With the aid of electronic computers the composer becomes a sort of pilot ... sailing in the space of sound, across sonic constellations and galaxies ..."
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is one of the most radical and important composers of the twentieth century.
He formulated a theory of stochastic music in the early 1950s, co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958, pioneered the use of computers to compose in 1961 ... As architect, he worked with Le Corbusier and designed the Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair in 1958.
In 1963, he published Musique Formelles, a collection of his articles relating music, architecture, and mathematics. In 1972, he founded CEMAMu (Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales) in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside of Paris. He has composed for a wide range of instrumental ensembles and solos, and his 'polytopes', sound and light spectacles, have been performed in Persepolis in 1971, in Paris in 1972, in Mycénes in 1978, in Paris in 1978.
He is particularly remembered for his pioneering electronic and computer music, and for the use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases in Pithoprakta, aleatory distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, Gaussian distribution in ST/10 and Atrèes, Markovian chains in Analogiques), game theory (in Duel and Stratégie), group theory (Nomos Alpha), and Boolean algebra (in Herma and Eonta), Brownian Movement or Motion (in N'Shima). In keeping with his use of probabilistic theories, many of Xenakis' pieces are, in his own words, "a form of composition which is not the object in itself, but an idea in itself, that is to say, the beginnings of a family of compositions." Unlike most of his contemporaries(i.e. Milton Babbitt, Schoenberg), Xenakis did not want the listener to be aware of the forms and theories used to produce his compositions.
In 1966, Xenakis founded the Centre for Automatic and Mathematical Music in Paris and subsequently set up a similar centre at Indiana University.
In 1962 he published Musique Formelles — later revised, expanded and translated into Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition in 1971 — a collection of essays on his musical ideas and composition techniques