“Athens—an anti-Nazi demonstration–hundreds of thousands of people chanting a slogan which reproduces itself like a gigantic rhythm. Then combat with the enemy. The rhythm bursts into an enormous chaos of sharp sounds; the whistling of bullets; the crackling of machine guns. The sounds begin to disperse. Slowy silence falls back on the town. Taken uniquely from an aural point of view these sound events, made out of a large number of individual sounds, are not separately perceptible… but reunite them again and a new sound is formed which may be perceived in its entirety. It is the same case with the song of the cicadas or the sound of hail or rain, the crashing of waves on the cliffs, the hiss of waves on shingle.”
The early years of Iannis Xenakis’ life bear no trace of the trajectories of most 20th century composers. While many of the great figures of the Western European and American avant-gardes received their undergraduate educations in non-musical disciplines (Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt were mathematicians, Steve Reich studied philosophy at Yale), all grew up with some kind of musical training. All except Xenakis. Indeed, as he would confess much later in life, “I have never been a musician.”
He was born on May 29, 1922 in Braila, Romania, a small industrial city on the Danube River near the border with Ukraine. His father was a Greek merchant firmly entrenched among the shipping magnates who controlled trade up and down the Danube throughout the Balkans in the pre-war period. His early childhood was probably one of both privilege and isolation among a wealthy greek elite who lived a separate existence from the Romanian laborers surrounding them.
When he was five years old, his mother died very suddenly. It’s a trauma he apparently spoke very little of later in life. At ten he was sent to boarding school, where he excelled in mathematics and the sciences, and in 1939 he was admitted to the Athens Polytechnic Institute to study engineering.
This was, of course, a problematic time to begin university. It’s also a problematic period in Xenakis’ biography. The German occupation of Greece, and the heroic resistance movements that sought to repel it, constitute some of the most politically fraught episodes of the Second World War.
Xenakis left University in 1940 to fight alongside the controversial right-wing dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who successfully repelled Mussolini from the Albanian border. A year later, Nazi Germany arrived and overwhelmed the Greek Army. Metaxas was replaced by a puppet dictator loyal to the Nazis. Greek activists responded with a chaotic, bloody struggle that has come to be known as the Greek Resistance
Historically, succesfull guerilla student movements have tended to coalesce around a particular political ideology. Mussolini’s blackshirts launched the Fascist movement in Italy, while countless leftist groups changed the landscape of European Politics throughout the 20th century. The Greek Resistance was a notable exception. Underground groups organized against the Nazis from all sides of the political spectrum—there were patriotic right wing neo-fascists in the countryside, territoraialist pragmatists near the Bulgarian border, and fiercely ideological Communists in Athens.
Xenakis threw himself into the fray by joining the communists, and quickly rose to become a batallion leader. From this we can infer not only that he was fiercely patriotic (hence his backing of the dictator Metaxas), but also that his education had led him towards a broader, more intellectualized political activism. He moved from the far right to the far left in a matter of weeks, and over the next few years abandoned his nationalism for the internationalism of the European Socialist movement.
Aftermath of December, 1944 street fighting in Athens
This got him into even more trouble. The splintering of the Greek resistance into ideologically opposed camps set the stage for a bloody civil war over the power vacuum left by the Germans in 1944. The British, backed by the right-wing nationalists, occupied Athens and saw fierce resistance from the leftists. Ironically, it was after the Nazis had left that Xenakis experienced the fierce battle he describes in the quotation above: He led his batallion in a guerilla attack on the British soldiers guarding the Pantheon, suffering a nearly fatal shrapnel wound that cost him an eye and the left half of his face.
Not your average conservatory education. Xenakis somehow earned his engineering degree in 1946, only to be thrown into prison with a death sentence.
Stay tuned, the saga continues…
