Classical Receptions Journal Vol 00. Iss. 0 (2021) pp.

1–19

The Music Of Iannis Xenakis’

Estranged Kassandra
Emily Pillinger*

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Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was a radically innovative composer. Violently
persecuted for his leftist activism in the Greek Civil War that followed the
Second World War, he fled Greece to live the rest of his life in Paris. One of the
most explicit expressions of his resultant feelings of trauma, guilt, and
displacement can be found in the vocal piece he called Kassandra (1987). This
demanding work requires its two performers to enact and explore the alienation
experienced by the prophet Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Xenakis’
Kassandra is defined by a symbiotic relationship between percussionist and
vocalist, by a simultaneously controlled and improvisatory score based on
extracts from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and by a striking use of the baritone
singer’s falsetto as well as his chest voice. These features of the piece mark out
Cassandra as ‘other’ in her origins, her sex, and her language, while also hinting
that her characteristics are not entirely foreign, but are in fact understood or
even shared by the very communities that initially seemed to exclude her.

Over the course of his lifetime the architect, mathematician, and composer Iannis
Xenakis produced a remarkable array of works that straddle the visual, theoretical,
and sonic domains. Though Xenakis is known primarily as a composer of music, his
oeuvre is challenging because it transcends any single discipline or artform; his intel-
lectualism and widely disparate skills led him to conjoin fields in ways that defy cat-
egorization. He developed site-specific installations across the globe, from Canada to
Iran, which harnessed architecture, sound, and light. He became most famous — no-
torious even — for using mathematics to underpin his practice of music composition,
and he was a pioneer in electronic and computerized music. But alongside his futur-
istic and groundbreaking artistic innovations Xenakis also regularly harked back to
ancient Greece, displaying a profound cultural nostalgia. Indeed, Xenakis implied
that his interest in both music and mathematics was connected to his own sense of

*Email: emily.pillinger@kcl.ac.uk
Emily Pillinger is Senior Lecturer in Classics at King’s College London. Her research
interests range across Latin and Greek poetry and poetics, focusing on themes that describe
the power and fragility of both spoken and written communications: she has written on
poetry associated with the utterance of prophecies and curses, with letter-writing, and with
inscribed monuments. She recently published the monograph Cassandra and the Poetics of
Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature (Cambridge 2019). She also works on the reception
of the ancient world, and particularly on the influence of Graeco-Roman myth and history
in music composed after the Second World War.
ß The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by/ 4. 0/ ), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:10.1093/crj/clab005
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

displacement in time as much as space. He is quoted as having said, ‘I felt I was born
too late — I had missed two millennia . . . But of course there was music and there
were the natural sciences. They were the link between ancient times and the present,
because both had been an organic part of ancient thinking’.1 Titles such as Evryali,
Medea, Psappha, and Palimpsest abound in Xenakis’ oeuvre, though not all perform
an obvious or easily identified act of reception.2 It is through some of the composer’s

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more explicit engagements with ancient Greek texts, placed in the context of his own
biography and the broader social and historical conditions that followed the Second
World War, that it becomes possible to make sense of the tension between Xenakis’
forward-looking iconoclasm and his compulsive evocation of the past. This article
focuses on how these contradictory forces operate in Xenakis’ short vocal work
Kassandra (1987), which is based closely on the Cassandra scene in
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.
Xenakis’ feelings about ancient Greece — a time and place with which he strongly
identified but which he could never visit — were doubtless informed by events in his
life that left him dislocated from his own home. Xenakis began life as the outsider
implied by his name, born in 1922 to a Greek family that had long been settled in
Romania.3 When he was 10 he was sent to boarding school on the Aegean island of
Spetzes, where he claimed to have been mocked for his odd Greek accent. After he
finished high school he moved to Athens to study civil engineering at the National
Technical University of Athens, but at that point the Second World War broke out
and Xenakis joined the communist underground resistance. With universities
scarcely operative, he scrambled through some semblance of study over the next few
years, while committing most of his energies to resisting both the occupying forces
and the Greek royalist militias. But it was the disastrous events during and after the
end of the war that triggered Xenakis’ ostracism from Greece. In 1944 Xenakis was
critically injured by a British mortar explosion as he was resisting the British-backed
efforts to restore the Greek monarchy — part of the early skirmishing that would ul-
timately develop into the Greek Civil War. He lost an eye, and only narrowly sur-
vived after making it through twelve hours without emergency treatment, and then
undergoing multiple operations to reconstruct his face. Xenakis struggled on in
Athens for just long enough to complete his engineering degree, but as the Civil War
dragged on and communists were increasingly persecuted he was ultimately forced
to flee the country. The Greek authorities condemned him to death in absentia, bru-
tally affirming his status as an outcast for the next thirty years.

1
Varga (1996: 15), also quoted in Harley (2004: 3).
2
Wolff (2010: 298) notes that more than half of Xenakis’ 157 works have Greek titles.
3
It has become a commonplace to note that Xenakis means something like ‘little stranger’,
e.g. Mâche (1993: 197). Harley (2004: 2) mentions his ‘early sense of alienation’,
Matossian (2005: 20) quotes Messiaen on Xenakis as an ‘outsider’, and Sakkas (2010:
327) says that ‘he belonged to another epoch; to another spiritual world, to another uni-
verse’. Xenakis’ early biography is outlined in Matossian (2005: 33–34).

