The New Yorker • An intelligent book.

The Independent • Even those inclined to question this composer’s musicality are likely to be caught up in this account of his participation in the post-war Greek Resistance, his architectural work with Le Corbusier and his struggles to gain a musical technique and hearing. With its many documents and diagrams, this is a revealing contribution to the history of the post-war avant-garde.

Perspectives of New Music • How refreshing, exciting and how rare to find a biographical study that captures the essence of its subject, as if Nouritza Matossian took the cue for her writing style from the composer himself. It presents a penetrating and sensitive examination of one of the most fascinating, creative and controversial figures in music today. Xenakis is a work that has a truly wide range of appeal and would be an asset to any library’s collection on contemporary music.

Le Nouvel Observateur • Very rich in powerful emotions.

Le Monde • A biography accessible to everyone. It’s no small achievement to say that after reading this book no one will ever be able to say again that Xenakis is a cerebral, inhuman artist. The very first account of the composer’s youth, experiences in architecture, early musical career are thoroughly treated. In addition a large number of Xenakis’ compositional techniques are explained in such as way as to make this book an excellent introduction to a universe which suddenly becomes more friendly than it ever seemed before.

Music and Musicians • Nouritza Matossian’s account of the life and music of Xenakis is elegantly written from close personal knowledge and is an ideal introduction to the restless innovations of this brave and isolated pioneer, who emerges as an original many-sided genius.

Harmonie • Not content with analysing in detail certain capital works, she also examines in depth his philosophical and mathematical thinking, his work in architecture and its connections with music. The biography and portrait of the man are of priceless importance. It must be said without hesitation that we have here a book bursting with information – warm, alive and thrilling.

Journal de Génève • Nouritza Matossian has published a study which she only completed after taming the savage inventor of stochastic music. With exceptional craft she integrates her materials into an intelligent analytic biography.At times it reads like a novel!

For my dear parents

Hagop and Satenig Matossian

XENAKIS

Nouritza Matossian

Moufflon publications 2005

(paperback edition)

Armida books 2022

(electronic edition)

Credits

Copyright © Nouritza Matossian 2022

All rights reserved

Electronic editions published in 2022

by Armida Publications Ltd.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the publisher.

For information regarding permission, write to

Armida Publications Ltd, P.O.Box 27717, 2432 Engomi, Nicosia, Cyprus

or email: info@armidapublications.com

Armida Publications is a member of the Independent Publishers Guild (UK),

and a member of the Independent Book Publishers Association (USA)

www.armidabooks.com | Great Literature. One Book At A Time.

(epub) isbn 978-9925-601-15-8

(kindle) isbn 978-9925-601-16-5

----------

Paperback edition published in 2005 by

Moufflon Publications Ltd.

20 Costi Palama

Aspelia Buildings

Apartment E1

1096 Lefkosia

Cyprus

publishing@moufflon.com.cy

www.moufflonpublications.com

(paperback) isbn 9963-642-22-5

Front cover photo (paperback and electronic editions), Iannis Xenakis by Lynn Bundesden in 1981 with kind permission.

Back cover photo (paperback), Nouritza Matossian by Davidé Mosconi, courtesy of Inez Mosconi. Excerpts from Metastaseis, Pithoprakta, Herma, Oresteia and Nomos Alpha are © Copyright 1967 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Excerpts from Syrmos and Evryali are reproduced by permission of Éditions Salabert (BMG). Other images are used with the permission of ADAGP, La Fondation Le Corbusier, Philippe Gontier, Xenakis Archive BnF, the Xenakis Private Archive, and the Matossian Private Archive. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. Please contact the publisher with any corrections.

Xenakis was first published in French by Fayard, Fondation SACEM (1981). First published in English in the UK by Kahn & Averill, London (1986) and in the United States by Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., New York (1986)

Designed and typeset by Toby Macklin (info@cocreate.com.cy)

Cover design by Vahakn Matossian Gehlaar

Printed and bound in Cyprus by Imprinta Ltd.

Iannis Xenakis in his Paris studio, 1997. © Philippe Gontier

Nouritza Matossian’s book

is the fruit of ten years’ collaboration with me. It was first published in 1981, and has become the key work in establishing the different avenues to understanding my work. It is a source book with a rich structure to which scholars invariably refer and has introduced my music to two decades of students, teachers, musicians, both in music and architecture.

