Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis revolutionized post-war music more forcefully than any other 20th-century composer. A Resistance leader in World War II, he escaped from Greece to Paris under sentence of death. He became one of Le Corbusier’s chief architects, and a pioneer of the computer age in music and the arts. Milan Kundera called him ‘the prophet of insensibility’.

Xenakis harnessed chaos theory and invented ‘stochastic music’. He freed the sound spectrum from western scales and based music on natural...