Iannis Xenakis's Persepolis is a focused study of one of the 20th century’s most imposing electroacoustic works and the dense web of history around it. Musicologist Dr. Aram Yardumian uses Iannis Xenakis’s 1972 composition Persepolis as a lens through which to view the composer’s life, politics and aesthetic, as well as the shifting fortunes of the Iranian monarchy that commissioned the piece. Originally created for the Shiraz Arts Festival, overseen by Empress Farah Pahlavi, Persepolis was conceived as a symbolic homage to Persian history – a vast, multi‑channel sound environment presented amid the ruins of an ancient capital. Its reception was as polarised as the festival itself: hailed by some as visionary, rejected by others as overbearing or opaque.

Yardumian traces Xenakis’s path from his involvement in the Greek Resistance during the Second World War, through injury, exile and resettlement in Paris, to his dual career as architect and composer, including his work with Le Corbusier. He shows how Xenakis’s distinctive thinking about structure, probability, mass and politics informed Persepolis, whose non‑harmonic shifts in texture and density can be heard as both overwhelming and meticulously calibrated. Listeners and critics at the time, unfamiliar with such an approach on this scale, often did not know how to categorise what they were hearing; the book revisits those reactions while offering analytical tools to understand the piece on its own terms.

Set against the backdrop of the lavish 1971 celebrations of the Persian Empire’s 2,500th anniversary and the growing unrest that would culminate in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iannis Xenakis's Persepolis also examines how art can become entangled with power, spectacle and backlash. Yardumian considers how Persepolis has been interpreted in the decades since – from accusations of complicity to readings that emphasise its abstract, even resistant qualities – and how its stark sonic landscape continues to challenge ideas of what political music might sound like. The result is both a biography in miniature and a case study in the ways a single composition can resonate far beyond its premiere.