Review: [untitled] Author(s): Charles Shere Reviewed work(s): Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition by Iannis Xenakis

; Sharon Kanach Arts/Sciences: Alloys. The Thesis Defense of Iannis Xenakis by Iannis Xenakis ; Sharon Kanach Xenakis by Nouritza Matossian Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Sep., 1993), pp. 96-100 Published by: Music Library Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/898697 Accessed: 28/08/2009 13:29
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NOTES, September 1993

Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. By Iannis Xenakis. Revised ed. Additional material compiled and edited by Sharon Kanach. (Harmonologia Series, 6.) Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1992. [xiv, 387 p. ISBN 0-945193-24-6. $48.00.] Arts/Sciences: Alloys. The Thesis Defense of Ilannis Xenakis. By Iannis Xenakis. Translated by Sharon Kanach. (Monographs in Musicology, 3.) New York: Pendragon Press, 1985. [x, 133 p. ISBN 0-918728-22-3. $21.00.] Xenakis. By Nouritza Matossian. London: Kahn & Averill; White Plains, N.Y.: Pro/Am Music Resources, 1991, c1986. [271 p. ISBN 1-87108217-X (pbk.). $19.95.]
The reissue of the principal compilations in English of Iannis Xenakis's theoretical writings, with seventy pages of new material, is a serious event for scholars of both philosophy and music. But it is also a reminder of the serious problems inherent in this confused and curiously disorderly because the study compilation-curiously, of order and disorder, and perhaps of the tendency from the former to the latter, remains the preoccupation of this illustrious, original, and supremely dramatic composer. Xenakis's life and thought are adequately presented to the layman in Nouritza Matossian's enthusiastic biography, reviewed here when it first appeared several years ago (Notes 44 [1987]: 271-73). The book is now reissued, unchanged, in soft covers. The biography is eventful: Xenakis's childhood in Romania; the loss, when he was five years old, of his mother, who died giving birth to her only daughter after three sons; his participation in the Greek Resistance during World War II, and the shrapnel head he took, losing his left eye; his architectural training in Paris and apprenticeship to Le Corbusier; his constant interest in the cross-stimulations of philosophy, art, and science. His intelligence, knowledge, and dedication are daunting; and the sheer strength and sonority of his music are both memorable and instantly recognizable. With Edgard Varese, Carl Ruggles, Giacinto Scelsi, and a few others, he is what might be called a phenomenological composer, whose music, not content with the organization of sound, achieves an almost physical substance. One wants to know how such music is made; what experiences prepare its composer's aesthetic values; what methods he has worked out to enable its conception and notation. Alas, FormalizedMusic, while useful and frequently of great interest, resists virtually any but the most dedicated initiate. Within its covers, intercut, inelegantly presented, and occasionally repetitious, three books await the reader: manifestos, generalized theories, and specific techniques. The bulk of the fourteen chapters, of which four have been added to this expanded (but not revised) edition, comprises closely reasoned but obscurely expressed material requiring advanced skills in reading (and following) mathematical expressions capable of describing Xenakis's approach to musical organization through the principles of "stochastics," which "studies and formulates the law of large numbers ... the laws of rare events, the different aleatory procedures, etc." (p. 8). (Two of the new chapters first appeared, in different form, in Perspectives of New Music. The remaining two new chapters are computer programs: for the generation of "sieves" for determining number sequences, written in "C" by Gerard Marino from the composer's original in Basic; and for the generation of nonrecurring, nonlinear functions that can generate sound events, in the composer's Basic notation.) Such material is of great interest to a growing number of scholars and composers, who seek to ally the composition of music to an essentially deterministic and supremely analyzable series of operations. There are good reasons for this: above all, at present, the consequent utility of com-

Book Reviews puters as aids to the formal manipulation of musical content. But such language also obscures other aspects of Xenakis's thought and music, aspects that should be known by the greater public if his music is to assume its true place in the history of art, even of thought. For Xenakis is a more significant figure than a mere technical master, or even a pathbreaker into new technology. He is a visionary, and his artlike so much art of great impact-is inspired by the contemplation of the Sublime. And more than that: his art, and even, at times, his discussion of his art, hovers in a fascinating area whose import to the human condition is only beginning to be known (let alone understood), the area between (or in addition to) those of conscious and "unconscious" mind. Testimony to these two qualities is scattered throughout these books. It is often buried within pages of mathematical formulae, or merely hinted at in asides, or, more often, as assumptions introducing the analytical writing. One wishes for an editor who will finally force this testimony into its own form -a consistently stated Xenakian poetics. On the address to the Sublime there can be no question, for FormalizedMusic opens on the subject: Art, and above all, music has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks to draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect.... This is why art can lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people. (P. 1) On the second proposition, that Xenakis quite directly addresses a mental function that transcends the conventional distribution of sensory and intellectual activity into conscious and unconscious realms, the evidence is equally available if less forthrightly stated: "[M]usical action ... imperiously demands reflection ... [yet] when scientific and mathematical thought serve music, or any human creative activity, it should amalgamate dialectically with intuition. Man is one, indivisible, and total. He thinks with his belly and feels with his mind" (p. 181).

