In his short essay, “Xenakis, prophète de l’insensibilité,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera explains that his love for the music of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis comes from its rejection of sentimentality. He praises the ‘soothing objectivity’ in Xenakis’ music as a break from the oppressive predominance of emotion in the European canon. For Milan Kundera, the unconditional vindication of sentimentality as a palliative against the coldness of reason had been exposed at the time as a structure of brutality. Objectivity, cleansed from emotion, became the source of true beauty. Its incarnation was the expression of order and rationality in the music of Iannis Xenakis.

It is one thing for music to be directed by sentimentality to a greater or lesser degree, and quite another that its beauty be founded on insensible and objective rationality. This opposition can be elucidated by an example.

Consider Alban Berg’s expressionist Piano Sonata Op.1 as a counterexample to Xenakis’ “Concret PH.” The sonata’s highly enriched harmonic language sets it apart from the typical B minor piece. At the time of its composition, tonality was the accepted convention for subjective conflicts in music. Berg operates at the limits of this convention. From the first few measures the listener is meant to understand that behind the music there is a voice speaking. It tells a story and expresses something that belongs to the composer. The role of the listener is to uncover this voice and interpret the story it is telling.

Xenakis’ “Concret PH” calls for a completely different attitude from the listener. The piece consists of the altered, distorted sounds of burning charcoal; this is the only “story” behind the music. The listener is not oppressed by what the composer is trying to express. The music is not about telling but about showing. One’s experience of the piece is governed by listening objectively.

A notorious result of Xenakis’s formal approach is his use of what he calls stochastic processes. A stochastic composition gives traditional compositional choices over to a probability framework that randomly produces complex masses of sound. The complexity of the sonic interactions is guided and shaped by the structural sound pillars that Xenakis erects for the composition. In the pieces that are “calculated” in this way, Xenakis’ aesthetic choices can only be seen as very thick brushstrokes. While listening to “Metastaseis”, one can observe a rather simple diagram presenting certain fundamental aspects of the piece, relating to the sound landscape or to the textural density operating in time during the piece. The diagram’s description is clear and illuminating; it shows what is happening globally in the music on a single sheet of paper. On the other hand, by listening to the sounds resulting from the stochastic framework at the local level, one hears how the enormous complexity of the music embodies Xenakis’ rejection of traditional craft and artistry.

The masses of sound in Xenakis’ music (whether they are produced by calculation or not) have inner lives, but they do not, on their own, affect the listener emotionally. Even so, Xenakis does not choose to reject traditional beauty to replace it with expressionist “ugliness.” He does not insist on breaking expressive conventions, but proposes a lack of convention. Qualitative judgment of any individual sound is renounced in the midst of the music’s bulky yet unintended complexity. Large-scale clarity is the only valid parameter for judging the sound events that occur in his compositions. One must objectively listen to the piece to really take it in. There is something genuinely soothing about the objectivity in Xenakis’ music as each piece attempts to construct a sound world of its own. The listener is not required to have knowledge of history, or of the life of the composer, or to share a common background in the conventions of tonality. This is the kind of music where only attention to sound is essential for enjoyment.

Milan Kundera’s article is available, in an Italian translation, in the Columbia Music Library as part of a multi-authored book on Xenakis, edited by Enzo Restagno.

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