Iannis Xenakis (b. 1922, Greece) fought in the Greek resistance suffering severe injuries which nearly took his life and left him permanently disfigured. In 1947, fleeing political persecution he fled to France. Although an illegal immigrant, Xenakis found work in Paris as an engineer and architect in Le Corbusier’s architecture studio. There, Xenakis designed the Phillips pavilion for Expo 58. In addition to being a brilliant engineer, mathematician, and architect, Xenakis was also deeply interested in composing music. Upon the advice of Le Corbusier, Xenakis met and studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, who Le Corbusier felt was France’s pre-eminent composer of the day.
Messiaen recalled, “I understood straight away that he was not someone like the others. […] He is of superior intelligence. […] I did something horrible which I should do with no other student, for I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said… No, you are almost thirty, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.”
(Xenakis, Nouritza Matossian, 1986, p48)
Xenakis took this advice to heart utilizing set theory, stochastic processes, and game theory in his works and exploring electronic and computer music techniques.
The title of the work “Dmaathen” means “they were crushed.”
(Music, Society and Imagination in Contemporary France, 1993 by François Bernard Mâche, p.210)