AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

(Yan’-nis Ze-na’-kis) 1922–2001 French/Greek composer Xenakis took up the formal study of music late, having lessons with Honegger, Milhaud and Messiaen in Paris in the early 1950s. He developed a technique in which masses of sound were manipulated according to laws of mathematical probability. This can be clearly heard in the accumulation of overlapping string glissandos in Metastasis (1954), ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

and 1960s, including John Cage (1912–92). In computer-generated music, the computer produces musical material within parameters determined by the composer. One of the first computer composers, Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), wrote a computer program, in the FORTRAN programming language, to produce musical scores that could be played by live musicians. More recent examples include the program M ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

(1897–1965), Frederick Delius (1862–1934), Jean Françaix (b. 1912), Bohuslav Martino (1890–1959), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Carl Orff (1895–1982), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), and later, Luciano Berio (1925–2003), Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), Elliott Carter (b. 1908) and György Ligeti (b. 1923). Introduction | Keyboards Instruments | Clavichord | Keyboards ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

clearly drawn from that of Darth Vader. Such recognizability allows Williams to change the mood of a theme without losing its identity. Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Iannis Xenakis | Contemporary | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(‘St Francis of Assisi’, 1983). His learning and non-doctrinaire openness to new musical ideas made him an inspiring teacher. His pupils included Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2010), Iannis Xenakis (b. 1922), Alexander Goehr (b. 1932) and George Benjamin (b. 1960). Recommended Recording: Turangalîla-symphonie, Jeanne & Yvonne Loriod, Orchestre de l’Opéra Bastille, Myung-Whun Chung (Deutsche Grammophon) Introduction ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Contemporary music whose ancestry lies in the Western classical tradition finds itself in a curious position. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that we are not entirely sure what to call it. The label ‘classical’ seems anachronistic, especially when applied to composers who have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the classical tradition. ‘Concert music’ is similarly problematic ...