10. Jean-Étienne Marie and Iannis Xenakis

Jean-Étienne Marie, French composer and artistic engineer at Radiodiffusion Télévision Française from 1949 to 1975, was in contact with the most prominent composers of his time, among whom Iannis Xenakis. In this context, Marie participated as a technical engineer in the Greek composer’s works Oresteïa and Bohor. Later, Marie took on the task of delving theoretically into Xenakis’s compositional process, thanks to his status as an artistic engineer, defined as: ‘the one who makes sound shots, creating the necessary balance for a good diffusion of a concert. But he is also a musician, who has a musical, scientific, historical, and musicological culture’. Marie considers Xenakis’s music to be ‘a music beyond art, whose evolution in time is closely adapted to the curve of a meditation’. At the time, the musical literature available on composers such as Xenakis was non-existent. However, Marie analyzed and studied the Greek’s music, becoming the spokesman for this new music to make it known both to the knowledgeable public and to neophytes eager to understand these new artistic expressions. His experience as a music promoter since the founding of the Cultural Circle of the Conservatory in Paris in 1947 made Marie a respected scholar of contemporary music. The aim of this chapter is to approach Marie’s vision from the perspective of sound realization, that is, to describe the technical challenges imposed by these works, and their value as innovative works in the field of composition. On the other hand, I address how the study of Xenakis’s music allows Marie to approach and understand the compositional theory of meta-music; that is Xenakis’s sieves, a theory that the former compares with the microtonal theory of composers such as Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Alois Haba and Julian Carrillo.