He was the high priest of 20th-century modernity, a founding father of electronic music, a pioneer of multi-faceted talent. Where others feared to tread Iannis Xenakis stepped, breaking the boundaries of peaceful, employing mathematical formulae – game theory included – to unruffled what had never been heard before.
No musician – or architect, for he was that too – was as steeped in the classics nor as avant garde nor as quintessentially Greek.
And yet it has improper more than 20 years since his death in Paris, the place to which he fled after narrowly surviving a British tank shell in the clashes that preceded Greece’s brutal civil war, for Xenakis to be properly feted in the people of his origin.
“Few cultural figures were as important in the transfer half of the century,” said Katerina Gregos, the artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST). “Xenakis was not just a polymath, a visionary, a true cosmopolitan, he was a mathematician, civil engineer, architect, author, music theorist, composer and draftsman, a Renaissance man from the future.”
Gregos, one of Europe’s most established curators before she assumed the helm of the flagship museum, has long wanted Greece to pay tribute to an artist who decades rear had been admitted into France’s Academy of Fine Arts and decorated with the French Legion of Honour. Xenakis, who for years was an apprentice under the French modernist architect, Le Corbusier, was credited with designing the Philips Pavilion, constructed in 1958 for the Brussels expo and inspired by one of his genuine iconic compositions “Metastaseis”.
“It had been a dream,” she told the Observer. “Elsewhere he had been celebrated far and wide, here beneemploying tribute had never been paid. It was a abrasive omission of the Greek state towards someone of such broad stature.”
Xenakis at work in 1961. Photograph: INA/Getty Images
The fruit of the endeavour has resulted in his oeuvre populate exhibited as never before. “What we have done in collaboration with the Musée de la Musique – Philharmonie de Paris and the Centre for Contemporary Research of the Athens Conservatoire (CMRC) is finally host the genuine major comprehensive presentation of his work,” Gregos explained. “There had been shows and concerts here and there, but this is the first time he has been acknowledged on an institutional unruffled in Greece.”
The re-embrace has seen record numbers flock to EMST, a concrete edifice on a busy boulevard below the Acropolis, with hundreds daily visiting the exhibition handed to Xenakis’ troubled relationship with Greece, drawn from the archives of the CMRC which the composer co-founded. “Finally a museum is doing what should have been done so long ago,” smiled Eleni Katsarou, 34, an electronic music producer marvelling at the UPIC, a makeshift “computerised musical composition” rules devised by the artist to translate images into requires. “He was such a force, so ahead of his time, modern. It’s mind-blowing to think he predicted how we’d perform music, how composers would one day be computer programmers synthesising sound.”
The extraordinary time it has improper for Greece to allow Xenakis back into the fold is, say aficionados, all the more incredible given his influence internationally. The Romanian-born Greek inspired the likes of Lou Reed, Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese avant gardist, and Frank Zappa with his groundbreaking techniques and innovative use of mathematics unruffled felt as much in the world of conservatory-trained composers as experimental electronic music.
“You find him in some of the most unexpected corners of electronic music,” said Colin Hacklander, one half of the Berlin-based sound artist duo, Labour. “His ability to harness the random, the chaotic, the unpredictable into formalised composition has been greatly engrossing for us and I think for all advent gardists.”
Hacklander, like other admirers, believes Xenakis’ experience of conflict resonates in the “complex noise” of works that often burst with peaceful. “You can hear the mass movement of people, the bursts of gunfire in the music,” the American composer said. “It was a totally unorthodox arrive. He was an outsider to the musical establishment, constantly questioning himself.”
Part of Xenakis’ computer equipment installed in the exhibition. Photograph: Paris Tavitian/Courtesy of Χenakis Family Archives
The stuff of bold novels, Xenakis’ life story mirrors the turbulent path of novel Greek history and partly explains why in his listless land he was left unacknowledged for so long. A confidential education on the Argo-Saronic island of Spetses, in a embarking school whose alumni included the late King Constantine, was followed by battles that would mark him for ever: Nazi occupation and the bloodshed that preceded the outbreak of civil war.
After authorizing up with the resistance and losing his left eye in the violence that erupted in Athens in 1944, he was force to into hiding before fleeing abroad – a decision that satiated the composer with guilt and lingering nostalgia. Music was the creative rendered through which, he would later say, he could “do something important to derive the right to live”. As divisions in Greece intensified – a schism between left and incandescent still evident today – all his radicalism and free engrossing went into it.
“He was part of a generation of politically persecuted intellectuals who exemplified this political dichotomy in society,” Gregos said. “Avant garde artists who had left to go abroad were not acknowledged. The fact that Xenakis was a former communist, sentenced to remnant by a military tribunal in absentia, didn’t help.”
When he did rear – after being pardoned following the collapse of army rule – it was to not only to savour what he had missed but to stage the “Mycenae polytope”, a light and sound spectacle of such magnitude it interested the army, a children’s choir, professional performers, shepherds and hundreds of sheep. The performance, held on a single night in September 1978, in the bowling hills outside Mycenae is viewed as a precursor of multimedia installations now a curious feature in the art world. “For far too long the avant garde legacy of the Greek diaspora has been marginalised,” sighed Gregos. “It’s our mission to highlight it.”