{"id":85890,"date":"2023-10-18T12:41:11","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T12:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/?p=85890"},"modified":"2024-02-19T09:13:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T09:13:26","slug":"xenakis-and-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/exhibitions-en\/xenakis-and-greece","title":{"rendered":"XENAKIS AND GREECE"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (\u0395\u039c\u03a3T) is pleased to also present a second exhibition on the composer entitled Iannis Xenakis and Greece<\/em>, which explores the controversial relationship with his ancestral homeland. The exhibition is produced by \u0395\u039c\u03a3\u03a4 in collaboration with the Athens Conservatoire and the Contemporary Music Research Center (CMRC or K\u03a3YME in Greek). Born in Br\u0103ila, Romania, the son of a Greek merchant, Iannis Xenakis was sent with his siblings to the Anargyrios and Korgialenios Boarding School of Spetses, following the death of his mother in 1927. Later, as a student at the Athens Polytechnic, he joined the National Liberation Front (EAM) and took part in the National Resistance. During the \u2018Dekemviana\u2019 or December events in 1944 (clashes between left wing resistance forces and the Greek Government, royalists and their British allies), he was wounded by an English mortar shell losing his left eye. He remained in Greece in semi-hiding before fleeing to France in 1947. Sentenced in absentia first to death and then to life imprisonment, he would only be able to return to Greece in 1974, following the amnesty granted by the then Greek prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis. Maintaining close ties to Greece during his long exile abroad, Xenakis\u2019s work became widely known in the country despite his absence.<\/p>\n

The exhibition Iannis Xenakis and Greece draws from the extensive historical archive of CMRC, an organisation that was founded by Xenakis himself in 1979, along with the composer Stefanos Vassileiadis, the musicologist, teacher and architect-urbanist John G. Papaioannou, and 22 others, which is now hosted at the Athens Conservatoire. Rare documents and items, including original handwritten letters and texts by Xenakis, articles, music scores, event programmes, photographs, recordings, videos, and various objects, such as the UPIC (the electronic composition system he invented), cast light on his multi-faceted relationship with Greece, testifying to the fact that contemporary, avant garde music in Greece has a longer and more sophisticated history than is widely believed.<\/p>\n

Visitors are able to follow Xenakis as he takes his first steps into the world of music and architecture, and through his letters, gain insight into his thoughts, concerns, nostalgia for his homeland and his dreams for the future of the arts in Greece. His relationships with prominent figures in the musical milieu of Greece, such as John G. Papaioannou and composer Manos Hatzidakis, who valued and promoted Xenakis\u2019s work during his period of self-exile in France, are set against Greece\u2019s musical and cultural background of the time. Featured prominently are the five “Hellenic Weeks of Contemporary Music”, an initiative for pioneering musical creation that became a context for presenting Xenakis\u2019s work as early as 1966.<\/p>\n

The exhibition places particular emphasis on Xenakis\u2019s activities after his return to Greece in 1974, through the presentation of the Mycenae Polytope<\/em> (1978) and the founding of CMRC (1979). Both are regarded as integral for the realisation of his musical and pedagogical vision. Through the archives of the CRMC collection, many items from which are on display for the first time, the exhibition Iannis Xenakis and Greece engenders a new reading of the tumultuous and often contradictory relationship between Xenakis and the cultural and political environment of contemporary Greece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (\u0395\u039c\u03a3T) is pleased to also present a second exhibition on the composer entitled Iannis Xenakis and Greece, which explores the controversial relationship with his ancestral homeland. The exhibition is produced by \u0395\u039c\u03a3\u03a4 in collaboration with the Athens Conservatoire and the Contemporary Music Research Center (CMRC or K\u03a3YME in Greek). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":86146,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-exhibition-post.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,34],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85890"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88302,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85890\/revisions\/88302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}