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Copyright

Cândido Lima

Published On

2024-10-09

Page Range

pp. 483–500

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

29. Iannis Xenakis, Inventor of Music—Composer, Engineer, and Architect

The Voice of the “Inexpressible” and of “Revelation”

  • Cândido Lima (author)
Chapter of: Meta-Xenakis: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis’s Life, Work, and Legacies(pp. 483–500)
Portugal, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and certain specific local personalities, were all crucial to Iannis Xenakis’s career as a composer throughout his life: between 1967 and 1992 and beyond, he received unsurpassed support for not only his creative activities (including financial support for eleven commissions), but also those, less known, geared towards his ideal of a democratization of music/creative pedagogy. In this summarized version of a ninety-page article published in Portuguese by Elisa Lessa, Pedro Maia, and Jaime Reis in Paisagens Sonoras. O Som, a Música e a Arquitetura, Xenakis’s career is seen through this perspective, as well as offering a living testimony (including previously unpublished excerpts of interviews between the author and Xenakis), highlighting some of the affinities between our two very different lives.

Contributors

Cândido Lima

(author)

Cândido Lima is a Portuguese composer, pianist, organist, teacher, chronicler, critic, publicist, essayist, lecturer, and researcher. He studied piano, composition and aesthetics in Lisbon, Porto, and at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne with Xenakis and Michel Guiomar. He obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1983, under Xenakis’s directorship. He studied orchestral conducting with Michel Tabachnik and Gilbert Amy and followed courses in electroacoustics, analysis and piano at the Université de Vincennes. He founded Grupo Musica Nova in 1973. Since the 1960s, Lima has been active in promoting contemporary music in music schools, on public television and radio, as well as in the written press, often including the work of Xenakis, even before their first personal meeting in Darmstadt in 1972. Their friendship was constant from that date until the composer’s passing in 2001. A-MÈR-ES (1978–9), Oceanos (1978–9), Manta (2004), Músicas de Villaiana (2008–9), are some of his diverse and multifaceted works for orchestra, voices, and multimedia, among chamber music, electronic music, computer music, mixed music. Besides his activity as a composer, Lima has written many texts, both published and unpublished.