“I think it’s time to listen…”.

Exhibition at the Benaki Museum / Gikas Gallery

Institute of Greek Music Heritage

25.04.2024 – 21.07.2024

On three floors of the Benaki Museum / Gikas Gallery develops the exhibition “I think it’s time to listen…” organized by the Institute of Greek Music Heritage.

Among the other “residents” of the building, 11 musical personalities are highlighted who belong to the same generation and whose work shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century. Vamvakaris, Theodorakis, Konstantinidis, Mitropoulos, Xenakis, Xenos, G.A. Papaioannou, Sicilianos, Skalkotas, Tsitsanis, Hatzidakis are the musicians who, serving different musical genres, defined the modern musical history of Greece. Stavros Xarchakos, a living emblematic personality of our contemporary musical culture, “talks” with them, recounts his memories of his creative association with the generation that inhabits the floors of the Gallery, while for the first time documents from his life and work are presented, before they make their way to the creation of an archive.

“I gave you rose water to drink, sheet music, poetry by Nikos Gatsos, music by Mikis Theodorakis. Donated by Agathi Dimitrouka, Benaki Museum / Gikas Gallery

With the help of new technologies, the visitor will listen to musical samples of the composers, watch older interviews, remember the friendly relations and collaborations between the composers.

As the curator of the exhibition, Erato Koussoudaki, stressed, the exhibition aspires to “give a nudge” to the visitor to refer to the discotheque, the library and the internet to search and remember the work of the creators, which is not a museum exhibit, but continues to be alive through the influences on contemporary musicians.

Snapshot of an original video clip created for the needs of the IGMH’s museum intervention in the permanent collections of the Gikas Gallery, which visitors will be able to watch next to the showcase of each of the 11 composers. These video clips offer us the opportunity to come into contact with musical samples of the 11 composers’ work, to watch them in snippets of interviews, to discover the creative relationships between them and how younger artists have been inspired by their work.

The INSTITUTE OF GREEK MUSIC HERITAGE (IGMH), a member of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), is an innovative scientific institute with a public benefit character. It aims at collecting, archiving and digitizing musical documents (scores, printed and digitized archives, books, e-books, audiovisual & photographic material, ethnographic material, discography, press, theses), concerning music as an Art and as a Science.