In 1981 the first biography of Xenakis was published in French by Nouritza Matossian. The composer was almost sixty at that time, and already a much discussed and widely honoured figure. Five years later, in 1986, came the English version of the book, which was destined to become the ‘classic’ work on Xenakis.Footnote ¹ After twenty years, during which the literature on Xenakis continued to expand, Matossian published this updated edition – a posthumous tribute to the man who chose her as his biographer.

It is worth mentioning two points at the very beginning – first, that the author is not an academic music scholar and, second, that her biography is an authorized one. As regards the first, Xenakis did not choose a musicologist or a musician to write his biography (and to ‘count’ his notes, as he said). Instead his ‘living biographer’ was to be Matossian, a writer and actress (though she does get involved in some descriptive music analysis for specific pieces). Matossian's admiration for Xenakis can be traced back to her student years, when she was captivated by a performance of his music at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.Footnote ² Given that other composers had not treated Xenakis sympathetically in the initial stages of his career, it is possible that he may have been unwilling to trust the discussion of his music to professional musicians and musicologists. The following remarks, penned by Xenakis on hearing that a paper he had submitted to a journal was due to be reviewed by other referees, are indicative of his attitude:

While it is possible therefore that Xenakis had similar reservations when it came to the writing of his biography, the author herself claims that Xenakis's choice was based on three considerations: her background in philosophy, her good command of the Greek language, and her love of his music.Footnote ³

The fact that this book is an official biography gives rise to certain expectations: first, that Xenakis's life and works are likely to be viewed from a highly personal standpoint and, second, that readers will be rewarded with unpublished letters, photographs, and personal reflections. As regards the first of these, Matossian's enthusiasm for her subject is apparent throughout the book and is clearly reflected in some highly subjective and poetic descriptions of Xenakis's music: ‘The unique aspect of Xenakis's composing […] was his highly individual mode of conceptualisation […] backed up by an intellectual virtuosity’ (117); ‘Pithoprakta […] joyfully demonstrates [Xenakis's] capital discovery that music is a medium of thinking’ (119); ‘[The] particular rhythmic scheme refined in Persephassa […] brilliantly epitomizes his ambition to depict the relativity of space and time’ (281). As regards the second expectation, that of unpublished material, Matossian indeed presents the reader with personal and professional letters of Xenakis and photographs from private collections, together with recollections recounted to her in interviews. In many cases this is information that the composer initially considered unworthy of interest but that later turned out to shed light on fundamental details of his biography.

Matossian's monograph succinctly discusses various aspects of Xenakis's life and music, covering architecture, philosophy, and science. It consists of twelve chapters with the following additions in the 2005 edition: a one-page preface written by Xenakis, an essay (‘Artisan of Nature’), a postscript on his significance, an extract from an interview with the composer in 1990 (‘Of Being and Necessity’), an afterword (‘Visible and Invisible Universes’) providing a survey of his later years up until his death, and a memorial tribute (‘A Man to Melt the Icecaps’).

The first two chapters (‘In Childhood and Resistance’ and ‘Awakening in Paris’) provide a useful overview of Xenakis's early life in both Athens and Paris, covering his upbringing, his education, and the first steps in his collaboration with the distinguished architect Le Corbusier. Readers are given detailed biographical material about his schooling and his first encounter with various subjects of study (ancient Greek literature, mathematics, natural sciences) that he later incorporated into his work. Matossian provides a synoptic account of the political situation in Athens during the Second World War, exploring Xenakis's political activism and the circumstances that led to a lifelong facial disfigurement and the loss of his left eye. His encounter with Le Corbusier in Paris, after he fled Greece in 1947, is presented as ‘an extraordinary stroke of luck’ (44).

The third chapter, entitled ‘The Eruptive Unconscious’, justifably focuses exclusively on Xenakis's experience as an architect, stressing how the commonalities of form, structure, and construction between music and architecture and his extensive knowledge of both fields provided the basic materials of his creativity. This parallelism leads on naturally to a consideration of the first ‘heretical’ composition that was to make him famous, Metastaseis (1956), which is based on massive glissandos whose curves follow the same ratios as those that determined the design of the Philips Pavilion. The author returns to Xenakis's professional life as an architect in her fifth and sixth chapters, where she makes extensive reference to the historical background of the pavilion's construction and gives a detailed account of Xenakis's parting with Le Corbusier. These chapters might have worked better had they been grouped together to achieve a more fluid narration of Xenakis's architectural phase. Matossian's intention is clearly to take the composer's side in her discussion of what she calls the ‘inevitable head-on collision’ (141) between these two powerful personalities.

Chapters four and seven are concerned with Xenakis's key concept of stochastic music and the formalizing aspects of it (again these two chapters might have been better combined). Matossian mainly discusses the philosophy behind Xenakis's method, as well as his first reactions against serialism. Her chief concerns are to give a comprehensive overview of the thesis behind Xenakis's new system, and to introduce to a broader readership a topic whose technical complexity has at times proved forbidding to musicologists. As Matossian writes, through stochastic music Xenakis was to ‘adopt an enquiring view’ and discover a ‘fruitful and a genuinely radical path’ (119). Her view is indeed justified, since Xenakis managed to look beyond serialism and put forward a method that enabled him to explore the concept of sound from another perspective – in terms of scales (sieve theory), structure (arborescences), melodic contours (random walks), and transformations (group theory).

