Meta-Xenakis: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis’s Life, Work, and Legacies
About this ebook
This volume evolved out of the multi-modal, international Meta-Xenakis Consortium’s artistic and scholarly events commemorating his centenary. Informative and comprehensive, contributions span subjects including music composition, creative pedagogy, aesthetics, game theory, architecture, and the social and political contexts in which Xenakis operated. The book is organized in eight sections, centered on different facets of Xenakis’s work and reception. It includes a digital archive of audio and visual media from the events staged throughout 2022, as well as computer software.
Bringing into conversation the diverse perspectives and insights of researchers, musicians and artists, this volume serves as a foundational resource for future research on the life and work of Xenakis. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners across a range of disciplines including music, architecture, cybernetics and computation, and the digital arts.
About the author
The American musician Sharon Kanach first went to France to study with Nadia Boulanger. Very quickly, her path crossed that of Iannis Xenakis in 1978 (1922 – 2001), with whom she studied and collaborated closely, especially on his writings (Arts/Sciences: Alloys, Formalized Music, Music and Architecture…). With the publisher Pendragon Press (recently closed) she was the editor of the Xenakis Series, a part of which six books were produced. In 2009, she founded the Xenakis Project of the Americas under the auspices of the Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She is currently co-president of the Centre Iannis Xenakis based at the Université de Rouen Normandie (France), under the auspices of the research lab Groupe de Recherche d’Histoire (GRHis). Between 2013-2023, she was on the Editorial Committee of Circuit, musiques contemporaines. In 2022, under her directorship, the CIX initiated the Meta-Xenakis Consortium to celebrate the centenary of Xenakis’s birth. Sharon Kanach has been promoted to ‘Chevalière de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ by the French Ministry of Culture.
The British composer and music scholar Peter Nelson is Professor Emeritus of Music and Technology at the University of Edinburgh, where he established the electronic and computer music studios and led a research group in music and artificial intelligence. He met Iannis Xenakis in 1986 and became an associate of Xenakis’s computer music studio Les Ateliers UPIC between 1987 and 1991, touring and teaching with the Atelier and composing a number of works for UPIC. Between 1992 and 2022 he was Editor of the international journal Contemporary Music Review, published by Routledge.
