"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "08 MUSIC or Inner Space" "Question - where does music start?" "Musicians usually think of music as being combinational." "The setting of discrete objects." "One sound here, another there, an instrument here, another there, which make separate sound entities like objects or colours." "But they leave aside something which is fundamental in evolution - the perpetual sliding" "without barriers or delinated objects, from one form into another in a continual manner." "Next station - the owl." "It will record the owl's hoot then display it on this screen." "Then it will extract a shape." "It represents a tone or a pattern or the variation of its dynamics." "I ask the machine to show me a shape illustrating the owl's hoot." "From the middle of this wave-form" "I am now going to extract" "another shape" "which will define the tone." "I can penetrate into the depths of the sound fabric itself." "I'll be bale to get right inside the micro-structural level to define this tone." "This one is even more complex and we hear the result right away." "Many generations ago" "I wrote some music for orchestra but found the traditional notation was inextricable." "I thought we should have something which can transform drawings into traditional orchestral notation," "each instrument with its own coding or a system to produce the sounds, that was a long time ago." "Then I had another idea." "With a relatively simple tool we could transform thought into sound, into music" "and maybe we could bridge the gap between musician and non-musician." "We can hear it..." "All year long, groups not necessarily musically trained participated in UPIC workshop." "This one was chosen to illustrate the very myth of birth of music as is described in Greek mythology." "Our titular owl appeard there under two guises." "His hoot analyzed, metamorphosed so many" "Greek words." "His image turned into musical parameters, since Xennakis' contractions allows for such equasions." "The Gorgon myth?" "It's the myth of the birth of music." "The invention of music by Athena." "One day she heard the Gorgon's cry." "Gorgons were horrfying creatures." "So it occured to us that it was a kind of an owl especially because of its eye." "So music was born of imitation when Athena imitated a natural cry." "When they first thought about art, especially in Ancient Greece, they felt it should imitate reality." "So we have all those anecdotes like Xeuxis painting fruit" "which was so lifelike that birds came to peck the canvas." "Art, by definition, shouldn't mimic, it should create." "But to create it must delve like it or not into every part of the human mind." "It must feel each part." "It must understand them and be able to manipulate them." "So it must have thinking skills as well as technological skills." "From there, art could go further." "That is where the challenge lies, the greatest freedom of Man, because in the artistic field Man has nothing to prove, not in the material sense." "So he can create whole universes which is what he does with music." "He creates extraordinary universes which are plausible and possible in all their generality." "Music has done this many times." "This was the case with the space/sound relationship." "When the Alexandrian grammarians tried to save Attic phonetics and invented accents they managed to relate two or three dimensional space" "to shrill or low sounds." "Later came the Neume, the use of pitch to denote music" "using lettres of the alphabet." "A similar method but much more precise was Guide d'Arezzo's use of staves which gave both time and pitch in a more precise way." "Now two gestures or events are identical or similar because time has changed." "But what is time?" "What is space?" "There'll always be a question mark." "But we can talk about the difference." "If what I do is very different from what I've been given then I'm relatively original." "How far can this difference go?" "You can rebuild a whole universe." "Music compared to vision, sound compared to vision, has an extra different quality." "When you compose or listen to music you manipulate more abstract notions than those of the visual world." "The visual world has a problem." "We are dominated by the eyes which are more down-to-earth more tuned in to reality than the audio senses." "You can make visual abstractions of your immediate surroundings" "but it's much more difficult, they're tainted by everyday life." "Whereas in music sound works on a deeper level, it manipulates in other ways owing to the structure of our ears." "Ears are closer to one's head and the dimensions of what we hear, pitch, frequency, intensity," "are closer to us in their structures." "There are no photons, only phonons." "Phonons can be perceived, touched." "Photons only leave a global imprint." "So maybe, when you manipulate sound you reach something closer to Man and therefore much more