2
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

1947 found Xenakis in Paris: alone, traumatized, and disillusioned. There he was
employed in the atelier of Le Corbusier, where he found common ground with the
controversial Brutalist architect. In their different ways, both Le Corbusier and
Xenakis were trying to think across scientific, artistic, and aesthetic fields. In the
1950s Le Corbusier’s firm was designing huge apartment blocks called ‘Unités
d’habitation’, miniature cities within a single building, designed as a new way to

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house those displaced after the ravages of the Second World War. For the Unité
commissioned to be built in Nantes (1955), Xenakis designed the nursery that sits on
the top of the building. He peppered its walls with rectangular windows placed at ir-
regular intervals to mimic the appearance of neumes, an early system of musical nota-
tion. For the Dominican priory Le Couvent de Sainte Marie de La Tourette (1953–
60), Xenakis designed a chapel in the shape of a grand piano, and masterminded the
construction of long stretches of glass panes along the external walls. The layout of
these panes was determined by the same mathematical ratios that Xenakis was simul-
taneously using to structure his first major musical composition, Metastaseis (1953–
54) — a work that Xenakis described as recalling the sounds of Athenian anti-Nazi
protests and gunfire.4
As Metastaseis shows, in Paris Xenakis had also begun to explore and develop ser-
iously his interests in music composition. For this he had found support from the
titan of French contemporary music composition, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen not
only recognized Xenakis’ unique set of skills, but also understood that he was trying
to process and express the trauma of war and exile in ways that had little to do with
conventional musical training at the time. Though a pacifist, Messiaen had also expe-
rienced the horrors of the Second World War from his time in the prisoner-of-war
camp Stalag VIII-A, where he most famously composed his Quatuor pour la fin du
temps — ‘Quartet for the End of Time’.
Although Xenakis gradually built up enough of a following in the musical world
that he could stop working in architecture and devote himself to full-time music
composition, he never abandoned his interest in synthesizing space and time, sculp-
ture and sound. This is most apparent in his Polytopes, the huge-scale pieces of per-
formance art that he designed to animate specific spaces around the globe. Even their
title transcends disciplinary borders: a neologism, rooted in Greek words evoking
multiplicity (poly) and place (topos), it is a mathematical term that refers to a geomet-
ric object operating in multiple dimensions. Xenakis was not working in a vacuum: at
the very time he was working on his first Polytope (for the French Pavilion in
Montreal, 1967), Foucault was developing his theories of heterotopia.5 In Xenakis’

4
Matossian (2005: 66–84) explores the interaction between Metastaseis and what Le
Corbusier called ‘Le Couvent de Xenakis’ and its ‘musical screens of glass’, with images
at 175–77.
5
Foucault (1984), based on ideas delivered at the Cercle d’études architecturales, 14th
March 1967.

3
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

case, his fascination with the worlds of antiquity increasingly drew him to the cre-
ative reimagining of spaces whose links with the past were visible. This reached its
fullest expression in his later Polytopes, in which he applied sons et lumières to electrify
ruins in Persepolis (1971) and Mycenae (1978), resuscitating the distant past by
applying futuristic media — and contemporary communities of performers and
audiences — to ancient material structures and landscapes.6

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This interest in revisiting and recreating the ancient world clearly had a personal
component. Intersecting with Xenakis’ interests in mathematics, engineering, and
music, was his identification with the world of ancient Greece, and his understanding
of how this identification counterbalanced a more general sense of alienation from
the world around him. Consider, for example, how he presents his interaction with
music from countries and cultures that are new to him, and how this transforms his
appreciation of Greek history: ‘… in the 1950s, I discovered music beyond the
European tradition: from India, Laos, Vietnam, Java, China and Japan. Suddenly I
found myself in a world that felt my own. At the same time, Greece appeared to me
in a new light, like the crossroads of remnants from a very ancient musical past’.7
Xenakis appears to have discovered what was meaningful to him about the musical
past of Greece by acknowledging his temporal and spatial distance from that world
— that is, by embracing both anachronism and a global sonic perspective. At another
time he wrote in jest to his wife: ‘I am not a Roman decadent but a classical Greek liv-
ing in the twentieth century’.8
It is in his vocal works that Xenakis explores this dislocation most explicitly.
Creating music to accompany Greek texts, in particular, forced Xenakis to confront
his own unique experience of Hellenic identity, an identity that was dependent on
his lived — and subsequently lost — experience of Greek space, time, and language.9
Xenakis clearly intended to signal through his compositions a connection with the
Greek past, with its places and its people, but he was also conscious of how much of
an imaginative leap this communication process required for him, as ‘a classical
Greek living in the twentieth century’ — and a classical Greek living in France, to
boot. Echoing his memory of being mocked for sounding strange to his fellow Greek

6
On the Mycenae Polytope see Kotzamani (2014) with further bibliography. Chardas
(2016: 91) quotes Xenakis describing the work as ‘an artistic revival’ in the pro-
gramme notes.
7
… dans les années 50, j’ai découvert les musiques extraeuropéennes, de l’Inde, du Laos, du
Vietnam, de Java, de Chine et du Japon. Je me suis trouvé tout à coup dans un monde qui était
le mien. En même temps, la Grèce m’apparut sous un autre jour, comme le carrefour des survi-
vances d’un passé musical très ancient. Xenakis, interviewed in Montassier (1980: 221).
Translations from the French are mine, except where noted. Vagopoulou (2006: 4) notes
the influence of Japanese Noh theatre on Kassandra.
8
Matossian (2005: 244).
9
Vagopoulou (2006: 1–2). Wolff (2010: 301): ‘Ties to his Greek heritage, perhaps shaped
and intensified by exile and then adoption of another country, are balanced with an
otherwise undeviating commitment to his avant-garde explorations’.

4
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

pupils at boarding school, Xenakis described another disconcerting realisation of his

own alterity when he finally went back to Greece in the mid-1970s, after the military
junta fell and his death sentence was rescinded. After nearly three decades of ab-
sence, he found that the Greece to which he had returned was unrecognizable to
him, and that his own native Greek speech had become antiquated and occasionally
even incomprehensible.10 Perhaps it should come as no surprise to find that as

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Xenakis’ ties to the modern country of Greece frayed, his attachment to the world of
ancient Greece only grew stronger.
We can track Xenakis’ growing interest in ancient Greece from the 1960s to the
1990s through his work on Aeschylus’ Oresteia — a trilogy whose ancient complex-
ities proved fascinating to many avant-garde composers. Before the twentieth cen-
tury Aeschylus was not popular with composers of music. Static staging, difficult
Greek verse abounding in flights of open-ended metaphorical imagery, and overt
political messaging tended to deter all but the most committed of classically educated
composers.11 Yet the wars and political upheavals of the twentieth century triggered
a renewed interest in Aeschylus’ plays, as Ferrario explains: ‘In a post-monarchical
world that has experienced warfare on an unprecedented scale, dramas that expand
beyond the human emotions to question absolutism, show the brutality of conflict,
and perhaps even advocate for a just society have found an increasingly hospitable
home’.12 Ferrario also identifies the concomitant aesthetic shifts that made the chal-
lenge of Aeschylus more tempting to composers. As sound worlds became more rad-
ical, partly in response to the destabilizing trauma of the twentieth century, so the
violence, surrealism, and sheer foreignness of Aeschylus’ language grew in appeal.
Ferrario describes Orff’s use of Aeschylus’ Greek in his Prometheus (1968), linking it
back to Stravinsky’s use of a Latin libretto in setting Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (1927).
The strangeness of the ancient languages in these works, along with the screaming,
the lamenting, and the ‘virtuosic, unconventional vocal delivery’, creates an alienat-
ing effect that reflects the disorientating uncertainties of the century.13
This wider appreciation of Aeschylean possibilities may explain why Xenakis
reworked his settings of the Oresteia so many times.14 In 1966 Xenakis wrote the
music for an English-language production of the Oresteia at a festival in Ypsilanti,
Michigan.15 After the event he cut the piece down to become a concert suite, in the

