Iannis Xenakis: A Moving Father

For several years now, I’ve had this strange, compelling feeling that I had to give life to this new book about my father, which has occupied me in a hidden way for so long. I’m not a musician, musicologist or mathematician; others are and they discuss his work very well from those angles.

Now that I’m a mother, I’d like to try and understand how this little boy, then this young man, built himself up from the successive traumas he experienced throughout the first years of his life, which remain omnipresent in his music. I’d like to share the extraordinary journey I was able to take, both in time and in thought, thanks to the reading of his manuscripts, which reveal how, in the space of a few years, he succeeded in controlling the chaos of his emotions through the elaboration of a new music and architecture. Finally, I’d like to offer this personal testimony, so that Iannis Xenakis, beyond the man preoccupied by inaccessible mathematics, appears as the deeply moving man I knew.

This book is undoubtedly an echo of the one I wrote with Louise Bourgeois on her work, Louise Bourgeois, l’aveugle guidant l’aveugle, in 1998. Another tutelary figure in my life, thanks to her friendship and trust, she enabled me to truly enter my own artistic universe.

Through my father, it is also my own universe that I am questioning today.

Finally, I’m happy to announce that this English version of my book contains archives and documents that have never been presented in any book about my father.