Science and music: an interview with Iannis Xenakis

UNESCO Courier, April, 1986

Science and music An interview with Iannis Xenakis Iannis Xenakis, besides being a musician you are also an architect. How do you account for these twin preoccupations?

I am not really an architect in the professional sense of the term. When I worked with Le Corbusier, a good many years ago, I was involved in both activities at once. In particular, I collaborated on the Cite Radieuse residential complex in Marseilles, the Convent of Sainte-Marie-de-La-Tourette in Eveux-sur-l'Arbresle, near Lyons, and the city of Chandigarh in India. And in 1958 I designed the Philips Pavilion at the World's Fair in Brussels. But since then I have been concerned with making music, and occasionally, when the opportunity arises, with architecture.

What is your most recent project?

The plan for an experimental concert hall that I designed with the architect Jean-Louis Veret. It was short-listed for the Cite de la Musique music community centre at La Villette, in Paris, but was not the winning design. This concert hall is entirely different from a conventional one. It is a sort of potato-shape, so as to avoid being circular, which is very bad acoustically. So it has a rounded, oval shape, with walls that bulge slightly. Instead of a fixed floor, there are cubes one metre wide, each of which can accommodate two people: the contours can thus be modified and the levels can be varied by as much as six metres. This makes several combinations possible: groupings in the centre, or several groupings to left and right, or, again, a traditional stage. The instrumental performers can accordingly be placed in the middle, on a platform of cubes, with the audience all around them. But it is also possible to shift the focus away from the centre, or, on the contrary, to keep everything on one side only. Everything is possible. Running around the inside of the walls there is a spiral gallery which can accommodate the audience and also musicians, so as to produce a three-dimensional soundscape. The walls themselves are perforated with panels which can vary in their degree of absorbency to obtain the right degree of reverberation. Moreover, this entire volume can be made to communicate with another, much larger volume, which contains it and which opens outwards, thereby creating a great many new possibilities for performances. But this is not mobile architecture. Mobile architecture never works, because the machinery gets jammed.

Why is there such a link, in your opinion, between these two areas of creative activity, music and architecture?

Because architecture is a three-dimensional space in which we live. Humps and hollows are very important, in sound as well as in the visual sphere. The handling of proportions is essential here. The best architecture has to do not with decoration but with plain proportions and volumes. Architecture is the bare bones. Architecture is something visual. And in the visual sphere there are components which relate to what we call the rational sphere, which is also part of music. Whether we like it or not, there is a bridge between architecture and music. It is based on our mental structures, which are the same in both cases. Composers, for example, have used symmetrical patterns which also exist in architecture. If we want to discover the equal and symmetrical parts of a rectangle, the most informative way of proceeding is to rotate it. There are four directions in which a rectangle can be turned, and no more than four. Such transformations also exist in music: this is what was invented in the melodic field during the Renaissance. You take a melody: (a) you read it upside down; (b) you invert it in relation to the intervals; (c) that which rose towards the upper part of the scale now descends towards the lower, and vice versa. To this you must add (d) the recurrence of the inversion, which was used by the polyphonists of the Renaissance and which also occurs in serial music. In this example, we find the same four transformations carried out in architecture and in music.

Another example is the Philips Pavilion. To design this I used ideas borrowed from the orchestral music that I was composing at the time. I wanted to create changeable spaces, which could be continuously altered by the displacement of a straight line. This produces hyperbolic paraboloids in architecture and masses of glissandos in music.

Can you give any examples from history of such a convergence, or even coincidence, between architectural and musical patterns?

Bartok used the golden section to achieve his harmonies. The golden section is taken from the visual sphere. It is a geometrical proportion, with the additional property that each term is the sum of the previous two terms. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Greek temples, it was used in architecture as a sort of miraculous key to the creation of something beautiful.

But for you this correspondence is fundamental?

Goethe said: "Architecture is frozen music." If we attempt to go further than this literary form of words in order to make a more objective claim, we soon come to mental structures which fall into the group category. The rotation of rectangles or melodies are groups of transformations. And in fact group theory deals with symmetries, down to the infinitely small level of particles--this is the only means whereby particles can be identified.