KATERINA
GREGOS

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EMΣΤ is pleased to present the first major comprehensive exhibition in Greece of Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), the avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, engineer, mathematician, and one of the most progressive creative thinkers and cultural practitioners of the second half of the 20th century. In the 1950s, Xenakis broke the boundaries of contemporary music and devised a genre of music that is entirely unique. Instantly recognisable despite being in a state of constant reinvention and revolution, his radical music is, in essence, a reference to antiquity, an ode to nature and the elements, a tribute to modernism at its most extreme, and is visionary in its use of technology. Though widely acclaimed internationally, his work has yet to be presented in such an extensive way to date in Greece, and this exhibition represents the most extensive presentation of the work of this avant-garde composer, architect and mathematician, both in Greece and internationally.

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The initiative for the Xenakis exhibition is in line with one of the museum’s missions, which is, among other things, to highlight the work of prominent or even lesser known but significant cultural practitioners of the Greek diaspora.

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Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as the application of game theory, he was – and still remains – a seminal influence on the development of electronic and industrial music, and one of the innovators of multi-media art. He conjoined music with architecture, creating music for pre-existing spaces but also designing spaces for specific music compositions and performances, reconfiguring the classical spatial arrangement of the orchestra. He was also one of the first to deploy computers for musical composition. The exhibition highlights the multi-faceted, multidisciplinary practice of this singular figure – a true polymath – and illuminates the breadth of his prolific oeuvre demonstrating just how far ahead of his time he was, so unprecedented was his vision.

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In 1947, during the Civil War and after receiving his degree in engineering from the Athens Polytechnic, Xenakis fled to Paris as a wanted-man for his resistance activities, only to return 27 years later after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, and receiving an official pardon after nearly 3 decades of self-imposed exile. Until his death in 2001 he composed over 150 works – from vocal, choral and orchestral, to chamber and solo music for piano, strings and percussion – as well as electronic music written on the UPIC, a computerised musical composition tool he devised that could translate graphical images into musical results. Xenakis also left behind a small but seminal architectural oeuvre, produced while working with Le Corbusier at the latter’s studio in Paris in the 1950s. Most emblematic of these is the Philips Pavilion which Le Corbusier charged him with, for the Brussels World’s Fair Expo 1958, with music by Edgar Varèse (his Poème Electronique), while at the entrance to the Pavilion Xenakis’ own composition Concret PH, could be heard. The exhibition includes the original model of the architectural structure.

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