Her writing is beautiful and concise. She gives a special flavour and captures the essence of the different subjects: musical analysis, architectural accounts, philosophical discussion, biography. She has a mastery over them and finds connections to illuminate their importance in an intuitive and natural way. Her evaluations are exact, her explanations clear. She has always maintained her own independent perspective giving rise to an interesting dialogue between us.

As an Armenian who grew up in a Cypriot Greek culture, speaking Greek, and a graduate of philosophy, she shares aspects of a cultural background with me.

At first, I believed that my past was not relevant and refused to answer her questions about my childhood and early life. Only after reading her book, I was moved by how she had dealt with my past and linked it with my work. The logic of her thinking is now apparent and I find that her viewpoint is enriching.

I cannot recommend this book too highly. Time has shown that no new book has filled its place in the last seventeen years. It has laid out a master plan for scholarship of my work in different areas. After the first edition, I had asked Nouritza Matossian to write a second volume but she felt it was too soon. I am delighted that she will bring the book up to date. I shall be seeing the new chapters and discussing them with her.

It will be a pleasure to collaborate with Nouritza Matossian again, and I feel sure her new book will be even more stimulating with additional illustrations and photographs which I will be lending her from my collection.

Iannis Xenakis

Paris 1994

Preface to the Second Edition

We cannot know what path ideas will take. — Iannis Xenakis

A few years after the publication of this book in English, I stayed with Iannis and Françoise Xenakis in their Pigalle apartment to lecture in a Colloquium about Xenakis’ work. We were having breakfast by the open window looking across rooftops down to the Opera. It felt like an uninterrupted continuation of the days we had spent together when I was working on the manuscript. He said: Since you wrote your book, something has changed. People no longer seem frightened of me. Before, they’d expected a monster and now it’s the opposite. Hmm, I suppose it’s good. Isn’t it time you wrote Volume 2?

Françoise, my ally in providing personal material for the book and always ready with an illuminating memory or anecdote winked at me from behind red-framed glasses. Now a famous writer, Françoise’ steadying love and many talents had surrounded him with a warm family, independence and freedom to work.

I was busy researching the life of Arshile Gorky, the Armenian artist, and wasn’t thinking of updating my book on Xenakis then. But I’d been struck by the parallels between Xenakis’ and Gorky’s life. Both had lost their mothers in childhood, then their homelands. In exile, each had struggled to overcome their despair by creating a body of brilliant and cathartic music and art to overcome this deep trauma and anger.

I saw Xenakis’ smiling face in the sunlight, his yellow shirt brilliant against the Byzantine blue of the wall behind. I recalled late nights in his studio, the chaos of sketches and scores. It was a challenge as I learnt to acquire the discipline of his habitat. We started in the morning and continued without a lunch break except for a few almonds and raisins until night time. I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice. During long hours of companionable silence, we worked in opposite corners of his studio, he standing composing, me riffling through huge sheets of sketches and graphs, taking notes. We both enjoyed a timeless calm while Paris traffic blared outside. Then came a question from me which would be greeted with a peremptory wave, stony silence or an immediate reply that developed into a three-language conversation on how he’d adapted a Brownian Walk (a mathematical distribution), or quarreled with Le Corbusier, or he’d ask my opinion of his latest work.

I was tested many times. Once he failed to turn up for an appointment. Outside the studio in the Pigalle, down the hill from the Moulin Rouge red light district, I waited in the rain. A terrifying bouncer proffered me an umbrella from a strip joint across the street. At last I gained entry into the old building and stood on the landing for four hours. It was a Zen moment. When he finally showed up he grunted surprise and gave me a set of his studio keys.

I knew instinctively when he needed to be left alone and when to speak to him. He was like my father: direct, unsentimental, economical with words, honest to the bone. The book had taken exactly ten years from start to finish.

Each time I returned from London with newly typed pages, he sat next to me, read them carefully, commented, explained, objected, approved. He was concerned with accuracy, clarity, and took care not to interfere with my evaluations or interpretations. He became my primary interlocutor but a very rigorous and generous one, since he’d agreed to share his precious workspace and silence. Later, he listened, questioned and advised me on important life decisions: marriage, children, how to live.

Fifteen years on from when I’d started, as we drank coffee, looking over the cobbled courtyard, he said: You should not touch it. I was surprised by his insistence. Promise me you will not change a single word. I hadn’t changed my views on his work so I didn’t want to revise it. I think it is still valid. Once a work is done, whether it’s music or writing, you should leave it well alone to live its own life. You have your own way of connecting things, whether it was architecture, or philosophy or music. You had your own perspective and it should not change because a few years have passed.

