Xenakis.(Iannis Xenakis)

IN HIS BOOK The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978) Jacob Brownowski has written:

I believe that we need to review the whole of our natural philosophy in the light of scientific knowledge that has arisen in the last fifty years. It really is pointless to go on talking about what the world is like (as much of philosophy does) when the modes of perception of the world which are accessible to us have so changed in character. And we become more and more aware that what we think about the world is not what the world is but what the human animal sees of the world. (1) Those who are deeply involved with the arts of our time will understand immediately the significance of Bronowski's deceptively simple observation. If recent art, music and literature teaches us anything it is that our understanding of the world is a reflection of the way in which we appropriate the things around us; that, in the end, what we understand is not what we perceive of the world, but rather, how we perceive it.

Composition, of course, is an act of exploration. What this exploration reveals (as it is undertaken time and time again by innumerable composers) is just how complex and seemingly contradictory our perceptions can be. Each new discovery reveals previously hidden dimensions. Each new work reveals the world from a different perspective, and represents one of many ways to give it meaning.

With the death of Iannis Xenakis on February 4, 2001, the music world lost one of its greatest explorers. Truly, for Xenakis, the process of composing was a process of investigation and discovery, an ongoing search for new sonic materials as yet untested as musical matter, and for new tools with which to engage those new materials within the artistic enterprise. I can think of few composers of the twentieth century who have so radically changed our way of thinking about music. In every one of his works we sense a passion for discovery, the discovery of previously hidden or even completely unimagined facets of our aural experience. When we allow his music into our lives, it rewards us in rich and unexpected ways.

Of all the changes that have swept across our musical landscape, it seems to me that none has been more significant than the simple fact that what we now accept as material for making music includes virtually anything that we hear in our daily lives. The joy of bringing new sounds into the world of music is truly one of discovery; the discovery of new and previously unimagined connections between things always believed unconnected. As we embrace the full diversity of sonic matter in the world and seek to integrate this diversity into our creative lives, we reconfigure our culture itself. For almost fifty years Xenakis's music has vivified this fact.

In order to work with wholly new types of sounds (new to music, at least) a composer must find new tools with which he can engage those sounds. Hence the famous (infamous, to some) mathematical tools that Xenakis uses to work with the materials of his sonic universe. Of course, his music is no more "mathematical" than Mozart's (or Babbitt's for that matter). After all, a sound wave is a sound wave. But new sounds engender new compositional tools. In turn, the creation of new tools leads to original musical designs and ultimately to a fresh evaluation of the ways that the world appears to cohere, even if only momentarily. As poet and literary critic Charles Bernstein has put it, form is "how any one of us interprets what's swirling so often incomprehensively about us . . . ." (2) Our culture provides a framework through which we experience and interpret the world. It is this framework that shapes our understanding of the world. As our materials and tools change, this framework changes and our entire worldview takes on new dimensions. I find it impossible to hear one of Xenakis's works and then not attend to the sounds of every day life in new ways; not just the sounds themselves, but the ways that I perceive those sounds. The world, at least the part that we hear, becomes malleable after Xenakis; we feel that we can shape it as we wish. In this sense his music is truly empowering.

Xenakis's work has been immensely important to me as a composer, teacher and scholar. Indeed, my own music has been deeply influenced by that of Xenakis. Certainly, as with many others, I can cite the influence of his techniques, his early explorations with computer technology, and his philosophical outlook. But there are also more specific influences. Whenever I use pitches in a piece (a truly rare occurrence these days) I instinctively feel the need to add noise of some kind to that piece. If I don't, I feel that I have cheated nature--the listener included. (I am far from alone in feeling this impulse.) Of course, we know that what we loosely label "noise" is really just another manifestation of what we call "pitch." At one point in music history the boundary for Western music consisted of a set of twelve pitch classes. Thanks to composers like Xenakis, such boundaries seem to have disappeared; we hear every sound of a musical work in the context of the entire world of sounds. In addition, when designing a composition I also find it essential to embrace fully the seemingly opposite worlds of determinism and indeterminism. (Again, I am far from alone in feeling this impulse.) Thanks to composers such as Xenakis we are today fully cognizant of the fact that there is no single, optimal conceptualization of musical design. Materials have multiple implications and invite a wide range of creative responses. Each new composition arises from some integration of these multiple responses and, hence, becomes an expression of the very existence of such multiplicity. No single perspective will suffice for the creation of music today. For me, as a composer, this has been one of the great lessons of Xenakis's work.