Supporting music as well as theatrical education since 1871, the Athens Conservatoire is the oldest institution for the performing arts in Greece and has played a significant role in the advancement of music studies in Greece.  The Athens Conservatoire Centre for Research and Documentation (KETOA), was founded in 2016 with the aim of preserving, curating and bringing to the spotlight the valuable archives and library of the Conservatoire.

From June 2023 until January 2024, KETOA is collaborating with EMSΤ (National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens) for the exhibition Iannis Xenakis and Greece, held at EMST from June 1 2023 until January 7, 2024.The exhibition explores the iconic composer’s controversial relationship with his ancestral homeland.

The exhibition “Iannis Xenakis and Greece” draws from the extensive historical archive of and CMRC (Contemporary Music Research Centre), an organization that was founded by Xenakis himself in 1979, along with the composer Stefanos Vassileiadis, the musicologist, teacher and architect-urbanist John G. Papaioannou, and 22 others, now hosted at KETOA. Rare documents and items, including original handwritten letters and texts by Xenakis, articles, music scores, event programmes, photographs, recordings, videos, and various objects, such as the UPIC (the electronic composition system he invented), cast light on his multi-faceted relationship with Greece, testifying to the fact that contemporary, avant-garde music in Greece has a longer and more sophisticated history than is widely believed.

Visitors are able to follow Xenakis as he takes his first steps into the world of music and architecture, and through his letters, gain insight into his thoughts, concerns, and nostalgia for his homeland and his dreams for the future of the arts in Greece. His relationships with prominent figures in the musical milieu of Greece, such as John G. Papaioannou and composer Manos Hatzidakis, who valued and promoted Xenakis’s work during his period of self-exile in France, are set against Greece’s musical and cultural background of the time. Featured prominently are the five “Hellenic Weeks of Contemporary Music”, an initiative for pioneering musical creation that became a context for presenting Xenakis’s work as early as 1966.

The exhibition places particular emphasis on Xenakis’s activities after his return to Greece in 1974, through the presentation of the Mycenae Polytope (1978) and the founding of CMRC (1979). Both are regarded as integral for the realization of his musical and pedagogical vision. Through the archives of the CRMC collection, many items from which are on display for the first time, the exhibition Iannis Xenakis and Greece engenders a new reading of the tumultuous and often contradictory relationship between Xenakis and the cultural and political environment of contemporary Greece.

EMST is also hosting another exhibition on Xenakis - co-produced with Philharmonie de Paris, under the title Iannis Xenakis - Sonic Odysseys. The exhibition focuses on the most important and ground-breaking work of Xenakis’s visual, literary, architectural, and musical output, while illuminating his personal history by contextualizing the composer in his times, and the political and cultural movements that defined him as an artist.

The Athens Conservatoire Centre for Research and Documentation (KETOA)

The material held at KETOA is relevant not just to the history of the Athens Conservatoire itself, but also the history of musical life in Greece and, in some cases, the political history of modern Greece. The research conducted at the Archives aims also at challenging the still dominant perception that art music never actually existed in Greece.

Besides the historical archive of the Conservatoire, other archives and collections that have been donated or granted to KETOA. Among these are: the archive of the Chormouzios-Papaioannou Foundation, which includes the aforementioned archive of the  Contemporary Music Research Centre (CMRC or ΚΣΥΜΕ in Greek) founded by Iannis Xenakis, the Archive - Collection of Stathis Arfanis, the music archive of composer of the Hellenic National School Dionysios Lavragas, and the archive of the great Greek avant-garde composer and thinker Jani Christou. A large part of the material has been classified and digitized and is available to researchers and anyone interested upon consultation. This valuable material, up to now largely unknown and underutilized in research, has fueled numerous exhibitions, lectures and concerts organized by KETOA in recent years.

Since September 2013, the Hellenic Music Research Lab of the Ionian University has undertaken the responsibility of classifying and digitizing the Archive of the Conservatoire, a work still in progress.

Publishing Activity

KETOA has embarked on as series of publishing projects, focused on Greek musical creation, among which is the magazine Neos Mousikos Hellinomnemon. The magazine’s issue 11, which has just been released, includes a research article on Maria Kallas and her studies at the Athens Conservatory, based on the relevant material of the Conservatory's archive, as part of KETOA's activities for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the former student of the Athens Conservatory.

The most important publishing project for promoting musical creation and activity in Greece, is however, the three-volume History of Music in Modern Greece) edited and written by a large team of distinguished scientists and researchers. The edition, tracking the history of Greek music from as early as 1453 going up to the year 2000, is accompanied by six compact discs with unknown or rare recordings of works of classical Greek music. The first volume has already been released and is almost sold out, and the other two are to be released soon.The Centre believes that his edition will decisively change the concept of what Greek music is on an international level, putting it on the map of musical studies where it belongs, among other European countries.

Future Projects

Among the immediate plans of KETOA are the organization of an event in memory of esteemed composer Dionysios Lavragas and his work - on the occasion of the recent grant of his music archive to the Athens Conservatory, as well as a publication for the archive - collection of Stathis Arfanis, who also generously donated his collection to the Athens Conservatory.

KETOA's future plans include the creation of a Greek Music Repository, dedicated to preserving the country’s rich musical heritage. Although in recent years many uncollected works of Greek musical production have been identified, a great number of them remain lost or forgotten. KETOA considers of the utmost importance the effort to collect as many works as possible (scores, recordings, etc.) to be stored and managed in this future Repository. Finally, the creation of a Museum that will house all the treasures kept at KETOA and make them accessible to the general public, is another project that the Centre considers essential.

