Xenakis, Iannis

Xenakis, Iannis

(born May 29, 1922, Braila, Rom.—died Feb. 4, 2001, Paris, France) Romanian-born Greek-French composer. His Greek family returned to Greece in 1932, and he studied engineering. A wartime resistance fighter, he was forced to flee Greece in 1947 when he was denounced as a communist. He worked closely with the architect Le Corbusier (1947–59), while studying composition with Olivier Messiaen and others. Interested in expressing mathematical structures in music, he used the term “stochastic music” to refer to situations in which the number of elements precludes prediction of what each element will do but the overall behaviour of the group is determinate (see stochastic process). He often based his compositions on standard concepts of mathematics and physics, such as the Fibonacci numbers (Metastasis, 1954), the Boltzmann constant (Pithoprakta, 1956), and Markov chains (Analogique A and Analogique B, 1958–59).