Xenakis

This is no longer the uptight atmosphere where John Adams was angrily booed and where people noisily walked out as Zubin Mehta premiered major new works by Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis.

“When you are learning Xenakis, or anything,” he said, “when the composer says ‘wood block,’ the variety of sounds that can come from that instrument is vast.’”

It’s extremely rare for someone to have a first outbreak of psychosis at age 40, according to Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general.

At that festival, Mr. Black performed Iannis Xenakis’s “Theraps” — an extraordinarily difficult piece that traverses five octaves through uncanny glissandos — and Tom Johnson’s “Failing,” which asks the performer to play increasingly complex passages on the bass while at the same time reading aloud a humorous text that self-consciously describes the possibility of failure.

Gen. Stephen Xenakis, the former head of the Southeast Army Medical Command, who at the time was affiliated with Physicians for Human Rights, said he advised detainee lawyers about challenging the practice.