Iannis Xenakis: Regard, disregard; liberation.

INDULGE MY REMINISCENCE: one Fall day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was sipping Drambuie and doing calculus homework with the radio on. The oleaginous announcer's voice turned into--Metastasis! My head snapped up from the homework. The sounds were an entirely new musical world, totally and instantly engaging. But in fact it wasn't the sounds themselves that felt so different--the glissandi, for example. The sounds were put together with an audacious disregard for all compositional conventions--but this was not simply "bad boy" music either. What riveted my attention was the new regime of musical organization which so patently inhered, obvious on the surface but not limited to the surface of the music. The newness was about time at least as much as it was about pitch. The pitch-and-time blackboard had been wiped clean, then rewritten.

It was the music, as music, that captured and retained one's attention, but the hint of a novel--and a "formal"--means of underlying organization had a fascination of its own. At the end of the Sputnik and H-bomb era, spurred by our fear of annihilation, technology was valorized throughout our American culture: a techno-mathematical hegemony. The value of formal methods went without saying. It was natural to try to be formal.

In 1966, now a bassoon student at Juilliard I had obtained a copy of Xenakis's book, Musiques Formelles, and a tutor who was a French graduate student in mathematics. We went through the book, but ultimately I was disappointed. My tutor and I could not make perfect sense of all of the mathematics in the book. To the extent that we could--this is an interesting book of early essays by Xenakis--the formalisms did not account for the musical part of the music. That is, yes, there was a relation between the mathematics and the music, but the excitement generated by the music was not, in turn, generated by the mathematics behind the music. Between the mathematics and the music was a crucial intervention by Xenakis-the-composer. The mathematics was not irrelevant--Xenakis used mathematics for conceptual tools, and with these tools, he fashioned the music. In the end, the music was so good because Xenakis was a good composer, not because of any underlying formalism.

There is a sense of wildness in Xenakis's music which is part of its liberating effect. Initially at least, Xenakis used stochastic laws as part of his set of formal tools. Xenakis was fascinated by phenomena described by such laws, turbulent throngs which now would probably be described by flavors of "chaos theory" still unknown in the 1950s. I believe that it was not any faith in the mystical powers of "chance"--or any concomitant letting-go of oneself, ecstasis, or abnegation of will--which attracted Xenakis to stochastic laws, but rather a positively plastic working with stochastically describable matter. Large numbers of things, such as people or molecules, behave differently from just a few of those things. Such collective behavior is often bimodal. A gas at a certain temperature, filling a volume, uses its energy within those bounds, an energetic stasis; but a gas rushing through a bottleneck to fill a volume exhibits turbulence. Stasis and change.

For an individual, there is something frightening about the behavior of collectivities of which one may, will-he nil-he, form a part. Danger is exciting.

I once lived in a Greek village which had no streets. Every house was oriented in some way that appealed to its builder, but, apparently, no builder cared to align any house with any other house. A fundamental anarchy. Xenakis was a Greek, and a Communist (in the Greek and French contexts), who as a student had lived through violent social turbulence. This ...