He smiled. "C’est un roman de gare et j’aime lire les romans de gare" (You made my life into a thriller, that’s my favourite literature). Then he became serious. No, the most important thing is this: you showed you had an independent mind and you were free of me, free of the other composers too.

He had refused to endorse the book on the cover for fear of trespassing on my independence. The simplicity of being with him did not blind me in the early days. As an inexperienced young student, I realised I was confronting one of the most radical thinkers of the century as I tried to convey and interpret his ideas. Mine was a case of ‘where angels fear to tread’. When I started in the early ’70s, he wasn’t famous but his modesty didn’t fool me. On the battlefield of ideas, he treated me as an equal. Nor did his abruptness deceive me. I took it as a sign of his integrity.

The new edition of this book is a homage to Xenakis, and respects his wish that no words be changed in the original text. It is also a response to a growing demand from students, musicians and listeners. For me each year, since his death in 2002, makes him more vital as a presence, a force and ever-growing influence. The fact that the narrative remains in the present tense is a reflection of this. I found it impossible to change it into the past tense. A revised edition is planned for the future.

In retrospect, my aim in writing the first critical study and biography of Xenakis was to set out a ground plan of how the different subjects that interested him – composition, architecture, philosophy, mathematics, logic, computer sciences – meshed to produce his varied, colossal output. I had suspected that there was an essential unity behind the diversity of his thinking and had been determined to find it. Another was to help in understanding his compositional methods, which being so new and original were hard for students to follow.

Lastly, I had hoped to give a fair portrait of a man who was scarcely known, consistently undervalued and misrepresented at the time I was writing. I’d been curious to discover how his dramatic and troubled early life had impacted on his creativity. It was never my intention to give a slavish breakdown of each piece of music, nor did he want that. Rather, I found points of departure – ideas, underlying patterns, groupings and generative models – to classify the works, even to guide in the understanding and appreciation of those which he would compose after the publication of the book. Fortunately, I did this with the active collaboration of Xenakis himself.

At first he was doubtful about the value of including his childhood and war experiences. As time passed, he noticed the response of readers who seemed to understand him better. He began to reintegrate these censored shards of his life, saw their importance in his work and even began to talk about them more freely. A self-imposed barrier had dropped. This growing dialogue with the book surprised and intrigued him. I too felt vindicated in choosing to write the book early in his career.

My concern had been to show that he was not merely a cold technocrat juggling with mathematics. Xenakis’ music struck me as deeply personal and emotional. It raged, protested and tore through him with Dionysian fury. Xenakis had never been interested in psychoanalysis. Perhaps catharsis and eruptions of emotion could only be caught and conveyed by using the cool mediation of probability mathematics and physics. The anger and disappointment of loss and betrayal could be embodied by powerful structures and processes which he adapted from his passion for science. To my mind, he fully succeeded in integrating the personal and instinctive aspects of himself and expressing them artistically.

Xenakis’ music has gained such a strong footing in the 21st century that it fits naturally, as though he were still in his studio today composing. He is not so much an influence as a way of thinking that I, and others like me, absorbed as part of our musical language and the way we listen to music today. He changed the face of music by hacking out his own rugged aesthetic. The growth of digital music and the arts produces a convergence of different disciplines that he foresaw as the mark of humanism in a new era. Today, artists and composers of electronic music and digital arts increasingly perform and honour him as a pioneer.

He said: We can’t know what path ideas will take. It’s useless to impose upon ideas. You are creating something and you have freedom to do it. How it will be used, you cannot foresee.

In this new English edition of Xenakis, the original text has been reprinted. We have also included a letter written by Xenakis pertaining to this publication; an important extract from an extended interview from 1990; the original essay in English, Artisan of Nature from ‘Regards sur Iannis Xenakis’; an important extract from an extended interview in 1990; a personal memoir of journeys and performances from 1985–2001, and a brief discussion of works significant in the trajectory of his life; finally, a short lament for a beloved friend and giant of modern music. This edition was not intended as a comprehensive update, which is foreseen for the future. The book has been redesigned with a new photographic essay, updated lists of works, architecture, and bibliographies.

