The in situ sound and light installation by the art group ExperiensS, which is a translation of the composer’s famous Polyhedra, is the highlight of the Xenakis Revolution exhibition organized at the Cité de la Musique in Paris on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the most important composers and architects of the 20th century. At intervals of twenty seconds, spots of light on a strict canvas pulsate rhythmically across the ceiling, flickering – sometimes without a visible pattern, and sometimes drawn according to a multidimensional equation – cutting out nebulae and galaxies. Luminous clouds of stardust in tempo parabolic representations.

The undulating sound mass expands and contracts, creating an echo of Xenakis’ “contemplative” music. The sound – eccentric and pure – collides with liquid light, swirls in space and is embedded in the mind of the viewer/listener as a unique audiovisual experience. A tribute to the performance “La Legende d’Eer”, which took place in 1978 in Paris, in the “Diatopo”, an ephemeral structure designed by Xenakis himself, in front of the Center Pompidou.

At the forefront of the most radical modernity, a lover of Greek antiquity and Plato, “born twenty-five centuries later,” as he put it. Versatile and rebellious. Composer, architect, engineer, initiator of electro-acoustic digital music, he challenged the fundamental principles of the major post-war musical movements. He imagined grandiose “Wagnerian” extra-local spectacles. His over 150 works highlight mathematics, using sound masses as the source of inaudible timbres. He introduces probability and set theory into his compositions, using thermodynamics, the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence in a constant search for innovation. Each composition is determined during its execution. Space and time intersect in eternity, creating digital works of art.

Curated by the daughter of Machys Xenakis and Thierry Manija, the exhibition captures the immensity of Xenakis in an excellent museographic study by the architect Jean-Michel Vilmot. Original and archival documents from his private collection, screen projections, objects, photographs, layouts, manuscripts and scores. A sonic whirlwind, wandering with headphones in your ears in search of the cosmic unheard of Xenakis. The curved, slotted space, reminiscent of Machet’s villa, the house he designed for his daughter, the artist and sculptor, and her French husband, the composer François-Bernard Mas, in 1966 on Amorgos, houses objects from his studio. Family photos, sculptures, shells, musical instruments, paintings, a blackboard with mathematical calculations. Books. Engraving from Hokusai’s book The Great Wave. Beaubourg diatopo model.

A Greek by birth, Yannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was born in Braila, Romania. His mother dies early. He grew up in a boarding school in Spetses.

A student in Athens during World War II, a communist, joins the Resistance and the KKE. He participates in the “Decambrian”, where he is seriously wounded by a fragment of an English shell, losing an eye. This experience is imprinted on his face and haunts his work. “For me, the most amazing music is the music of the demonstrations that I heard in Athens,” he says. “The rhythmic swing turned into a chaotic mixture of sounds and screams, wounded and dead, marked by weapons, bursts of bullets, explosions, fireworks-like fireworks from ammunition. This unreal music turned it into a spectacle. I’m still trying to reproduce the sound I heard when the bullet hit my face.”

Fearing exile, he flees to Italy. He is sentenced to death for desertion. Exiled, he arrives in Paris in 1947. While studying civil engineering at NTUA, he worked as an architect for twelve years alongside Le Corbusier, the most important modernist architect. He is involved in the planning of his most iconic projects: the Cité Radieuse residential complex in Marseille and Nantes, the La Tourette monastery, the Santigarh metropolis in India. In 1958 he designed the Philips pavilion for the International Exhibition in Brussels, a turning point in his musical career. Le Corbusier presents the Pavilion as an “electronic poem”. He entrusts Edgar Vares with the music, and Xenakis undertakes – in addition to the architectural composition – the creation of the 2.5-minute Concret PH audio work, which is heard at the entrance and exit. It would become one of the most influential works in electronic music – the first experiment in microstructural composition – it would be a huge success and mark the end of his collaboration with the self-absorbed Le Corbusier.

Inventor of UPIC, the first graphic sound synthesizer, a machine with which you compose music without having any idea about notes and harmonies.

An architect of music, he studies rhythm, symmetry, rotations, different directions, repetitions, volume born in space and time. The design of the rhythmic aspect of the undulating glass panels of La Tourette Abbey is inspired by his explorations of different sound mass densities in his work Metastases.

A student of Olivier Messiaen (leader of the New France musical movement), he experiments with the propagation of sound in space. Several speakers are placed in different places. Musicians in the center and listeners around, or vice versa, often playing in motion. His music builds spaces. “Architecture is frozen music,” said Goethe, and he himself: “Music in motion.” With a multicultural eye, he looked at Africa and Asia. He composed for drums and xylophones. In 1969 “Persephassa” is performed at the ruins of Persepolis in Iran by six percussionists around an audience.

The Polytopes are his most important works. Place-specific multi-dimensional works, extravaganzas of light and sound: from Montreal (1967) and Expo 70 in Osaka to the Shiraz Arts Festival with “Persepolis” in Iran (1971). In 1978 he returned to Greece with The Mycenaean Polytope. There technology meets antiquity and nature. 40,000 spectators watched the earth of Agamemnon shake and shine through military searchlights, and six thousand lit candles dangle from the horns of three thousand goats that climbed the mountain. Flash electronics, lasers, dispersion and volume, orchestra/audience movement, architecture and music create interactive art that immerses you in an ocean of sounds and psychedelic emotions.

Xenakis was the first to use digital instruments and a computer to compose music. Inventor of UPIC, the first graphic sound synthesizer, a machine with which you compose music without having any idea about notes and harmonies. Your drawings turn into music.

Art and science are intertwined in his work. He doesn’t write melodies, he chooses sounds. Uses mathematical calculations and explores rhythms. He rejects the generally accepted musical vocabulary, invents his own, uses graph paper. His estimates are nothing more than blueprints. Clouds of algae in the ocean. Lines intersecting in space and time, multiplications and divisions, scales soaring in ecstasy. Graphics filled with colors, shades of blue and green, yellow backgrounds and hints of fuchsia. His “musical schemes”, like his architectural plans, are works of art.

Companion to the urban concerns of his time, he is looking for a utopia. He designs “Space Cities” that go beyond the clouds and bring man into contact with the sky and the stars. He looks into space and talks about climate-controlled cities, ultra-high-speed vertical communications and innovative recycling systems back in 1965.

In May 1968, a poster read: “Down with Gounod! Long live Xenakis!” Down with opera and solfeggio, long live the revolution against tradition. His music still seems like a piece of science fiction. The synchronization of light and sound shaped her vocabulary.

He equally loved nature and technology. Mediterranean Sea, the sound of the sea, sky and sun. Corsica. Fishing and kayaking. He loved the waves. Their image and sound. He plunged into them ecstatically. Omega is his latest work. He asked that his ashes be scattered over the sea.