10
Mâche (1993: 197).
11
Ewans (2018: 205) notes how difficult Greek choruses are to integrate into opera, and
how Aeschylean language adds a further layer of complication. Ewans (2006) explores
Aeschylus’ profound influence on Wagner, but even Wagner was inspired only to adapt
Aeschylean dramatic forms, not to set Aeschylus’ own plays to music.
12
Ferrario (2016: 211).
13
Ibid., pp. 208–9.
14
Vagopoulou (2006: 4) notes how unusual it was for Xenakis to return repeatedly to the
same work.
15
Dir. Alexis Solomos, using Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Oresteia. For
details see Foley (2005: 209–10).

5
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

process reverting to Aeschylus’ original ancient Greek text for a libretto intended to
be sung by a chorus of either children or adults. In 1987 Xenakis revisited the com-
position while on a visit to Sicily, in which he stayed not far from Aeschylus’ burial
site at Gela. There he produced a new episode for his Oresteia, called Kassandra; it
was a piece based on the Cassandra scene from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the 250 lines
in which the Trojan prophet attempts to communicate with the play’s chorus before

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she follows Agamemnon into the palace offstage to face her murder (Ag. 1072–1330).
A few years later Xenakis returned to his Oresteia one final time to add La Déesse
Athéna (1992), a piece in which he explored another passage of powerful female
speech, setting to music Athena’s lines from the Eumenides in which she establishes
the court of justice in Athens (Eum. 681–708).
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is the first extant ancient Greek text to develop in detail
the unique features of the prophet Cassandra and the situation in which she finds
herself when she arrives in Argos, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Years earlier,
back in Troy, Apollo had granted Cassandra true visions of the future, but after she
refused his sexual advances the god had stripped her of the ability to communicate
her knowledge regarding the future. Apollo ensured that whenever Cassandra was
possessed by prophetic frenzy, her language effectively became incomprehensible,
foreign-sounding, to her interlocutors.16 In the Agamemnon Cassandra has been for-
cibly transported from Troy to Greece as part of Agamemnon’s spoils of war. This
means that, as a Trojan, she is quite literally a foreigner in a Greek-speaking world.
She is also now an enslaved woman in a ruling household, and one who will become
collateral damage in the generational violence that has engulfed the house of Atreus.
Aeschylus emphasizes how Cassandra’s life-story has been one of repeated victimisa-
tion and marginalisation in every respect: sexual, social, cultural, and linguistic. Her
rambling and confusing narratives, wandering backwards and forwards through time
and space, are presented as the natural product of a prophet who is also always tragic-
ally displaced in time and space. Yet Aeschylus gives Cassandra the opportunity to
use that same freedom from narrative convention as a form of resistance to the op-
pression she faces in Greece.17 Her voice, both heightened and hobbled in its reach,
is the weapon with which she asserts her authority as someone who can tell — if not
sell — the truth.
The Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon, then, reflects the challenges faced by so-
cial outcasts when they try to communicate their insights, no matter how truthful or
16
On Cassandra’s mythic biography see Pillinger (2019: 1–8), with bibliography.
Cassandra’s characterization as a prophet, rather than just a daughter of Priam, is not
explicitly marked in Homer. She has a ‘pitiable voice’ — οἰκτροτάτην. . . ὄπα — in
Agamemnon’s recollection of her death in the Odyssey (11.421), but he does not quote
her words. Proclus has Cassandra prophesying in the Cypria in the Epic Cycle, and she
is clearly a prophetess by the time of Pindar (Pyth. 11.33).
17
Brault (1990) makes the important point that recent feminist thought and literature
have tended to make Cassandra a figure of subjugated womanhood, while ancient texts
(particularly those of fifth-century Athens) push back against this characterization

6
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

profound those insights might be, and the range of communicative strategies that
they might adopt to defy these challenges.18 As such, the scene has appealed to many
ancient and modern artists interested in voices of alterity and subversion.19 Virginia
Woolf, for example, responded powerfully to the figure of Aeschylus’ Cassandra, as
Prins has demonstrated.20 For Woolf, the trouble that Cassandra has with making
herself understood in the Agamemnon can, and should, be read as a radical portrayal

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of the difficulties involved in translating, particularly translating an ancient language
whose riches have been co-opted by a patriarchal education system that largely
excluded Woolf. From this the scene ultimately comes to stand for the difficulties
involved in all acts of communication, linguistic or other. Woolf writes of Aeschylus’
words: ‘we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant
that meaning afresh into any other words’.21 She finds this phenomenon at its most
evident in Cassandra’s first incoherent cry in the Agamemnon, in which the prophet
produces a string of untranslatable noises that make it unclear whether she is speak-
ing Greek or not, or indeed whether she is even speaking a human language at all. As
Woolf wrote in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’: ‘No splendour or richness of
metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the
subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ

