Persepolis Polytope: Resolving Fictitious Attributions from a Persianate Perspective

Iannis Xenakis’s relations with Iran’s royal family resulted in some political troubles in the artist’s already troubled political life. Criticism and reports on the Shah’s human rights violations increased in 1970s Europe while Xenakis, a leftist revolutionary, had a seemingly prosperous association with that aggressively hardline monarchy. What made the association more troublesome was Persepolis Polytope (1971). This paper concerns the polytope, Xenakis’s most celebrated Iran related work. It contributes to two understudied aspects of the polytope, i.e. how Iranians received and understood the polytope, and a historiographical conflation that exists in the field. The latter demonstrates that almost all the literature around Iran’s Imperial Celebrations and a considerable share of the scholarship about Xenakis have conflated Persepolis Polytope with Persepolis Son et Lumière. This completely different audiovisual program was premiered during the Imperial Celebrations and had no connection with Xenakis whatsoever. Some scholars claim that Xenakis created Persepolis son et Lumière while some argue that Xenakis’s Persepolis Polytope was premiered during the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. However, Xenakis Persepolis Polytope was premiered during the August 1971 Shiraz Art Festival, not the October 1971 Imperial Celebrations that offered Persepolis Son et Lumière.
Undoubtedly, the location, similarity in names, and closeness in dates between the two events are innocent contributors to this conflation. However, scrutinising the conflation leads to more fundamental problems. For example, Empress Farah Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran and the primary patron of Xenakis’s Iran-related activities, was still asserting on her official website that Xenakis was the composer of the October 1971 event. Such scandalous mistruths like Xenakis performing for royalties during the ultimate propaganda of the Shah, the Imperial Celebrations, made him seem more politically biased than in reality. Besides, Iranians’ reaction to the polytope was very adverse. Not many works performed in the Shiraz Art Festival, if any at all, received such critical feedback. Soon, the negative reactions extended to Iranians living in Paris, where the opponents of the Shah criticised Xenakis for collaborating with a human rights abuser. Reacting to critical remarks, Xenakis first wrote an open letter explaining he was solely interested in art and culture. A few years later, though, he wrote another letter and refused to take any further commission from the royal family or participate in the Shiraz Art Festival.
The paper begins by describing Persepolis Son et Lumière. Afterwards, it categorises the conflated arguments around Persepolis Polytope and Persepolis son et Lumière by reviewing the literature from 1998 to 2021. Then, the paper builds on an interview to show how the conflation started. This section also proposes three scenarios about why the piece was attributed to Xenakis, among all artists. This research is an archival work and pivots around Archives Famille Xenakis, print media published in 1971, and an interview with Loris Tjeknavorian, the composer of Persepolis son et Lumière.