My warmest thanks to Françoise Xenakis for her friendship over the years and for granting rights to documents and photographs in this edition. I also thank Sharon Kanach, Xenakis’ archivist, expert and writer, for providing materials and unstinted guidance; to Catherine Massip of the Bibliothèque Nationale for reproduction of manuscripts and sketches; to Nelly Querol at Éditions Salabert (BMG) and to Patricia Alia, to Boosey & Hawkes; to Fondation Le Corbusier and many others whose help has been invaluable.

Acknowledgements also to Les Amis de Xenakis, Mâkhi Xenakis, François-Bernard Mâche, Claude Helleu and particularly for the excellent website by Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet and Makis Solomos. This site provides up to date bibliographies, lists of works and other valuable information.

I am grateful to Rolf Gehlhaar for his comments and hand-drawn sketches, Hagop Matossian Gehlhaar for graphs, Vahakn Matossian Gehlhaar for the new book cover design, and to my dear friend Carol Burns for invaluable help, editing and generous support. Thanks to Toby Macklin who designed and edited this book most sensitively, and to Gillon Aitken, my cherished literary agent.

Nouritza Matossian

London, July 2005

XENAKIS

Introduction

One morning in 1971, I received an envelope from Paris addressed in a strange, minuscule lettering, written with the finest architect’s pen. An answer to my request, sent to several composers, for cooperation in granting me interviews and materials for a book. Affirmative. A one-line letter signed ‘Xenakis’. I was pleased by this answer of a man who does not waste words.

Icy silences, defensive replies, the imperious rebuff, were predicted for my first interview. I was to be disappointed. The ogre talked for hours, put his cardigan over my shoulders shivering in his unheated studio, poured whiskey and invited me back. But one look at the files whose contents bore no relation to the titles scribbled on their spines, the shoe-boxes of correspondence and the overflowing wastebaskets, left me in no doubt that I should first have to undertake the work of an archivist in order to gain access to the primary sources I hoped to consult. No-one but Xenakis had written a book about Xenakis. No wonder!

As a graduate of philosophy I was attracted to the pluralism of his approach, the truly catalytic nature of his relationship with science, mathematics, philosophy, morphology, which erupted into music; to the awkwardness which Messiaen was the first to recognise, a musician not like the others, an artist who cannot be fitted into the categories and classifications of orthodox musicology.

As an Armenian who has never lived in her homeland I felt a kinship with a Greek born in Roumania living in Paris who put his heart and mind to work in order to recreate his own land out of thought and music.

Finally as a stranger I did not know that I was facing a man who had courted death and who was enacting, through the demonic intensity of his actions, Dostoevsky’s words applied to another Greek revolutionary, Alexander Panagoulis:

If I could only not die! If life could be returned to me! I would transfer each minute into a century of life; I would not lose a single one and I would keep an account of all those minutes in order not to squander them.

Had I known I should have been terrified, as I did become once I knew. Terrified of wasting one precious minute of his life.

Hermetic he was, especially on personal matters. My first chapter would have to wait until last, nor was I to know its contents until I had finished the rest of the book. As time went by Xenakis began to give me his studio keys, never failing to remind me that I alone among all men and women was granted this privilege. In later years as I spent entire nights sifting through pounds of closely written paper in poor light, repeatedly having to wash the dust off my hands, I would wish that I had never set foot in that place. Françoise regaled me with files of letters, business, and personal and, finally one day, a little wooden box containing her love letters. Mâkhi recounted her childhood, catching her breath at her recklessness in telling all. I knew that this limitless trust could turn against my work as I became increasingly inhibited, not so much afraid of betraying trust but of hurting by inadvertent disclosure or forceful interpretation.

I turned to others for balance, people who had known him in younger days; letters, articles, documents, diaries in Greek, as I pieced together an extraordinary trajectory of meetings, accidents, impulses, reactions to adverse circumstances, a life story which Xenakis at any rate considered unworthy of interest. Astonished at my pursuit of the trivia in his past, sometimes he warned me not to mention certain matters we talked about.

They would not allow me to ignore them. A book about Xenakis alone claimed me. After years of hesitation I decided to write all and handed him my manuscript with trepidation. Only when he read my ‘indiscretions’ in the context of this book did he give me carte blanche and offered more. To bare his soul. No cuts, no objections, and for the first time in his life he authorized the entire story of his childhood, activism in the war, wounding and escape, to be published.

If my account of Xenakis’ participation in Le Corbusier’s atelier differs from the ‘official’ version in Le Corbusier: Œuvre Complète, it has been reconstructed from the documents and plans of the Fondation Le Corbusier. It is timely this story too, treating a period capital to the creative awakening of Xenakis and throwing new light on the enigmatic father of modern architecture and his methods. For, once the dust settles, we will be able to see their roles correctly; Xenakis will be to music what Le Corbusier has become to architecture.

