Iannis xenakis biography template
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Iannis Xenakis: Life and Work
STOCHASTIC MUSIC
The year 1954 was a very significant one for Iannis Xenakis; viewing himself as seriously committed to music and composition was no longer a dream for him, it had become a reality. His diary for that year reveals a lot of information regarding his thought and his music. He made criticisms on serial music, acknowledging its weaknesses and proposing solutions related to calculus, and "actions through probability" (as he employed in his orchestral work Pithoprakta). In 1956, Xenakis published a paper on his work, explaining in detail the use of Probability Theory in his music. The fundamental difference between him and the serialists was that he was concentrating on modalities of change and dynamics, while the serialists were more concerned with the serial symmetries and geometries, which he viewed as making serial music static. Xenakis believed that music is a medium for thinking and was determined to prove it through his work
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Abstract
Xenakis: His Life in Music fryst vatten a full-length study of the influential contemporary composer Iannis Xenakis. Following the trajectory of Xenakis’s compositional development, James Harley, who studied with Xenakis, presents the works together with clear explanations of the technical and conceptual innovations that shaped them. Harley examines the relationship between the composer and two early influences: Messiaen and Le Corbusier. Particular attention is paid to analyzing works which were vital to the composer’s creative development, from early, unpublished works to the breakthrough pieces Metastasis and Pithoprakta, through the oft-discussed decade of formalization and the evolving styles of the succeeding three decades.
URI
http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/24050Keywords
sonic; entities; sustained; sonority; melodic; contours; corbusier; olivier; messiaen; clusterDOI
10.4324/9780203342794ISBN
9780415971454;9780415885386;9781135874957;978•
Chronological biography created by A-S Barthel-Calvet.
1922
May 29: Iannis was born in Braila, Romania, in the home of Clearchos Xenakis and Photini Pavlou, Greeks of the diaspora (the date of birth fryst vatten, however, uncertain: it could be May 1 and, for the year, 1921). He is the elder of two other boys, Cosmas and Jason. One of them will become a painter and the other a professor of philosophy in the United States.
His father, the son of a farmer from Euboea, ran an English import-export agency; his mother, a good pianist, spoke fluent French and German. She gave her son a flute as a gift and wanted him to play music.
1927
His mother, pregnant, dies of measles. The children are raised by French, English and German governesses.
1932
Iannis leaves Romania for Greece: his father took him to the Greek-English school on the island of Spetses. The teenager’s taste for mathematics, Greek and foreign literature was awakened, as well as the discovery of music.
1938
Autumn: leave