had been in control for the previous decade, collapsed. His return to Athens was steeped in emotion. As his friend Maurice Fleuret wrote in the Nouvel Observateur, Xenakis was surprised to find that many knew his name and became tearful upon seeing him, crossing the street to shake his hand. Movingly, “an elderly lady traced her path through the crowds, touching ever so gently Xenakis’s tragic scar, as though she were caressing an icon.”20 The Polytope de Mycènes (1978) was staged at the foot of Mt. Elias on four successive evenings [PLS. 34–37]. Like Persepolis, it had a mythic component, but it was even more elaborate, involving searchlights and torch-bearing children; herds of belled, light-bedecked goats suddenly let loose; projections on the walls of the ruined citadel; readings from Homer, and performances of several Xenakis works drawn from ancient Greek texts, intoned in archaic dialects. At the dramatic conclusion came a fireworks display, a gush of flame along the citadel, and the children’s-chorus finale from his Oresteïa. A centerpiece was the ten-minute Mycènes Alpha, Xenakis’s first full-scale composition using the UPIC, a digitized “musical drawing board” with stylus that he invented [PL. 64]. It is able to translate drawn shapes directly into electronically generated sound. According to Harley, “the rich, harsh sonorities of Xenakis’s piece matched the savage magic of the landscape.”21 During the 1970s, Xenakis’s vision for his polytopes grew increasingly global. He imagined intercontinental sound-and-light events communicating via radio beams reflected from satellites.22 In 1974, the French government commissioned him to create an on-site spectacle to coincide with the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His more sweeping technological conceptions were scaled down into a Diatope, an architectural framework (portable) some fifty-feet high, composed of steel cables covered by red vinyl, and shaped into three of his signature hyperbolic paraboloids [PL. 38]. The interior had a glass-tile floor
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Maurice Fleuret, “Le Métèque du Monde Entière,” Nouvel Observateur, no. 524 (November 25, 1974). Harley, Xenakis: His Life in Music, 117. Kanach, “Xenakis’ Diatope,” in Xenakis, Music and Architecture, 247 n.4.