A book about a living composer is necessarily an unfinished book. While I was writing Xenakis was continuing to compose; about five works a year. It had never been my intention to analyse all his compositions. Xenakis had been represented to me as a cardboard figure behind an obscuring screen of numbers and technology. His own writing sometimes contributed to the confusion. I was always relieved to put aside the author and listen to the man explain to me with clarity and patience the beautiful simplicity of his basic approach. Like all great ideas it was disarmingly uncomplicated, capable of charming, of exciting a non-mathematician like myself.

I decided to give equal emphasis to his architectural history as to his musical formation, to his theories as to his œuvre, to his response to ancient Greek literature as to electronic technology. My first task was to flesh out the man, a complete picture, by making a study of the kaleidoscopic talents which elbowed one another in the early years, then settled gradually into the distinctive pattern of today. I selected certain key works which seemed paradigmatic of the bare bones, the conceptual framework which sustains eighty-two works completed – hopeless to deal with them all in a first book about Xenakis. Trying to avoid jargon I discuss these at some length by tracing concepts and ideas familiar to the modern reader from other fields. Unlike other composers Xenakis has not described sharp turns of direction but has built upon a foundation set down at the beginning of his career. A foundation whose elaboration is one of my chief concerns, for I believe that it illuminates all of his compositions, including the most recent ones which I could not discuss in the space of a short book. I hope that I shall be forgiven for trying to simplify certain complex and technical matters in order to render them more accessible to the non-specialist reader and that I have not thereby inflicted too much damage to certain complicated and rich procedures.

This book follows a roughly chronological structure except for Chapter Ten on the theatre and vocal works, and Chapter Eleven on the polytopes, grouped together for ease of reference.

Finally the essence of writing a book about Xenakis was summed up for me by Messiaen in our conversation together:

He is very difficult to define. Firstly he is Greek – there’s nothing to be done about it – that lucidity of spirit, that speed. If you look at the great classical theatre of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, of Euripides, these were prodigiously intelligent people but the subjects were horrible. It is appalling! They are horrendous crimes! There is a certain savageness, and he has a little of it. He has a certain cruelty … yes. Finally what he has done, he has used mathematics, he has used architecture, in order to compose and that has given something which is totally inspired, but is completely ‘outside’. Which belongs only to him. Which no one else could have done! That has an impact, a force. That is a power.

Naturally I thank firstly Iannis Xenakis and then all the friends whose help, encouragement and criticism, I value greatly: Françoise Xenakis, my husband Rolf Gehlhaar, Peter Hulton (Dartington College of Arts), Robin Maconie (Sussex University), Brigitte Schiffer, Ruth Keshishian, Lynn Bundesden, Brigitte Massin, Mâkhi Xenakis.

I am grateful to the following for granting me interviews: Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Maurice Le Roux, Pierre Schaeffer, Ruggiero Andreini.

For use of documents, scores, library resources, I thank Éditions Salabert, Boosey & Hawkes, La Fondation Le Corbusier, CEMAMu and IRCAM.

Nouritza Matossian

London, July 1985

Chapter one | In Childhood and Resistance

I am a classical Greek living in the twentieth century. — Iannis Xenakis

The name has cast the man. Iannis Xenakis means ‘gentle stranger’. For him no territory, no ground is home.

At birth he was delivered by forceps; it will never go easy with him. Iannis Xenakis never surrenders the edge of strangeness either to people or success, wedging it between himself and his family, marking out the green line of his freedom. Discomfort is a primary condition and where it fails to exist he will provoke it.

