became a world-famous avant-garde composer, presumably out of boredom. After being shot in the face by a tank, I’d imagine that any job is something of an anticlimax. Architecture and music are, at first blush, not at all alike; Xenakis was an interesting man – all fighting and cussing aside – because he approached them in the same way. This is not conjecture; the man himself was very helpful and laid out his philosophy of music in the 1960 essay, Free Stochastic Music. Central to this essay is a disaffection with the dominant musical trend of the time, towards musical structures which were rigorously worked out but sounded random. Xenakis, in contrast, argues that the moment-to-moment action of a work can be semi-random once the global trend is determined or directed. Metastaseis B, a composition of his from 1953, illustrates how this might be applied to music (and eventually architecture). I do recommend you listen to this one, if only because it treats pitch in a novel way. The global form is determined not by specific pitches and pitch events, but by an overall pitch profile which rises and falls.
FIG 1 - HYPERBOLIC PARABOLOID
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