Tommaso Nervegna :: Iannis Xenakis, Notre Dame du Haut

Iannis Xenakis (Ιωάννης Ιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek modernist composer, musical theoretician and architect. He is regarded as an important and influential composer of the twentieth century. His music theory book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition is regarded as a very important, if esoteric, work of 20th century music theory.

“By 1979, he had devised a computer system called UPIC, which could translate graphical images into musical results”, wrote Andrew Hugill in 2008. “Xenakis had originally trained as an architect, so some of his drawings, which he called ‘arborescences’, resembled both organic forms and architectural structures.” These drawings’ various curves and lines that could be interpreted by UPIC as real time instructions for the sound synthesis process. The drawing is, thus, rendered into a composition. Mycenae-Alpha was the first of these pieces he created using UPIC as it was being perfected…