Beyond the modern-postmodern cleavage: Xenakis' mythical thinking

“I am a Classical Greek living in the twentieth century”, used to say Xenakis, meaning that he was a man of his epoch who nevertheless remained attached to his mythical roots. In fact, Xenakis’ musical approach is founded on a mythical thinking which tends to deny the notion of time and implicitly that of history. According to it, historical changes do not affect the essential true contained in mythical narratives and expressed in archetypal forms. Modernism and postmodernism thus can be both related to one immemorial substratum. This assumption helps understanding why Xenakis’ music continues to interest various audiences even after the decline of the radical modernism which it was supposed to embody. The Greek mythology along with Pythagoras’, Parmenides’ and Plato’s philosophy inspired Xenakis in various ways. Oresteïa, his highly original version of Aeschylus’ theater, recalls Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Greek tragedy as a synthesis between apollonian and Dionysian trends. Mythical thinking is in fact omnipresent in Xenakis’ musical approach. It allows understanding his demiurgic posture, his manner of conceiving the musical creation as sonic cosmogony, his interest for archetypal morphologies. The harshness of Xenakis’ noise-like sonorities also could be related to the sacred dimension of the mythical thinking. Like Varèse, Scelsi and Messiaen, Xenakis belongs to a particular class of Moderns that one could call “trans-modern”. Their approach transcends the historically determined modernity of the twenty-eighth century. Prophets of a radically new music, they stood apart from the mainstream musical modernism. In their music, age-old archetypes arise beneath the radical modernity of the new languages, new sonic materials and new techniques of composition. This convergence of archaism and modernity finds an astonishing visual equivalent in the art of Brancusi, with whom Xenakis also shares an interest for archetypal essential forms