Xenakis - Back to the Roots : Philological Approaches to Electroacoustic Music

The electroacoustic works of the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) captivate with their radical ideas, sounds and compositional models. They were often conceived as multimedia works for specific locations and architectures. The richness of the approaches and processes gave rise to an extensive body of sources. Therefore, this volume is particularly dedicated to a philological approach, combining contributions by companions of Xenakis and renowned experts in Xenakis research with studies in philology of electroacoustic music. It concludes with a roundtable discussion of the performance of these electroacoustic works, thus linking the philological questions back to musical practice.

Reinhold Friedl studied piano, composition, musicology and mathematics. He received his PhD at Goldsmiths University London and is guest professor at the Katarina Gurska Institute in Madrid. Musically, he is directing the avantgarde ensemble »zeitkratzer« and released over a hundred CDs and LPs as a composer and performer. He received numerous prizes and fellowships as well as commissions by the French state, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, and BBC London, among others.

Thomas Grill works as a composer and performer of electroacoustic music, as a media artist, technologist and researcher of sound. He earned a doctorate in composition and music theory at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz and researched as a Post-Doc at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in the domain of machine listening and learning. He is currently heading the certificate program in electroacoustic and experimental music and co-heading the Artistic Research Center at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien.

Nikolaus Urbanek, born in 1976, is a professor for musicology and currently serves as Dean of Research Studies at mdw - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien. He completed his doctorate in 2008 with a music-philosophical thesis on Adorno's Beethoven Fragments at Universität Wien. His research focuses on philosophy of music, music historiography, and theory of musical writing.

Michelle Ziegler, born in 1981, is a research associate (postdoc) at the chair of history of technology at ETH Zürich and a lecturer in Basel, Bern and Vienna. She pursued inquiries into the materiality of notation in the DACH project »Writing Music« at the Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel. She has also published numerous articles as a music journalist for Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Her research areas include music of the 20th and 21st centuries, music and technology, archival practices and digital historiography.