Participation of the PArtiMus group in the Congress celebrating the composer’s 100th anniversary.

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Iannis Xenakis is one of the main referential composers for contemporary concert music. On the centenary of his birth, initiatives multiplied worldwide to celebrate the enduring presence of the Greek creator’s thought and art.

The Xenakis 22 Congress can be considered the most significant of the events related to this centenary, as it is coordinated by the two major universities associated with Xenakis’ artistic trajectory: the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Paris 8 University. Additionally, it enjoys the support of numerous partner institutions (The Friends of Xenakis Association, The University of the Peloponnese, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Ioannina, University of Thessaly, Lyriki Skini/Greek National Opera, ASKI [Contemporary Social History Archives, Athens], Stegi – Onassis Foundation, and the École française d’Athènes). The event brought together the foremost scholars of Xenakis’ poetics, including Benoît Gibson, Makis Solomos, Moreno Andreatta, and Gérard Assayag, among others.

One of the authors of the article “An attempt at extending Xenakis’ compositional design of Herma through computational tools”, Professor Pauxy Gentil-Nunes, was a member of the event’s scientific committee and also participated as a reviewer. The work was preceded by a course taught within the PPGM-UFRJ (Graduate Program in Music at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) during the 2021-1 term, involving the MusMat research group and composer/mathematician professors Carlos Almada (UFRJ), Pauxy Gentil-Nunes (UFRJ), Liduino Pitombeira (UFRJ), Hugo Carvalho (UFRJ), Stefanella Boatto (UFRJ), Petrucio Viana (UFF), Nei Rocha (UFRJ), and Rodolfo Coelho de Sousa (USP). The course was organized as a reinterpretation of Xenakis’ book “Formalized Music.”

The article proposes a reinterpretation of the compositional process of Iannis Xenakis’ “Herma,” using computational tools to examine both essential and auxiliary procedures related to the piece, and to suggest compositional applications that can be integrated into artistic projects. The authors are professors Pauxy Gentil-Nunes (Poetics of Musical Creation, UFRJ), Petrucio Viana (Logic, UFF), and Luan Simões (Master’s candidate in Computer Science, UFRJ). Their work focuses on issues related to set theory, primarily applied to the relationship between sets A, B, and C in Xenakis’ proposal, as well as results from other instances of the same compositional process. Several innovative systematic proposals are presented, and two computer codes were published concurrently: Herma Applet and Hermoser.

The complete article and all works presented at the Xenakis 22 Congress are available here.

The authors of the article were subsequently invited by the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) to participate as guest speakers at the event “Brazilian Tributes to the Iannis Xenakis Centenary,” where they presented the same work translated into Portuguese for the Unicamp community. The event featured the participation of Benoît Gibson and other Brazilian researchers in the field of musical analysis, including Adriana Lopes Moreira and Stéphan Schaub.