He inhabits two spaces by choice. The first can be reached by a staircase which he designed; narrow, precipitous, without a balustrade, and built out of closely-set wooden slabs which can only be climbed safely like a ladder – the first clue that this composer is a stylite. It leads to the tiniest room under the roof of his otherwise spacious and luxurious apartment; a narrow bed above which hangs a child’s oil painting of the room by his daughter, upon the bedside table a photograph of his father and daughter, a white bookcase against white walls and on the bare wooden floor a stack of English paperback thrillers to combat nights of insomnia. His second place is up four flights of stairs, a five-minute walk away from the house in the Pigalle. In a large studio with a high ceiling, a ribbon of windows runs across the north wall. Several outsize objects punctuate the space; a huge wooden bell is suspended in mid-air, a string of colossal beads, a climbing rope, a knife dangling from a string – the sword of Damocles to remind him of the passing of time. Metal shelves line the walls, rickety. Books, scores, papers spill out, and against them lean postcards, snap shots, shards of pottery and rocks. On the ground outcrops of boxes, folders, science magazines and letters form islands of disorder, leaving channels and inlets for human beings to navigate through. At the end of the room is an architect’s drawing desk; for hours he stands here immobile, staring through his half-frame spectacles at the paper before him, making tiny marks upon it; drawings, columns of figures, calculations, diagrams serried onto thin pieces of paper spread out all about him. Always at hand is a slide rule, an electronic metronome, a stop-watch and at least one work by Homer or Plato in the original. Here is a roughness and vigour, more characteristic of a carpenter’s workshop or a forge than the well-upholstered study of a middle-aged composer. In this room, chaotic and unswept, Xenakis has squatted since the day he bought it in 1967; most of the objects have not been moved since then, the only concession to comfort in ten years being the addition of some armchairs and a heater.

He dresses in soft cord trousers, open-necked shirt, woollen sweater and soft rubber-soled shoes, for Xenakis is always on the run. He could be mistaken for a physical instructor as he stands tall and broad-chested. His body betrays a permanent state of impatience. People in his presence always appear to placate him or put him at ease as though distracting a precocious child. When they succeed he switches from glassy staccato to warm grainy vowels and sudden volleys of laughter; he begins to surrender more of his body space to his neighbour as he tenderly pours out a glass of wine as though to confound the initial abruptness of granite dignity. Imperious nose and the predatory eye of a bird of prey set into a physiognomy hewn out of an olive-trunk; square-tipped fingers splay out as he mellows into a favourite story of the Samurai returning home, or compares Athenian to Cypriot Greek as he repeats phases with delight; "The Cypriot is much closer to ancient Greek. Much purer. C’est beau ça. C’est archaïque." The famous scar has receded, falling back into the folds and fissures of a natural landscape. The ‘gentle’ is surfacing unchecked.

Only now may he begin to answer questions about his childhood where previously he had responded with the kind of abbreviated generalities which are a sure sign of an unhappy early life. His father, Clearchos Xenakis, was born in 1878 in Braïla, a Roumanian port in the crook of the Danube just before it flows into the Black Sea. Here for centuries the Greeks had shared financial power with the Jewish community. Clearchos’ father had come from Naxos to trade in Soulina and had raised a family of twelve children of whom Clearchos was the eldest. The young man showed an aptitude for abstract subjects, later inherited by his sons, but his own wish to study theology in a famous Greek college of Constantinople was thwarted by family obligations. In order to acquit his responsibility towards the education of his brothers and the dowries of his sisters, he became the agent of a British import-export business, involved himself in shipping, dealt on the stock-market and was soon a prosperous member of the Greek community. Clearchos’ wife, Photini Pavlou, was the daughter of a mill-owner in Braïla whose family originated from the Greek island of Lemnos. She was born in 1895, given a sheltered convent education where she learned several languages and became a proficient pianist. The couple lived in the smart residential district near the public park, with their three sons (Iannis the eldest, Cosmas and Jason) together with servants and governesses. Iannis’ date of birth is usually given as 29 May 1922 although some relatives believe he was born in 1921, for his birth certificate was lost during the war.

Social life for the family fell into the demarcated pattern of their milieu; they exchanged formal visits with other Greek families, spent holidays in the wealthy hotels of the pine-forested Carpathian Mountains or in the Balnearic resort of Mamaia. Sometimes Clearchos’ passion for the opera took the couple to Bayreuth and Paris. For the most part the parents seemed to live alongside the children, not with them, except when the boys were paraded at dinner and on promenade, stiffly attired in tight little velvet suits and carefully groomed to behave in accordance with rigid conventions.

Xenakis’ few memories of his mother associate her with the piano which she loved to play for hours, reading from a large collection of piano literature. When the boy was still only five years old she caught measles during her fourth pregnancy and suddenly the atmosphere in the house became ominous, charged with adult whispers, the comings and goings of doctors and nurses, the obvious distress of his father. One day the boys were told by their grandmother to go upstairs and to kiss their mother good-bye, being careful not to wake her for she was very tired and about to go on a long journey. Only Iannis was old enough to suspect the truth. As he entered