97 Xenakis thinks and writes, self-consciously, in the tradition of the great Greek intellectuals of the age of Pericles. He frequently refers to his work as formed within the pillars of the idealist Pythagoras, who could relate everything known by man to numbers, and the determinist Parmenides, who invented reasoned logical proofs in order to state his conviction that Being is all that exists, and therefore change and motion, for example, are illusory. Xenakis finds, in this area (though never expresses as such) the validation of digital description of reality, and especially of sound. But in the quotation just cited, on the dialectic of mathematics and intuition, first published in 1967 (and in English in 1970), he recalls the vocabulary of Homer-specifically, etor ("belly" or "guts") and noos (later nous) (variously translated, usually as "mind," but originally more precisely meaning "perception" or even "vision"). The evolution of these words and others-thumos ("rush," in the current slang sense, usually translated "courage"); phrenes ("lungs"); kradie ("quivering," then, through "beating," "heart"); and psyche("breath," then "life" in the sense of vitality)-is traced persuasively and at length by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousnessin the Breakdownof the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pages 257-77. Jaynes finds this linguistic evolution, in the five centuries or so separating the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey,a response to the sudden and striking and, at first, frightening awareness of consciousness-which resulted, among other things, in the disappearance of the gods who in former times had guided men and women in their daily activities. Pythagoras and Parmenides developed their systems in order to approach, analyze, and codify this new kind of mind-activity, consciousness, in a sort of unified-field theory explaining the possibility of being aware of one's awareness. Xenakis intends a similar investigation, with similarly epochal results: Thus the inquiry applied to music leads us to the innermost parts of our mind. Modern axiomatics disentangle once more, in a more precise manner now, the significant grooves that the past has etched on the rock of our being. These

98 mental premises confirm and justify the billions of years of accumulation and destruction of signs. But awareness of their limitation, their closure, forces us to destroy them. All of a sudden it is unthinkable that the human mind forges its conception of time and space in childhood and never alters it. Thus the bottom of the cave would not reflect the beings who are behind us, but would be a filtering glass that would allow us to guess at what is at the very heart of the universe. It is this bottom that must be broken up. Consequences: 1. It would be necessary to change the ordered structures of time and space, those of logic, . . . 2. Art, and sciences annexed to it, should realize this mutation. (FormalizedMusic, p. 241; emphasis and ellipsis original) Xenakis refers to this "annexation" of art and science very often; it exists, for him at the basis of music. "Music, by its very abstract nature, is the first of the arts to have attempted the conciliation of artistic creation with scientific thought. Its industrialization is inevitable and irreversible" (p. 133). The obligation of music to pursue this course, for Xenakis, is simply axiomatic. And so he chose, as the title of his "thesis defense" in pursuit of the doctoratd'Etat at the Sorbonne in 1976, Arts/Sciences:Alloys (alliages); and in the deliberations of his defense-in fact an extended conversation, erudite and often witty (though occasionally too elaborately so)-distinction is carefully made between "alloys" and "mergers." Xenakis states at the outset that his work has evolved "a sort of mosaic of hierarchical coherencies. At the hierarchy's summit I'd place philosophy . . . the impulse which pushes us toward truth, revelation, research, general quest, interrogation, and harsh systematic criticism, not only in specialized fields but in all possible domains" (Arts/Sciences: Alloys, pp. 7-8). Xenakis places the arts "at the head of man's activities" because, since they proceed in the three modes of strict and logical inference, theory-confronting and -challenging experiment, and immediate (and ultimately irrational) revelation, they "seep through all of his daily life" (pp. 8 and 4). In the table of "Correspondences [sic] Between Certain Developments in Music and Math-