/ ὤπολλον ὤπολλον’.22 Cassandra’s ‘naked cry’ is sound, but not sense — or rather,
its sense is its unmediated, untranslated sound.
With the twentieth century’s growing appreciation of Aeschylus, creative artists
working in a variety of media joined Woolf in responding to Cassandra’s extraordin-
ary speech in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon with a similar combination of bafflement, fas-
cination, and identification.23 In each rewriting of Cassandra’s role the
representation of her linguistic estrangement maps onto a more contemporary ex-
perience of political, social, or cultural isolation. Cassandra is exotic, foreign, a
Trojan in Greece; she is divinely inspired and cursed in a world of limited mortal
understanding; she is a prisoner of war being brought into the house of her captors.
She is therefore a figure for foreign exiles, for resistance fighters, for creative artists,
for minorities, for feminists, for leftists, for the oppressed and marginalised and mis-
understood. It is not hard to see why Xenakis might have felt impelled to return to
his Oresteia suite to fill out the character of Cassandra. Xenakis found in Cassandra a
figure who allowed him to explore in sound the frustrations and unexpected insights
granted to those who have been uprooted from their homes, especially those for
whom language, or the ability to communicate politically or artistically, has be-
come fraught.
18
Brault (2009); Pillinger (2019: 28–73).
19
Pillinger (2019: 226–39). See Munteanu (2016) on Cassandra in the operas of Taneyev
and Gnecchi.
20
Prins (2005); see also Pillinger (2017).
21
Woolf (1984: 30) [1925].
22
Ibid., p. 31.
23
Goudot (1999).

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The first striking feature of Xenakis’ Kassandra is its instrumentation. This is all
the more noticeable when the piece is performed as part of the Oresteia suite. The
Agamemnon movement in the suite depends on a mixture of orchestral instruments
and choral voices, all of which mark the play’s concern with public display and the
ostensible welcoming of the king Agamemnon as he returns to his people. Just before
Kassandra is to be performed, there is a formal trumpet fanfare (marked a blaringly

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loud fortississimo), reinforcing an atmosphere of official, martial, civic activity. By
contrast, Kassandra begins with an austere, if energetically syncopated, beating of
skin drums, introducing the spare and intimate instrumentation that the work will
employ throughout.24 Xenakis scored the piece for only two performers: a percus-
sionist playing woodblocks and those skin drums, and a baritone singer who would
also play the Javan psaltery. He wrote it for two particular performers, the singer
Spyros Sakkas and the percussionist Sylvio Gualda, so the sense of unusual intimacy
is further reinforced by the ease of the three artists’ collaboration.
The versatility of Sakkas’ vocal talent inspired Xenakis to make the most dramatic
innovation in this piece. Whereas in the rest of the Oresteia suite both choral and in-
dividual roles are performed by a chorus, or at least by small groups of singers, in
Kassandra a single voice performs the part of both the chorus and the isolated
prophet. Cassandra’s speech is represented by the baritone singing in falsetto, while
the chorus of old Argive men — or at least the chorus-leader — is represented by the
same singer using his chest voice.25 A similar move in La Déesse Athéna, also written
with Sakkas in mind, sees the baritone hop in and out of falsetto to represent the
male and female aspects of the goddess Athena.26 Sakkas’ vocal abilities allowed
Xenakis to use one voice to dramatize a female-gendered insight (prophetic or divine)

24
The score instructs the performer to play with hands (mains), but the instruction is
often ignored by performers, including by Gualda in the first recording of the piece,
which is the recording referred to throughout this article.
25
Le baryton est successivement Cassandre dans son registre aigu et coryphée des vieillards
d’Argos dans son registre grave — ‘the baritone is alternately Cassandra in his upper regis-
ter and chorus-leader of the old men of Argos in his lower register’, as Xenakis writes in
the foreword to the score of Kassandra (Editions Salabert, 1987). In the score for
Xenakis’ Oresteia (Boosey and Hawkes, 1996), which is the final revision of the work but
includes neither Kassandra nor La Déesse Athena (as they are exclusively published by
Editions Salabert), the front matter oddly suggests that the baritone’s role in Kassandra
might be sung by a baritone plus one or two children instead. The details are not
explained anywhere else in the Oresteia score, and the idea is not found anywhere in the
score to Kassandra. It is hard to know what Xenakis had in mind. Would the children
play the role of the chorus leader or of Cassandra? If two children were involved, how
would their voices manage the highly improvisational melodic shaping — would they
be expected to sing in unison or to present another kind of vocal fragmentation?
26
Wolff (2010: 298); Harley (2004: 45). Wolff (2010: 299) notes that the instrumentation
of the rest of the Oresteia tends toward the extremes of pitch also found in Kassandra,
stretching as it does from piccolo to tuba with little in the mid-range.

8
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

in attempted conversation with a male-gendered response.27 In an interview with

Vagopoulou, Sakkas identified his collaboration with Xenakis as part of a compos-
itional process analogous to Cassandra’s inspiration: ‘I believe that [Xenakis’] kind of
inspiration goes hand in hand with the performer’s dexterity … . Kassandra comes as
a delirium; no matter if there is a text behind it, it is in fact a delirium.’28
Xenakis’ inspiration for Kassandra certainly manifests itself in a carefully cali-

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brated sharing of the interpretative process with his performers. He directs precisely
the rhythms of the percussion, as well as the untempered tuning of the psaltery, and
he marks the relative pitches of both drums and woodblocks.29 Xenakis denotes the
voice of Cassandra with a treble clef, and that of the chorus with a bass clef. The me-
lodic line of the voice within those distinctions, however, is marked purely in terms
of graphics that indicate rising or falling pitch, with further directions as to the vocal
attack and timbre. In his foreword to the score Xenakis describes the notation as
being ‘neumatic’ in fashion — like the windows he had designed in the nursery of
the Unité d’habitation at Nantes — but in fact the wandering line (literally a line, ra-
ther than dots, on the musical stave) is more impressionistic still than even the rela-
tive pitches marked by medieval neumes.30 The singer is instructed to match his
semi-improvisational melismatics to the tetrachords he has selected to play on the
psaltery, which in turn he is encouraged to choose on the basis of his own interpret-
ation of the character of each passage.31 The electronic amplification of the

