Elitist Pynchon-ites?

[David Morris]

As has been noted by many, architecture has been likened to music also, 
using similar compositional tools.  Intrestingly enough, Xenakis worked in 
Paris as an assitant to one of the greatest-ever modern architects, Le 
Corbusier:

"Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 into a Greek family residing in Braila, 
Romania. The sense of being an `ousider' has remained integral to his 
identity, as the title of a recently published book of interviews signals: 
"il faut être constamment un immigré."Xenakis lost his mother when he was 
five years old, then was sent off to boarding school on the Greek island of 
Spetsai at age ten. He studied civil engineering at the Athens Polytechnic, 
but the German invasion followed by the British occupation drew him into the 
Resistance, activities from which he would end up near fatally wounded, 
losing one eye, then later condemned to death. Forced to escape his country, 
Xenakis ended up in Paris, wanting to study music, but earning a living 
working as an engineering assistant for Le Corbusier.
   His creative and intellectual intensity attracted the attention of both 
the reknowned architect, who delegated architectural projects to him in 
spite of his lack of professional training, and the composer and pedagogue 
Olivier Messiaen, who saw in the music he was struggling to produce in 
isolation an originality deserving of encouragement. Xenakis had his first 
major succès du scandale with the premiere of Metastasis at the 
Donaueschingen Festival in 1955, and by 1960, he was able to devote himself 
entirely to composition."

http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/spec.projects/Xenakisbib.html


>From: "s~Z"
>Xenakis speaks to much more:
>
>"Music always has been, since ancient times, at least, something very close
>to rational thinking and to mathematics. You know that, don't you? For
>instance, the Guido d'Arezzo way of writing music which was already in the
>writing of Byzantine music - after the alphabetical writing of ancient
>times - was a two-dimensional design for the sound: pitch versus time. And
>that was much before Erasmus [Desiderius Erasmus, 1466?-1536] started
>thinking in that way - and also Descartes with analytic geometry - so it is
>a fantastic step to put together two dimensions that have nothing to do
>together - did I say so? Yes, I did say so. They have to do with one 
>another
>a lot; but as a substance, they are absolutely foreign to each other. What
>they have in common is the structure, the mental structure, because they 
>are
>additive groups: both time spans and intervals. So, at that time, music was
>in front of scientific thought or mathematical thought, which became
>important later on."
>
>http://rogerreynolds.com/xenakis1.html

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