Xenakis and Romanian Music: An Unspoken Relation

Abstract

Xenakis’ music can be related to an ancient cultural background composed of Thracian, Byzantine, and oriental elements, shared by Greece, Romania, and other South-East European countries. A central element of this background is mythical thinking as defined by Mircea Eliade: a forma mentis involving a particular relation to the sacred, the coexistence of the archaic and the modern, and the attachment to archetypes. Mythical thinking accounts for the affinities existing between Xenakis and Romanian composers like Niculescu, Olah, and Rădulescu, which concern specific aspects such as heterophony, modalism, and spectralism. However, Xenakis’ Romanian roots are unassumed and unspoken as they belong to the unconscious and the repressed. They nevertheless occasionally emerge precisely as manifestations of a return of the repressed