24. Liberated Music. A Loving Testimony

A young man, a young fighter, screams in pain.

The shrapnel has torn his face off.

He falls next to dead fighters, or some seriously wounded, and some survivors.

The young fighter with his wounded face is named Iannis.

Among the survivors, his friend, Manolis.

My father.

It was the last combat of the Lord Byron Company

from the People’s Army of National Liberation,

which fought against the Nazis during the Occupation in Greece

and which continued to fight against the British invader

at the beginning of the Civil War.

An atrocious civil war broke out in December ’44.

And there, on 1 January 1945, it was the last fight of the Lord Byron Company, against the English, and the Greek government that supported them.

The young fighters—they were about thirty or forty of them.

It represents the courage that these young people had—students from Polytechnic, like the young Iannis, or the Faculty of Political Science, like my father.

They were not soldiers; they had no weapons; and yet they had the courage to go into battle—a last battle.

After this shell burst, Vassilis, the commander, a young student too, he tried—with a group—to make his way out, but they were all killed or captured.

Years later, my father often told me this story, about this last battle of Didot Street,

and often referred to his friend, Iannis.

My father’s description of this battle,

he always referred to his friend who had been mortally wounded.

He thought he was dead, Iannis, who fell next to him, his face torn off by the shrapnel.

He told this story often, with his friends, when they talked about the stories of the Resistance. He often talked about this battle of Didot Street.

It was a crucial moment for him.

Afterwards, deportations followed, really very difficult moments.

Their defeat.

At the time, they deeply believed in—that a better world was possible—the ideal of the socialist revolution—that all these young revolutionaries, with deep faith—

all unaware that while they were fighting their battle the world was already divided—

and that Greece was going to belong to the West...

like from a chapter of this period impregnated by the Civil War.

Of course, I didn’t know anything about the story of Iannis Xenakis;

I did not know that it was the same Iannis my father talked about.

And who was a famous composer.

I arrived in Paris. I was eager for new worlds, new experiences, openness, everything that Greece—at that time—could not offer me.

I dedicated myself to music.

I discovered the music of Xenakis—which was love upon first hearing—

I enrolled in his seminar.

And I followed his courses, trying to understand the mechanisms of his music.

On the contrary, he was a very solitary man, even from his students.

So he would turn his back on us; he would write mathematical equations on the blackboard—which nobody understood (or pretended to understand.)

And he would pretend to explain to us.

That’s how his class was conducted.

At a certain point, I started to write my first scores.

I dared to present one of my first works in his class.

And then—little by little—a real master-pupil relationship began to develop in the sense that I wrote pieces and was lucky enough to have them performed.

Xenakis showed himself more and more receptive with regard to my scores, even on pieces that were in the process of being written.

And I also learned by chance that he supported, without telling me anything—

These scores began to be played by important ensembles of the time and in festivals, like Musica.

We sometimes met a little before the course so that he had time to look at a new score.

He didn’t give me advice; he just looked at it, and I don’t think he even expressed an opinion on it. But I felt his moral support.

We used to talk about Greek poets for a long time, our preferences about contemporary poets when we walked out together at the end of the seminar.

And so, thanks to things published in the press,

my father discovered that Iannis Xenakis was indeed that Iannis,

his companion from Didot Street

where he believed he was dead, wounded in the face.

But I was not present at this meeting.

They talked about the details of that battle, they told each other things,

as though it happened yesterday.

And so, my father was very, very moved to have found Iannis

and to share with him things from that time.

and to have the relationship with him that I have already described.

We never said a single word about this meeting:

I knew, he knew, but we never talked about it.

It concerned him and my father.

Of course, I was really surprised by this law of probability that Iannis Xenakis was indeed this Iannis my father knew.

He too, surely, was astonished, but he did not comment on it.

I felt that deep down another quality was beginning to take place between the two of us, but by doing things, as it were.

And… when I was about thirty years old, little by little I began to say to myself

that even if my music was played in festivals, like in Avignon, in Musica

It’s something that put me in a kind of horizon that was drawn by Iannis Xenakis

and it’s something that I couldn’t accept, by my personality.

I decided to end everything, to stop writing music and move on to something else.

at Chaillot, on the invitation of Antoine Vitez … The Seventh Door.

Directing began to gain more and more ground, I decided to turn to the cinema.

with a very deep nostalgia, to find my language, in my light…everything that I feel is my biosphere.

I wrote a letter to Iannis Xenakis telling him the news

that I had decided to give up composition and turn to cinema.

I felt, on his end, that he felt it a bit as a betrayal,

because I didn’t talk to him about all that, about my different interests

that emanated from feeling a little bit in a dead end

by writing music that I characterized as “sub-Xenakis”…

which worked very well for several others

all while doing ‘sub-Xenakis.’ But let’s close this parenthesis.

I told him the news and we left each other, if I may say so, as friends.

And so, it was the moment of separation…

launching my new life,

the fact that the cinema interested me more and more, the fact of having returned to Greece.

That’s it!

We lost touch, no contact. I always listened to his new works with admiration.

I remember the moment when one of my pieces, Stehen, was played in Strasbourg at the same time as Iannis,

At the end of the concert, I told him.

“I’m not the one who’s going to tell you that it’s really a masterpiece.”

“But no, but no, I need your opinion, how you found the work.”

When I played him this music I had the impression that he was getting a little impatient,

that he didn’t appreciate it very much and I said to him:

“I tried to introduce a slower movement in this piece of music.

He answered me with a real: “But maybe it’s not good

I told him: “No, no, no! I admire that but I tried to do something a little different.”

Despite his influence on 20th century music and beyond, he was probably a man who was always

deep inside himself, questioning his art, his evolution, his place.

it was a response to this violence he received, this shrapnel that tore his face off

and that he transformed into a luminous violence, a violence of beauty, a sublime violence.

His violence, which I love so much in his music,

Violence, of the cosmos, of the universe.

It is the violence of feelings, of passions. It is the violence of life…

which is opposed to the petty violence of war.

But all of his music,

we understand at once that it is Xenakis

And which is the the buzz of life, which is the explosion of organic cells of life.

I believe that all great art has the characteristic of sublimation of this part of ourselves:

black, violent, vital, something that takes shape, becomes an artistic gesture—catharsis—

all of that is part of ourselves and we must face it.

Art is there to make of all this something beautiful,

something that gives us courage, to live, to continue to create, to love.

Iannis Xenakis was a human being deeply attached to his principles

which were the principles of his youth and which made him a young revolutionary,

courageous to go without hesitation with the last fighters

to this last battle of Didot Street that they knew in advance would be lost, but he was there.

All his life was this young revolutionary, this young man

who always questioned his art, music, and who always wanted to be ahead of the game,

who wanted to make a step forward,

who wanted to evolve by transgressing and by transforming the universe of sound, art

and the way of perceiving our universe.

I believe that his music is—if I dare say the word truth.

It comes from something lived that has, as with the great writers—

the great ones are strong when they manage to deposit their deep, intimate truth.

The same is true for music, even if the language is different.

I believe that Iannis Xenakis became a great composer,

because from one year to another, from one piece to another,

he deposited his deepest truth, his intimate being.

And this music shines by its inner truth, which is a truth born of love and amorous violence.