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  • BBC Music Magazine

    Iannis Xenakis

    Apr 14, 2022 5 minutes
    ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING

    Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in May are: 2-27 May Vaughan Williams* (*month-long focus; see p140)

    ‘You are almost 30, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of ‘You being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.’ Iannis Xenakis came from a very different world to the one he was beginning to call home in 1951, when Messiaen offered him this advice.

    It was not only his origins and early life experiences that set him apart. As Messiaen recognised, Xenakis ‘was not someone like the others’; besides even his ‘superior intelligence … this was a man so much out of the ordinary’. He would become one of the most significant and Italian fascists and German Nazis, then British anti-Marxists.

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