Xenakis: His Life in Music. By James Harley. pp. xii + 279. (Routledge, New York and London, 2004, £55. ISBN 0-415-97145-4.)

Abstract

Scholarly engagement with the music and writings of Iannis Xenakis is certainly on the increase, which for such a universally attractive personality is understandable if not always expected. Since his creativity involved a wide range of interests and his professional life a wide range of occupations, the scholar pursuing research on him needs equally to be able to deal with a wide range of interdisciplinary questions. Nouritza Matossian’s oft-quoted book Xenakis, published first in French (1981) and later in English (1986), was the first biography, and it also included a discussion of Xenakis’s principal theories. James Harley’s Xenakis: His Life in Music is the most recent monograph on the composer. The author, a Canadian composer and academic, studied aesthetics with Xenakis at the Université de Paris (1985–7). The promising title of the book may mislead the reader into expecting a deep and lengthy discussion of Xenakis’s eventful life and its impact on his compositions. Additionally, the blurb sounds ambitious, claiming that Harley delves deeply into the music while explaining the structures and theories in easy terms. Such a book, discussing in plain language Xenakis’s complicated mathematical theories and how they are applied in his compositions, would be very welcome to scholars without the necessary scientific training to understand Xenakis’s calculations.