27
On the female gendering of prophecy in the ancient world, particularly in relation to
prophets granted their visions by the god Apollo, see Fowler (2002), Brault (2009),
Miller (2009: 141), and Pillinger (2019: 12–16).
28
Vagopoulou (2007: 213).
29
Wolff (2010: 289) notes how often, since Milhaud’s Les Choéphores (1915), twentieth-
century composers have used abrasive, stark percussion sounds to evoke ancient Greek
tragic performance, despite the lack of evidence for percussion in the original produc-
tions. Wolff attributes this to composers’ desire to evoke the imagined acoustics of ar-
chaic ritual and to ‘other’ the sound-world of their compositions. Brown (2004: 286)
discusses related attempts to engage with the musical traditions of Africa or East Asia
— as Xenakis also does — to defamiliarize, at least for modern Western audiences, the
performance world of ancient Greece.
30
La notation est du type neumatique afin de tenter une approche nouvelle de la voix qui sous-
tend le texte d’Aeschyle — ‘The notation is neumatic in style, to try out a new approach
to the voice that supports the text of Aeschylus’. Xenakis, foreword to the score of
Kassandra (1987).
31
Le baryton accorde les mouvements de sa voix sur l’un des tetracordes qu’il choisit selon les
séquences du texte et leur caractère — ‘The baritone pitches the movements of his voice to
each one of the tetrachords that he selects according to the development and character
of the text’. Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra (1987). See Harley (2004: 188–
9). It should be noted that Sakkas (2010) strongly resists the suggestion that a good per-
formance of Xenakis’ vocal works is ever truly improvisational.

9
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

singer’s voice, suggested in parentheses in the score, adds one further layer of
technological anachronism, even as it reinforces the power and intimacy of the
words voiced.32
All of these moves combined serve to remove the piece that much further from
the conventions of the European classical music tradition. Xenakis and his perform-
ers construct a radical sound that avoids as far as possible the tonal patterns of any

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other piece of music — including those of any other performance of Kassandra, since
every iteration of the piece will depend on the singer’s interpretation of the notation.
The connections that the work builds are, instead, those that arise in the moment of
performance. As Sakkas observes: ‘The work is expressed according to the way it will
be played by the performers and by the rapport that will develop between the musi-
cians and the public, both of whom are participants in a ritual’.33 And there is one
more sonic connection that Xenakis embraces in the piece. The composer insists that
the singer must attempt to replicate the pronunciation of fifth century Attic Greek.
His notion of this ancient Greek pronunciation is fairly idiosyncratic, as can be seen
in both the Latin transliteration he provides in the Kassandra score and the more
detailed instructions for pronunciation found in the foreword to the Oresteia score.34
Still, the sound of Aeschylus’ language, articulated as it is by the solo singer’s male–
female voice, is identified as one of the few acoustic constants in Kassandra, an an-
chor within each performance of a piece that otherwise swirls in anarchically jumbled
sounds of past, present, and future.35
This combination — sometimes conflict — of rigidly controlled text and limitedly
controlled music enables a unique fidelity to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; it allows each
performance of the work to portray several of the most important aspects of
Cassandra’s communicative difficulties in the ancient play. This begins from the
very opening sequence of Kassandra, in which the audience is introduced in swift
succession to the various parts that construct the work. Firstly the percussionist beats
rhythmically on the drums, accelerating into a tremolo that fades away to nothing.
Next the singer enters playing the role of Cassandra and plucking the psaltery. Then,
after the first phrase, the singer abruptly switches into the voice of the chorus to

32
Connor (2000: 38) explores the intimacy of electronic amplification: ‘The microphone
makes audible and expressive a whole range of organic vocal sounds which are edited
out in ordinary listening; the liquidity of the saliva, the hissings and tiny shudders of the
breath, the clicking of the tongue and teeth, and popping of the lips … ’.
33
Sakkas (2010: 312).
34
Xenakis’ instructions combine elements of Erasmian and modern Greek pronunciations
without any clear rationale. One of the anonymous readers for CRJ helpfully pointed
out that Xenakis’ instructions would make a Greek singer like Sakkas less comprehen-
sible to a modern Greek audience than if he were left to sing the words with a regular
modern Greek pronunciation.
35
Chardas (2016: 110) 110 explores Greek twentieth century composers’ broader habit of
using the language of ancient Greek to signal the ‘unending significance’ of their sub-
ject matter.

10
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

deliver a response to Cassandra. (Sound clip 1.) This back and forth, punctuated by
episodes of solo woodblock, will continue for much of the work.
The first words sung are a version of Cassandra’s first words in the Agamemnon,
the very same stutterings that Woolf found so powerful: ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ
/
ὤπολλον ὤπολλον — ‘otototoi popoi da; / Ahpollo Ahpollo’ (Ag. 1072–3).36 In
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon these first sounds uttered by the prophet are anticipated by

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an exchange between the chorus and Clytemnestra in which they speculate on the
kind of speech the as-yet silent Cassandra might deliver, and wonder if the Trojan
princess might need a translator. Among those exchanges Clytemnestra associates
Cassandra’s barbarian speech with that of a swallow (Ag. 1050-2):

ἀλλ’ εἴπερ ἐστὶ μὴ χελιδόνος δίκην

ἀγνῶτα φωνὴν βάρβαρον κεκτημένη,
ἔσω φρενῶν λέγουσα πείhω νιν λόγωι.

But unless she is, like a swallow,

possessed of an unintelligible foreign voice,
by speaking within her mind I am persuading her with my argument.

From the moment the voice enters in Xenakis’ Kassandra we are reminded of
Clytemnestra’s speculative characterization of Cassandra. Xenakis may not specify
the exact pitch of the falsetto voice, but he demands an absolutely precise attack
throughout the work, which results in a birdlike articulation reminiscent of
Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux — ‘Catalogue of Birds’. The breathless staccato of
‘otototoi’ is carefully marked by separate curved lines on the score. The voice must
then transition into a glissando, marked by a curving line, then a wide vibrato,
marked by a wiggly line, and finally into an unusual fluting sound, marked by a bro-
ken line. Xenakis brings the Greek accentuation into play, too: simple stress marks
(‘/’) above the stave replace the polytonic accents of Aeschylus’ text, but the fluctua-
tions in the pitch line map approximately onto the rising and falling indicated by the
ancient accents that Xenakis has omitted. The result is a simultaneously stressed
(modern, monotonic) and pitched (ancient, polytonic) version of Aeschylus’ Greek
(Fig. 1).
This falsetto line is immediately followed by the chorus’ response, which the sing-
er delivers in chest voice: τί ταῦτ’ ἀνωτότυξας ἀμφὶ Λοξίου; — ‘Why do you cry out
‘otototoi’ to Loxias [Apollo]?’ (Ag. 1074). This jump from falsetto to chest voice vir-
tually without a breath introduces the most astonishing feature of the piece: the com-
bination, and virtual overlap, of multiple characters in one single singer’s
overstretched voice. Even Sakkas, whose remarkable vocal agility helped to inspire