perceptible where the function," "the discovery of ideas, is also closer, more accessible." "I think it's fundamental." "Our bodies which vibrate, with periodical movements made by walking or the heartbeat, by the eyes or simply with life," "this vibration on all these levels, our bodies' vibrations, that is," "merge with such thought vibrations through sound." "I mean for example when you hear percussions, rhythms, it's easier to get carried away, to let yourself go." "Why?" "Because our bodies are primed." "That's why rhythm is so important at the dawn of all civilizations." "Then it deteriorates, becomes complex." "Easter 1988, Pathmos." "Easter 1988, Pathmos." "The very year when they celeberated the first milenium of Christianity." "How many floodgates between this Orthodox liturgy whose splendour outshines every other and music of antiquity of which no one knows much about, except the fact that it was present at every corner of life." "But how did music change its role with the advent of Christianity?" "Rather than part of normal life, hadn't it been a mirror where all the cruelties of life" "returned down side up and a cry for another life, a call so strong that you didn't even have to be a believer to understand it." "Then Byzantium, instead of being one more landmark along the musical path of Western man, had been the mint of new mystery." "If a God could make himself a man, expose himself to frailty and fear, human misery could in turn make itself a God whose name was music." "Byzantine music is taken for granted so is Greek folk music." "But what I meant was that music, certain original Greek traditions, played an important role." "My early musical background was more or less occidental, that is, 19th century," "central European, mind you." "I hear Debussy and Ravel much later and said 'It could be Ancient music'." "Strange, isn't it?" "Here, a memory flashes." "Once Xenakis said on TV..." "Perhaps it's what moves me most." "I looked for a less painful life and I found it with music" "And we seized the occassion to see if he'd still sign it today." "Yes, I'd still sign it today." "But I also think, to quote Paul Valery, that at 18 you have many facets then life chips them down to one." "That happens to most people." "At 18 you develop physically, it's a transformation, a mutation." "You can do so much." "But with adversity and daily life, above all, when you start fighting, when you have to resist an occupier," "then things become much harder." "Then you have to make decisions because of defeats, defeats on many levels in the face of life's adversities." "Then you have to make choices." "You realize you can't do it all." "I wanted to do archeology, science, mathematics, physics and I wanted to be in politics." "You can't do all that and music too." "So I made my choice." "My decision was determined by..." "Well, because of the defeats," "I was so destroyed internally I said to myseld - why go on?" "Plus my scar, of course." "And the only way to exist seemed to be music." "Why?" "I don't know." "It's an inner thing." "Music moves me more than anything else." "It's an art which can be..." "I could come close to disliking it." "Because music can evoke, can provoke such misapprehensions." "By misapprehension I mean, this may be a bit daring of me, it's in the role music plays." "The same music that makes us cry, that can make us feel better, and I do believe it's ennobling, that can make us conquer death." "I am obsessed by the idea of death and only music can help me along, give me the will to live and fight this fear of death." "That's what music does for me." "Yet the same music that inspires me also inspired torturers, maybe glorifying an overblown ego" "in a kind of triumphant heroism." "This music which is a catalyst for noble and humane feelings may inflame a sense of triumph, evoke narcissistic feelings perhaps" "of rather dubious origins." "That's why I say music scares me." "Or rather it's an art that can assume a dangerous expression." "Yet, I can only say this to you, music is my means of escape from the fear of death." "Why is that?" "Maybe music is what defined us, the word was music before all else, or at least articulated sound and music is an articulated sound." "Is it simply standing upright and just one more thing that distinguishes man from beast?" "Maybe it's the metaphor of the soul because music, more than other arts," "can transport our soul." "Music is a complete mystery to me." "I have never been able, I can't explain it, but I know it's..." "It's a vector of something unique." "Even though I make music I'm no clearer on the subject." "Writing a piece is always a drama." "And as one is finished the next drama is already looming." "So it's a perpetual cycle" "but, let's say, it's not as terrible as if I didn't write at all." "Music justifies my existence more than anything else I could do." "It's a less of a vacuum, that's it."