ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Iannis Xenakis’s scientific and intellectual environment in the mid-1950s, the period when he began using probabilistic principles as compositional tools. Following contact with several major figures of information theory (Abraham Moles, Werner Meyer-Eppler, and Gerold Ungeheuer), notably at Gravesano where Hermann Scherchen invited him as early as 1955, as well as at Pierre Schaeffer’s GRMC in Paris, Xenakis showed great interest for this new interdisciplinary movement. Research in Xenakis’s papers, which are abundant for this period, and comparison with the notes, articles, and reports found in Scherchen’s Gravesaner Blätter and in his papers housed at the Archives of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin offer new insights into the intellectual substrate of Xenakis’s theories and compositional processes at that time.