36
Xenakis writes Ἀπόλλω rather than ὤπολλον. All translations from the ancient Greek
are mine.

11
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

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Fig. 1. Xenakis, Kassandra [score], opening bars

and shape the piece in the first place, is pushed to his limits, so that his voice cannot
help but express the strain of representing both Cassandra and the chorus that is try-
ing to understand her. Sakkas describes Xenakis as leading the performer ‘into highly
dangerous conditions for one’s spiritual and bodily integrity’.37
This strain, which begins here in the first lines but will continue and indeed in-
crease over the course of the work, operates in two competing directions. On the one
hand the dramatic fragmentation of the singer’s voice into multiple characters sug-
gests that the piece is exploring a breakdown of communication that is so powerful it
splits the individual performer at the centre of the piece into a broken embodiment
of that communicative failure. This fragmentation ripples out beyond the singer, as
the relentlessly precise, rhythmic drumming is jarringly juxtaposed with the glissan-
doing, wandering movement of the voice(s) and the gentle plunking of the psaltery.
Even the two performers appear initially to be pitted against each other in their ar-
ticulation of quite different kinds of musical language.
On the other hand, there are similarities in the ways Xenakis constructs the per-
cussion and the vocal lines. Both employ sudden shifts of dynamics, attack, and
tremolos of different speeds, and the percussionist switches between drums and

37
Sakkas (2010: 310).

12
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

woodblocks in the same way that the singer switches between chest voice and falsetto.
As Xenakis describes it, ‘The percussion consists of skin drums and woodblocks
punctuating or commenting on the text’.38 The vocalist and the percussionist may be
using different musical languages, but the languages complement each other and ap-
pear to be mutually comprehensible. Even their physical efforts match: Sakkas notes
that by the end of a performance of the piece he and Gualda were ‘both gasping for

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breath’.39 He observes that the audience, too, is led ‘breathless to the work’s end’.40
This symbiosis of the performers, along with the sympathetic engagement of the lis-
teners, encourages a more positive reading of the fragmentation experienced by the
singer playing both Cassandra and the chorus. The singer is not an individual who is
dissociating and disintegrating over the course of the performance; he is, on the con-
trary, the incarnation of shared experience. The singer is two separate but allied voi-
ces, and he represents within one single human body, one single vocal tract, the
struggle of both the individual Cassandra and the community of the chorus to breach
their mutual foreignness. It is fitting that their first exchange is triangulated through
an appeal to Apollo, the god who has created such communicative mayhem for
Cassandra, and who is here identified as the god of linguistic confusion with his cult
title ‘Loxias’ — ‘the riddler’.
As Kassandra develops, it builds upon this fraught but collaborative communica-
tion that is taking place between the musicians and within the body of the singer.
Soon the work widens its scope, to welcome the integration of entire communities
that are foreign to each other. In Xenakis’ work, as in Aeschylus’ play, Cassandra’s
birdlike sounds are closely linked to her identity as a barbarian, a non-Greek.41 At
one point in the Agamemnon the chorus expresses its astonishment at Cassandra’s
clear knowledge of past events that took place in Argos, even though the prophet was
living in Troy at that time (Ag. 1198-1201):

καὶ πῶς ἂν ὅρκου πῆγμα γενναίως παγὲν

παιώνιον γένοιτο; hαυμάζω δέ σου,
πόντου πέραν τραφεῖσαν ἀλλόhρουν πόλιν
κυρεῖν λέγουσαν ὥσπερ εἰ παρεστάτεις.

And yet how could the binding security of an oath honestly secured
be helpful? Then again I am indeed amazed at you,
how, brought up beyond the sea and talking about a foreign-speaking city,
you are as accurate as if you had been present here.

38
My italics. La percussion est faite de peaux et de wood-blocks ponctuant le texte ou le com-
mentant. Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra (1987).
39
Sakkas (2010: 326).
40
Ibid., 328.
41
Hall (1991: 211–12); Brault (2009: 198); Pillinger (2019).

13
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

The moments when the chorus can see the truth in Cassandra’s speech — that is,
when she describes events in the past rather than the future — are striking to them
not because they come from a prophet, but because they come from a foreigner. How
does Cassandra know about things that happened in the house of Atreus when she
was living on the other side of the Aegean? And how can she express the narrative of
the past in such clear Greek when her incomprehensible prophecies make her sound

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so foreign? Xenakis decided to highlight this moment in which the chorus is sur-
prised and impressed by Cassandra’s knowledge, by making some drastic cuts to the
text that precedes it. Xenakis instructs his singer to deliver Cassandra’s cry ἰώ (Ag.
1136) in the form of a drawn-out groan marked fendu — ‘cracked’ — in the score,
then has the cry fade into an extended passage on the psaltery. The composer cuts
the following sixty lines of stumbling communication between Cassandra and the
chorus in the Agamemnon, and instead jumps directly to the chorus’ lines quoted
above (with a couple of small changes). The chorus’ respectful appreciation of
Cassandra’s insight now responds not to the prophet’s words, but to her broken howl
and to the twanging strings that follow it. Cassandra is being validated and embraced
by the chorus in all her alien incomprehensibility. (Sound clip 2.)
The prominence of the psaltery at this point is significant because, as Xenakis wrote in
the foreword to Kassandra, he believed that its sound could signal both a spatial and a tem-
poral shift: ‘The Psaltery, a copy of a 20-stringed instrument from Java belonging to
Maurice Fleuret, is a remarkable descendant of the ancient lyre. It is strung in 6 perfect
fourths with two intermediary pitches, creating a global scale that is non-tempered and non-
diatonic’.42 Lifted (appropriated) from its Southeast Asian origins the geographical and cul-
tural displacement of the psaltery allowed Xenakis to represent his translation of Aeschylus’
original text across space and time. The instrument is avowedly inauthentic, but it is an at-
tempt to be truthful to the sounds of ancient Greece. In taking over from Cassandra’s
cracked and inarticulate cry the psaltery offers its own version of Cassandra’s ‘otototoi’; be-
yond verbal communication and outside notions of past and future, its unfamiliar sounds
(in a European context) nonetheless convey an integrity that the chorus recognizes even
though there are no specific words to which they can respond. As they say to Cassandra,
but also to the psaltery: ‘you speak and are as accurate as if you had been present here’.
Having expanded a single voice to encompass multiple bodies, and having used
the Greek language and the Javan lyre to celebrate the value of foreign speech and
sound, Xenakis goes on to develop one further feature of Cassandra’s position: her
role as a woman communicating, for the most part, with men. Cassandra’s vulner-
ability as a mortal woman is crucial in the ancient Greek myth. It is Apollo’s

