This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek stuck in the contemporary world. His instrumental music at times suggests an alien species trying to communicate with us through our musical instruments, his electronic music a distressed animal on the receiving end of amateur
THE MUSICAL AVANT-GARDE in the 1970s constitutes a complex mosaic whose integrative logic would seem to support a multitude of propositions, each with its own unique dialectical thrust. Today, when a composer’s sensibility can be dramatically influenced by such diverse musics as those of John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, North Indian improvisation or African drumming, to trace the various and variable ties among the many fragments of this mosaic becomes a difficult task indeed. This resembles the situation around the turn of the century, when the world of music exploded into a pluralistic universe comprising a myriad of compositional premises. Then