24. Liberated Music.

What runs through all the music of Iannis Xenakis is violence. An extreme violence which has its source in a crucial moment of the civil war which followed the end of the German occupation in Greece and in which the composer participated unwillingly: the last battle fought by the ‘Lord Byron’ unit of the students of Athens, an integral part of the Popular Army of National Liberation. This famous battle of Didotou Street was told to me many times by my militant father who always spoke with emotion about his comrade Iannis, ‘mortally wounded in the face’ during the operations. The laws of probability and the deep mysticism of life made that, when I arrived in Paris at the age of 18, I was immediately attracted by Xenakis's music (making no connection with my father's narration), whose courses I followed at the Sorbonne and under whose influence I wrote my first musical pieces before turning to cinema. In the meantime, I had discovered, by chance of circumstances, that Iannis Xenakis was this companion of my father who was wounded in the face (and fortunately quite alive!). I had understood that the superb violence of his music was only a great gesture of liberation where love and beauty transcend hate.