42
Le Psaltérion, copie d’un instrument à 20 cordes de Java appartenant à Maurice Fleuret est
un succédant remarquable de la lyre antique. Il est accordé en 6 quartes justes conjointes avec
deux notes intermédiaires formant une échelle globale non-tempérée et non diatonique.
Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra (1987). Maurice Fleuret (1932-1990) was a
composer, critic, and ethnomusicologist who championed contemporary and glo-
bal music.

14
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

attraction to her and her denial of him that brings upon her the curse of being both
truthfully prophetic and doomed never to be understood.43 This situation is revealed
in its most explicit physical dimension when Cassandra finally accepts her fate at the
very same time as she prophesies it (Ag. 1256-94).44 At this point in the play, as
Apollo mentally assaults the prophet with his inspiration, Cassandra hurls away the
accoutrements of her prophetic skill (Ag. 1264–70) in a grotesque act of undressing

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that may be read as either her ultimate submission to Apollo, or a defiant (second) act
of rejection. Hall notes the additional frisson that male actors cross-dressing could
bring to such a scene from antiquity onwards, particularly in a twentieth century
when directors were able to represent more diverse and fluid genders and sexualities
on stage.45 Xenakis’ singer, presenting now as male and now as female, has already
performed this diversity and fluidity through his vocal modulations. Here he gets to
reinforce this by gesture too: this action of discarding Apollo’s symbols is, signifi-
cantly, one of the few stage directions that Xenakis marks in the score.
In Xenakis’ piece the tension leading up to this moment builds through an in-
creasingly frantic exchange between Cassandra and the chorus. It begins with them
acknowledging the limited success of their current communications (Ag. 1239–45),
and then accelerates through several lines of stichomythia (Ag. 1246–55) in which
Cassandra cannot help but continue to articulate the events to come while the chorus
attempts some quibbling interjections. Finally, Cassandra takes over with an
extended prophecy. Xenakis sets almost all of this speech, concluding only at the mo-
ment where Cassandra foresees the arrival of her avenger, Orestes. Cassandra identi-
fies him, significantly, as another exile: φυγὰς δ’ ἀλήτης τῆσδε γῆς ἀπόξενος — ‘a
refugee, a wanderer, an exile from his land’ (Ag. 1282). This is the point in Kassandra
where the singer, who has perforce been leaping in and out of falsetto during the
stichomythia, brings his portrayal of the inspired prophetess to a climax. His voice,
now almost screaming the constant falsetto of Cassandra’s inspiration, starts to break.
The chest voice begins to make itself heard through the strain, and the pretence of
the female persona starts to break down. Finally, in a howling cry that follows the vi-
sion of Orestes’ arrival, the male voice emerges from concealment. The singer is
instructed to produce a fluting glissando which moves in a quite extraordinary slow
slide through all the vocal registers, from the treble to the bass clef, from Cassandra’s
falsetto into the chorus’ baritone. (Sound clip 3.)
The glissando is a remarkable moment that reveals the bare bones of the perform-
ance, while also exposing and then conflating all the apparent dichotomies explored
by the work as a whole. These seconds are totally given over to what Barthes
describes as the ‘grain’ of the voice, ‘the body in the voice as it sings’.46 The singer is

43
For a couple of different approaches to the possible events that may have led to Apollo’s
curse on Cassandra see Kovacs (1987) and Morgan (1994).
44
On the ineluctable performativity of Cassandra’s prophetic voice, and the connection
between her uttering and accepting the future, see Pillinger (2019: 16).
45
Hall (2004: 15).

15
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

no longer a prophet and a chorus, a local and a foreigner, a man and a woman. The
singer is a single body with a single voice. This reinforces the work’s earlier hints
that the communicator Cassandra is ultimately not so different from her receptive
interlocutors, that the foreign female prophetic voice is not so distinguishable from
the native male choral voice. The individual visionary cannot be extricated from the
community that depends on such a figure; everyone is implicated in the outsider’s

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struggle to be heard.
Kassandra explores the prophet’s distance from and yet enduring connection with
her interlocutors, her home (language), and her sex. Underpinning this tension be-
tween disruption and continuity is Cassandra’s defining superpower: her ability to
wander away from, and then return to, her own moment in time. This the figure of
Cassandra does, first and foremost, through her prophecies, for her visions give her
the ability to transcend time although her body is trapped in the mythic past. But she
also transcends time through her reception in the works of artists such as Xenakis. If
the music of Kassandra at first strikes its audience as alien, unfamiliar, and futuristic
in ways that take Cassandra ever further away from her ancient Greek past, every de-
tail can also be understood as an attempt to resituate Cassandra in the fifth century
Greece of Aeschylus — or rather, in the Bronze Age world filtered through
Aeschylus’ drama. In Kassandra Xenakis aspires to an authentic voicing of the past
through the compositional techniques of the present, while he also consciously defers
to the interpretative decisions of future performers, collaborators, and audience
members. There is no attempt to disguise the temporal layers that lie beneath the
voice of Cassandra in Kassandra, no attempt to trick the audience into feeling com-
fortably based in either the present or the past. In a way that suits the figure of
Cassandra — and Xenakis — so well, the composer is demonstrating how one’s lan-
guage (musical, verbal, cultural) can feel at odds with one’s spatial and temporal en-
vironment, and yet still engage meaningfully with others in that environment. As
Wolff says of so much of twentieth century music’s engagement with the classical
world: ‘The distant past has partially become timeless, and offers an enticing com-
bination of being both distant and other, and somehow also part of us’.47
In a collection of responses to Xenakis’ work published some years before
Kassandra was written, the novelist Milan Kundera reveals that he developed a par-
ticular appreciation for Xenakis’ music in the late 1960s, when Russia invaded his
home country, Czechoslovakia.48 Kundera describes the strange kind of comfort that
the music granted him, and dubs Xenakis a prophète de l’insensibilité: something like a
‘prophet of detachment’. Kundera explains that emotions are too easily mobilized in
the cause of violence and repression. By contrast, Xenakis seemed to him to have suc-
cessfully broken with the history of European music in order to pursue an objective,
rather than subjective, description of the brutal turmoil of the post-war years in

