| i am looking for compositions by
| Iannis Xenakis, bought some off Amazon, takes
| a month to arrive, and need some stuff sooner.
|
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Iannis Xenakis (Ιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 Romania - February 4,
2001) was a Greek composer and architect who spent much of his life in
Paris, France.
He was born in Brăila, Romania, and studied architecture and Engineering
in Athens, Greece. Xenakis participated in the Greek Resistance during
World War II and in the first phase of the Greek Civil War as a member
of the students' company Lord Byron of ELAS (Ethnikos Laikos
Apeleftherotikos Stratos, Greek Peoples Liberation Army). He received a
severe face wound which resulted in the loss of eyesight in one eye.
After the war, his involvement in the Greek nationalist movement in
British-occupied Athens led to a death sentence. In 1947 he fled under a
false passport to Paris where he worked with Le Corbusier. While his
assistant, Xenakis designed the Pavillon Philips in Brussels, home of
the première of Edgard Varèse's Poème Électronique at the 1958 Brussels
International Fair. Later, he composed one of his most famous pieces,
"Metastasis," based on the architecture of the Pavilion itself. It
remains one of his biggest masterpieces. Xenakis played in many world
expositions and fairs. He played annually in the Shiraz Art Festival in
Iran.
He studied music composition with Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and
Olivier Messiaen. 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). 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 in the vein
of mathematical music (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.