We met at the twenty-second Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1978. Five years had passed since the interview with Witold Lutosławski which had given me the idea of inviting composers to an imaginary roundtable and putting to them the first question. Xenakis’s unexpected presence in Warsaw provided me with a welcome opportunity for an interview. In answering, or rather, evading my first question, Xenakis reported on an experience that gave me the idea for the second one:

Metastasis, that starting point of my life as a composer, was inspired not by music but rather by the impression gained during the Nazi occupation of Greece. The Germans tried to take Greek workers to the Third Reich— and we staged huge demonstrations against this and managed to prevent it. I listened to the sound of the masses marching toward the center of Athens, the shouting of slogans and then, when they came upon Nazi tanks, the intermittent shooting of the machine guns, the chaos. I shall never forget the transformation of the regular, rhythmic noise of a hundred thousand people into some fantastic disorder … I would never have thought that one day all that would surface again and become music: Metastasis. I composed it in 1953–54 and called it a starting point because that was when I introduced into music the notion of mass … Almost everybody in the orchestra is a soloist, I used complete divisi in the strings which play large masses of pizzicati and glissandi. In other words, I do not use the term “mass” in a sociological sense.

Another experience of my youth dates from the time immediately preceding the war. I used to make outings to the countryside near Athens. I would take my bicycle, select a spot to erect my tent and listen to the sounds of nature. Crickets, for instance: their chirping was coming from every direction and was changing all the time. Those are also mass sounds, you see? But I also liked listening to the wind and the sea or the rain as it was lashing at the side of the tent.

How about birds?

No, I do not think so. I like them but birds sing melodic patterns and they do not interest me.