Le Corbusier; Iannis Xenakis; Edgard Varèse

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)
b. 6.10.1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, died 27.8.1965 in Cap-Martin. Trained as an engraver, painter and goldsmeith from 1900, and then as an architect at the École d'Art in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Modern architect who developed new structural forms with the aid of reinforced concrete.

Iannis Xenakis
b. 1.5.1922 in Braila, Romania, died 4.2.2001 in Paris; French engineer and composer of Greek origin. Xenakis graduated in engineering in Athens and worked in Paris as an architect for Le Corbusier after the Second World War. He went on to study composition under Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. He caused a stir at the 1954 Donaueschingen music festival with his mathematically based piece «Metastasis». His subsequent work is based on the idea of «stochastic music», whose structures can be described as sound masses moving in time and space.

Edgard Varèse
b. 22.12.1883 or 24.12.1885 in Paris, died 6.11.1965 in New York; French composer. Varèse first studied engineering, then music at the Schola Cantorum and the Paris Conservatoire. He emigrated to the United States in 1915 and caused a stir in 1923 with «Hyperprism» and later with «Ionisation» because his music ran counter to the traditional view of melodic and harmonic relations (for reasons including the lavish use of percussion instruments and noise generators like a siren, for example). Varèse opened up the concept of music by treating it as «son organisé». The sounds in his music are composed according to criteria like density and direction of movement.