New Review in TEMPO




A few years ago, we contracted with Routledge publishers to issue a book: Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House. The cumbersome title was a result of negotiation over how to assure the maximum number of potential “key words” that could attract search engines. In the following months and years, we learned a bit about book publishing.

We had worked for years on the notion that the multifarious materials we had gathered over four decades could somehow be shape-shifted into a coherent collection of chapters, they forming a book that would be detailed, accurate, informative, and would also provide an intimate window into Xenakis’s ways and capacities as we had experienced them.

Iannis and Françoise came to UC San Diego at our invitation for a festival in his honor in 1990. While they were in Southern California, we drove them out to the land that we had purchased in the Anza-Borrego Desert — a deeply ravined site on which we dreamed of realizing a design that he had offered to us during a dinner we shared with them in their 9, rue Chaptal apartment in Paris in 1984.

When several representative chapters were drafted, we submitted them to our Routledge editor, who in turn sent them to the required external reviewers. A particularly thoughtful remark by one clinched the deal:

This is a very unique proposal of the highest quality on a topic that is greatly underdeveloped: the links between musical, architectural and literary creativity in Xenakis’s work.

We worked for many months completing eight chapters with a multitude of illustrative images: photos, designs, letters … Now, after innumerable proofings, the book exists, and we hope it will be shared.