Iannis Xenakis: Why was he important?

Iannis Xenakis was considered a unique personality in the international scene of avant-garde music. His works were exceptionally original, due to the radical way in which he dealt with musical material. However, this was almost a prerequisite for a composer of his generation to be considered remarkable: the quintessence of the musical modernism of that time was the pursuit of the new, the unheard. Was Xenakis’s music limited to that alone? This talk will try to show that the contribution of the Greek-French pioneer composer differed not only regarding the degree but also the quality from the modern gestures of his contemporary composers and to show that the musical avant-garde as a whole acquired new dimensions and a new overall form thanks to his works. Giannis Xenakis was a great personality of the 20th century.

Haris Xanthoudakis: Composer and musicologist, he studied music with GA Papaioannou, Michalis Adamis, I. Xenakis (whose postgraduate courses he attended at the Sorbonne) and Pierre Boulez (as a listener in his free lectures at the French Academy). In the field of Music Informatics he worked at the G.R.M., at the I.R.C.A.M. and in C.M.A.Mu. He collaborated with Xenakis in the Installation of the Digital System U.P.I.C. (Polyagogia) in Greece, and was the first to teach its use. He taught Electronic Music at the University of Pau and organized numerous seminars on music technology and information technology in Paris (including the Sorbonne and IRCAM), in Nuremberg, Budapest, Athens (he also conducted the first computer music seminar that was organized by the Technical Chamber of Greece and the Hellenic Association of Contemporary Music) and in Patras.

He taught at the Ionian University, where he served as Vice Rector for two consecutive terms. Today he is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Music Studies of the same university, Secretary of the Board of the Music and Drama Association-Athens Conservatory, Director of the Research and Documentation Center of the same institution and Director of the magazine “Neos Mousikos Ellinomnimon”.