ABSTRACT
While Xenakis would certainly have been an outsider to the new musical activities in Paris or Darmstadt, he had, during his student years, received enough training and musical acculturation to know that he loved music and could dream of devoting himself to it. His father was an opera fan, of Richard Wagner in particular, and his mother played the piano. Xenakis made a few short-lived attempts to study the piano over the years, and he sang in the boy’s choir at the school on Spetse. He recalls “singing Palestrina and liking it very much” (Varga 1996, 12). He also learned notation and solfège, and became acquainted with Greek church music and traditional dances there. During his brief period in Athens before the outbreak of the war, he studied harmony and counterpoint with a Russian-trained musician, Aristotle Koundourov. Xenakis proudly recalls learning all the parts of Mozart’s Requiem by heart (Varga 1996, 14).