46
Barthes (1977: 188).
47
Wolff (2010: 304).
48
Kundera (1981).

16
 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

Eastern Europe, and this rationalism spoke far more powerfully and truthfully to
Kundera than any artistic histrionics.
In the foreword to Kassandra, six years later, Xenakis writes only one instruction
for performance: ‘The performance must avoid all emotional expression. For there is
a serious danger of imposing modern clichés on Aeschylus’ text.’49 The prophète de
l’insensibilité demands that his musicians should restrain their emotions in perform-

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ing his work, in order to avoid anachronistic perversions of Aeschylus’ Greek words,
whose ancient pronunciation he was so determined to replicate. In this effort to re-
main faithful to the Cassandra of the past, Xenakis takes what Kundera sees as the
only legitimate approach to their turbulent contemporary world. Xenakis’ presenta-
tion of Cassandra’s estranged voice neither translates nor explains Aeschylus’ text for
his listeners. Instead he allows the ancient prophet to speak for herself through, over,
against, and alongside the music that delivers her words.
At the same time, any performance demonstrates how impossible it is to channel
the voice of this Cassandra without making a huge physical effort that inevitably
takes an emotional toll on the performers and the audience alike. Cassandra’s voice
remains that of the swallow, the barbarian woman, the political exile, and the ana-
chronistic prophet, but her voice is ‘also part of us’. It is part of a sympathetic wider
community that cannot stay detached, but identifies with the ‘naked cry’ of Woolf’s
reading, the delirium of Sakkas’ singing, and the visionary sound of
Xenakis’ creating.

Acknowledgments
My warm thanks to the editors of CRJ, Constanze Güthenke and Pantelis
Michelakis, and to the journal’s kind and very helpful anonymous reviewers. I
would also like to thank colleagues who responded to oral versions of this paper,
first at the ‘Children of Orpheus’ panel at the SCS in San Antonio, Texas (2011),
then at the conferences ‘Music, Language and Identity in Modern Greece’ at the
British School in Athens (2015) and ‘Sounds of the Hellenic World’ at King’s
College London (2016), and finally at a King’s College London Comparative
Literature seminar. Ruth Bernatek generously shared many insights gleaned from
her work on Xenakis’ Polytopes, and Richard Rawles took the trouble to check a

49
L’interpretation doit eviter toute expression de sentiments. Car le danger est grand de super-
poser des cliches actuels au texte d’Eschyle. Xenakis, foreword to the score of Kassandra
(1987). This is echoed to an extent in the foreword to the score for the Oresteia (1996) as
a whole, although here the pitch of the voice is much more carefully controlled by the
composer: Les mots sont dits recto-tono, non déclamés, sans expression ni sentiments d’aucune
sorte, sans modulations de hauteur ou de volume, en respectant la phonétique qui suit… A
loose English translation of this is printed in the score: ‘The words should be spoken,
not declaimed, without any sentiment or expression whatsoever, in a ‘recto tono’ voice,
and without any modulation of pitch or volume’. Following this comes the rather odd
guide to the pronunciation of ancient Greek.

17
 XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

score for me. Above all I am grateful to my parents, Edward Pillinger and
Suzanne Cheetham Pillinger, for sharing their musical world with me.

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F.-B. Mâche, ‘The Hellenism of Xenakis’, Contemporary Music Review 8, no. 1 (1993), pp. 197–211.
N. Matossian Xenakis (Lefkosia, Cyprus: Moufflon, 2005).
J. F. Miller, Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
G. Montassier , Le fait culturel (Paris: Fayard, 1980).
K. A. Morgan, ‘Apollo’s Favorites’, Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 35, no. 2 (1994),
pp. 121–43.
D. L. Munteanu, ‘Aeschylus’ Cassandra in the Operas of Taneyev and Gnecchi’, in S.
Constantinidis (ed.), The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 213–35.

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 THE MUSIC OF XENAKIS’ ESTRANGED KASSANDRA

E. Pillinger, ‘Finding Asylum for Virginia Woolf’s Classical Visions’, in V. Zajko and H. Hoyle
(eds), Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017),
pp. 271–84.
E. Pillinger Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Y. Prins, ‘OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and ‘The Naked Cry’ of Cassandra’, in F. Macintosh , P.
Michelakis, E. Hall and O. Taplin (eds), Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 163–85.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/crj/clab005/6359460 by guest on 31 August 2021

S. Sakkas, ‘Singing… Interpreting Xenakis’, tr.. K. Romanou ,in S. Kanach (ed.), Performing
Xenakis (New York: Pendragon, 2010), pp. 303–34.
E. Vagopoulou, ‘The Universality of Xenakis’ Oresteia’, in M. Solomos , A. Georgaki , and G.
Zervos (eds), Definitive Proceedings of the ‘International Symposium Iannis Xenakis’ (Athens, May
2005) (2006): https:// www. iannis- xenakis. org/ Articles/ Vaggopoulou. pdf
E. Vagopoulou Cultural Tradition and Contemporary Thought in Iannis Xenakis’ Vocal Works.
Doctoral thesis, University of Bristol, 2007.
B. A. Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
C. Wolff, ‘Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy’, in P. Brown and S. Ograjenšek
(eds), Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
pp. 285–304.
V. Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ in A. McNeillie (ed.) , The Common Reader (first published 1925)
(San Diego: Harcourt, 1984), pp. 23–38.
Scores
I. Xenakis, Kassandra [score] (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1987).
——— Oresteia [score] (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1996).
Recording
I. Xenakis, Oresteia. S. Sakkas, S. Gualda and the Ensemble de Basse-Normandie (Naı̈ve
Classique, 1990).

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