I.L.

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Jani Christou (Greek:Γιάννης Χρήστου, 9 January 1926 – 8 January 1970) was a Greek avant-garde composer and thinker of music; he was among the most exciting and provocative figures of the twentieth century avant-garde, introducing a body of work of rigorous consistency that integrates philosophical notions and music. His contribution to the sonic world goes beyond the strictly musical innovation in terms of techniques and style. Having been educated under philosophers rather than musicians, Christou manifested a unique attitude towards art, ritualizing musical interpretation and interconnecting music, gesture, movement and choreography in his later works. Incorporating philosophical concepts in modern musical composition, he used musical instruments, vocal, tape sounds, visual effects, and body activity of the performers to produce compositions that grappled with timeless questions.

Although he was only 44 when he died, he is regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation. He was controversial, highly talented, and  he is to this day greatly respected in contemporary music circles, both in Greece and abroad. However, current performances of his music are extremely rare and he remains a “great stranger” for the wider public.

As we read in his mini biography by Michael Sterwart, The life and works of Jani Christou: "he was born in Heliopolis, Egypt, to Eleutherios Christou, a Greek industrialist and chocolate manufacturer and Lilika Tavernari, of Cypriot origin and was educated at the English School in Alexandria. He began composing at an early age and the important Greek pianist Gina Bachauer was among his first teachers.

In 1945 he travelled to England to study formal logic and philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge, under Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. He attained an MA in philosophy, while at the same time he studied music privately with Hans Redlich, the distinguished musicologist and pupil of Alban Berg. In 1949 Christou travelled to Rome, to study orchestration with Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

He also travelled widely in Europe, culminating for a short period in Zurich, where he met and attended lectures in psychology with Carl Jung. Christou's studies in psychology were greatly encouraged by his brother Evanghelos – himself a pupil of Jung – whom Christou considered his spiritual mentor and who exerted a strong influence on his creative thinking. Christou was deeply affected by his brother's death in 1956 as the result of a car accident, and it was Jani who arranged the posthumous publication of Evanghelos's book The Logos of the Soul.

He returned to Alexandria in 1951, and in 1956 he married Theresia Horemi, a remarkable young painter from Chios who supported and assisted Christou in all his artistic and creative aspirations. Christou would compose for long hours at a stretch, and when not actually physically engaged in the act of composing would spend a great deal of time studying in his vast library of books and absorbing subjects from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, theology and comparative religions, history and pre-history through to occultism and art.

Christou was as much a philosopher and metaphysician as he was a composer and it is important to understand that all of his music sprang from his philosophical studies and theories. This is particularly so in the music covering the last ten years of his life, where his compositional techniques are at times transmuted beyond conventional music. In a series of 130 Projects (described by musicologist John Papaioannou as metamusical-ritual works) Christou extends musical syntax to such a degree that the boundaries between music, theatre, choreography and everyday 'life', merge, coexist and sometimes become mutually independent one from the other: Anaparastasis III (The Pianist) for actor and instrumental ensemble and tapes (1968); Anaparastasis I, for baritone and instrumental ensemble (1968) and Enantiodromia are prime examples of this genre of Christou's late music.

Jani Christou died on or the day before his 44th birthday in a car accident a few kilometers outside Athens, Greece; that day the contemporary music world lost one of its most exciting and provocative talents. At the time of his death, his music was being heard at some of the most prestigious international music festivals in the world, and he was also preparing to unveil the most ambitious project of his career - a large scale contemporary opera based on Aeschylus's Oresteia (1967-70).

His untimely death left many projects incomplete, including the Oresteia which would have received its world premiere at the English Bach Festival in London in April 1970, with further performances scheduled for France, Japan, America and Scandinavia. This large scale contemporary opera, a massive stage ritual based on the text by Aeschylus, for actors, singers, dancers, chorus, orchestra, tape and visual effects (in which several of the Anaparastasis of the fifth period would have certainly been incorporated), would have served as a grand summation of Christou's life's work".

The Jani Christou Archive at the Athens Conservatoire

The archive of this great avant-garde composer and thinker of music was transferred to the Athens Conservatoire in 2023 after a donation from his descendants, and is housed at the Athens Conservatoire Centre for Research and Documentation (KETOA).

The Janni Christou Archive will serve an extremely valuable resource for musicologists, researchers, performers, musicians and researchers from a wide field of arts and sciences. It is comprised of:

• More than 1500 manuscripts: notes, typescripts, drafts, ideas (the composer's famous "stimulating ideas"), work diaries, handwritten librettos, philosophical thoughts, notes on his unfinished projects and the Oresteia, but also on the process of creating all his well-known projects, from conception to execution.
• Over 350 different documents of sheet music: full scores, parts, drafts, corrections, prepress proofs, slides and correspondence consisting of 600 letters.
• Approximately 900 press clippings (articles, reviews, interviews, etc.) – most of which were collected and archived by the composer himself – photographs, concert programs from 1950 to the present day, and is supplemented with graduate theses, doctoral theses , academic publications, tributes and publications.
• Finally, the Archive contains all the tapes from the composer's personal studio, with material from recordings of performances to electronic sounds, and from theatrical rehearsals and performances to hand-made loops and interviews.

The Jani Christou Archive has already been digitized by Athens Conservatoire Centre for Research and Documentation (KETOA) and will be available to researchers, musicians and anyone interested, with the aim is to showcase and spread knowledge of the work and thought of this rare musical personality.

I.L.

The post Jani Christou: The avant-garde composer as a philosopher appeared first on Greek News Agenda.