Matossian explicitly recognises Xenakis's status in contemporary music, but she chooses not to touch upon issues that might put into question the application of his theories in specific musical works. The polyphonic technique of ‘arborescences’ contradicts his own views regarding the imperceptibility of serial polyphony, since the resulting sound of his music can be as imperceptible as serial combinations (consider, for instance, the pitch sets in the piano piece Herma). Matossian's description of Herma in the seventh chapter gives an accessible summary of its complex compositional method. Aki Takahashi's admitted excitement about the piece matches her own enthusiastic conclusion that ‘Herma is a masterpiece of the modern piano repertoire’ (200), but without drawing attention to its idiosyncratic nature from a performance perspective.

Xenakis's life in the 1960s is discussed in chapter eight, whose title is taken from Parmenides' philosophical texts (‘The Way of Truth’ and ‘The Way of Seeming’), and also in chapter nine (‘Symmetry Under Cover’). Here Matossian details Xenakis's years in Berlin following his nomination as composer-in-residence, and examines his philosophical reflections on ancient Greek thought. She writes that the composer ‘accepted without question the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers’ (218). However, aside from those pieces that employed the Fibonacci series, the mathematics of number is of far less significance in Xenakis's output as a whole than the abstract mathematics of symbolic logic.

Chapter nine is primarily concerned with the discussion of Nomos Alpha, a piece based on the theory of ‘sieves’, of whose formalistic function Matossian provides an apprehensible musical analysis. Chapter ten looks at Xenakis's ‘total theatre’ and begins with the observation that his vocal works reveal a ‘remarkable difference in attitude to composing with and without classical texts for the voice’ (244). This is surely an accurate and valuable observation if we believe that in his vocal music Xenakis's mathematical thinking is pushed aside and in its place ‘humanistic’ aspects come to the fore. In her discussion Matossian gives particular emphasis to his music for Aeschylus's Oresteia (1966) and to the phonemic Nuits (1967), both of which belong to the canon of Xenakis's most significant music, alongside his instrumental works.

The notion of ‘abstraction’ – a huge topic – is briefly touched upon by Matossian, who assembles various statements concerning the issue. Initially she writes that, through the use of invented or ancient phonemes in Nuits, Xenakis ‘liberated [the voice] from its social functions’ (254), while in a subsequent paragraph we read that ‘no vocal work can be entirely stripped of social associations’. Towards the end of the chapter the author then states that ‘after hearing Nuits the conclusion might reasonably have been drawn that it marked a neat historical progression towards abstraction’ (256). Xenakis was almost obsessed with the idea of abstract art, but even in Nuits (a piece based on abstract phonemes) a statement of the composer's political concerns is included in the foreword to the score. On the whole Xenakis's music was not as abstract as he wanted it to be, especially towards the end of his life, when several works explicitly refer to the subject of death. The agony of his youth, of which some hear a reflection in the shrieking glissandos of his works from the 1950s, generates an ultimately personal, musical landscape, despite the composer's own attempts to deny any emotional dimension in his music.

Matossian dedicates the entire eleventh chapter to Xenakis's ‘Polytopes’, a challenging series of sound-and-light projects, each of which bears the name of the city in which it was installed (Polytope de Cluny, de Montreal, de Mycenae, etc.). The author gives a useful overview of these works, and further critical exploration would probably require significant additional space. The book concludes with the chapter ‘Branching Out’, which examines Xenakis's musical output in the 1970s and contains brief individual references to pieces such as Synaphai (1969), Persephassa (1969), Cendrées (1973), and his UPIC program. There is much ground to cover in this decade, and as a result its treatment in a single chapter is rather too compact to allow readers to gain an adequate insight into these busy years.

Matossian's book comprises a brief tour of Xenakis's turbulent life and intellect, and is undoubtedly a useful tool for music students and scholars. Most researchers take Xenakis's mathematical thinking as their starting point in their exploration of his musical thought. In this respect Matossian was probably the first writer to look at his life from a different perspective, forging interdisciplinary relationships along the way. In the preface she writes that her aim was to write a critical study and to give a fair portrait of Xenakis. However, throughout the text an excess of enthusiasm is present, most obviously in the frequently hagiographical style of writing, and readers should be cautious for this reason. Finally, one could ask why Matossian chose to update her original biography in this manner, mostly with archival material and minor additions to the text (extracts from interviews and an essay of hers), rather than to write a fully revised version of Xenakis's life, with more on the very different emphases of his final years. Although she indicates that a revised edition is planned for the future, one might naturally have expected the present volume to have been the edition to undergo serious revision, given the twenty years that have elapsed since it was first published and the death of the composer in the meantime. The book concludes with a list of Xenakis's compositions and architectural projects, an index of names (though a subject index would be a valuable addition), and a bibliographical section with an emphasis on books and articles written by the composer.

We still await the publication of a full-length biographical work on Xenakis's life and music, critically evaluated and restructured, incorporating fuller coverage of his last years and drawing connections between performance issues and the relationship he had with his regular musicians.