Iannis Xenakis: Regard, disregard; liberation.

Publication: Perspectives of New Music

Publication Date: 01-JAN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Washington

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...

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