NOTES, September

1993

ematics" appended to Arts/Sciences:Alloys, Xenakis traces the history of mutually inspired discoveries in the two fields. And though the two "poles" in another paragraph are Parmenides and his opponent, that apologist for chance Epicurus, Xenakis might as well be speaking of arts and sciences when he states that "[t]he mind of man should be able to travel back and forth constantly, with ease and elegance, through the fantastic wall of disarray, caused by irrationality, that separates determinacy from indeterminacy" (FormalizedMusic, p. 238). Or, as Jaynes would have it, that separates the left and right hemispheres of the brain-the left which has developed, in Broca's and Wernicke's areas, centers specialized for language and speech, and the right which in corresponding areas retains superiority in cognition, including, apparently, both intuitive cognition and "hallucination," as we customarily refer to events otherwise discussed as "revelatory." It seems clear that a certain kind of those epochal comcomposer-certainly posers whose work articulates the ongoing tradition of music, the Monteverdis, Bachs, Weberns-a certain kind of composer makes, or finds somewhere within himself, work that changes our perceptions of the structures of music, the ways sounds are related to one another, and therefore our understanding of the values in the details of music. And new metaphors result: music becomes "expressive" or "devout" or "logical" in manners thitherto meaningless. And the metaphors extend to our assessment of their times, just as our assessment of their times colors our response to their music. These composers have an oracular quality; their work "is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses" (Beethoven, according to Elizabeth Brentano in her letter to Goethe, quoted in Thayer's Life of Beethoven, rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964]: 495). Oracles are the refuge from uncertainty in the face of a change in the relationship of the two hemispheres, Jaynes says; certainly oracular art and music seems to be a cultural response to historical periods of stress. Xenakis, aware of the uniquely stressful nature of our own time-having given his left eye, one might say, to achieve that

Book Reviews awareness-writes frequently, if obscurely, of the need for revelation at this momentthe need to transcend the music that has evolved to this point. "What must we do in order to get rid of all of that [socioculturally derived conventions of thought], in order to establish fundamental thinking? The mathematicians and logicians of the nineteenth century showed us one way when they got rid of verbal mathematics and replaced it with symbolic mathematics. And it is in this manner that I have tried to see more clearly" [with his theories of stochastic music] (Arts/Sciences: Alloys, p. 87). "All that" is, in the composition of music, the received formulae, and methods of generating formulae, that had removed sounds from nature and subjected them to theories, whether modal, or tonal, or serial: Xenakis took nothing less for his selfassignment than the development of a method that could find and follow procedures-computational ones-without the imposition of recurring rules, and the domination they imply of subjective (because individually expressive) theory over objective reality. For while Xenakis's observation and aesthetic choices, like those of his teacher Olivier Messiaen, are rooted in Nature, as Francois-Bernard Mache touchingly demonstrates in "Xenakis et la nature" (L'Arc51 [1972]: 50-55), the one imperative, ultimately, for Xenakis, is originality, uniqueness. [E]ach event, like each individual on earth, is unique. But this uniqueness is the equivalent of death which lies in wait at every step, at every moment. Now, the repetition of an event, its reproduction as faithfully as possible, corresponds to this struggle against disappearance, against nothingness. .. . Unpredictability in thought obviously has no limits. On a first approach it would correspond to birth from nothingness, but also to disappearance, death into nothingness. At the moment, the Universe seems to be midway between these two chasms, something which could be the subject of another study. This study would deal with the profound necessity for musical composition to be perpetually originalphilosophiocally [sic],technically, aesthetically. (FormalizedMusic, p. 267)

99 These contemplations often lead Xenakis to speculate on the role of chance, and we have seen him refer to Epicurus as the one heroic spokesman for chance in his introduction of spontaneity into the atomic mechanics described by Democritus. In the challenges recorded in Arts/Sciences:Alloys, this concept becomes significant as it contributes to the important area of aesthetic choices or personal "style," an area Xenakis evades, then refuses to address. (P. 20: "I don't say everything, even if I sense or perceive it, because I don't know how to say it." P. 40: "In life, there are two ways of proceeding: one is to do things and the other is to analyze them. But the best analysis, for me, is to do things; in other words, I refuse analysis-psychoanalysis, if you prefer-as a method of introspection. If one gets involved in these domains, one doesn't know what is going to be discovered, and one risks falling into holes, dreadful traps.") Bernard Teyssedre persists, pointing out that Xenakis's music, favoring densities over sparseness, rules out fortuitous sounds, unlike, for example, John Cage's music. Xenakis: "Fine, and I'll tell you why. Very simply because we all have fortuitous sounds in our daily life. They are completely banal and boring. I'm not interested in reproducing banalities" (Arts/Sciences: Alloys, p. 95). Then Olivier Revault d'Allonnes takes up the thread, pointing out that on page 113 of FormalizedMusic Xenakis lists six kinds of events that can occur in Duel, a work for two orchestras, of which the sixth kind is silence, and that in the following "Table of Evaluations" he neglects any consideration of the sixth kind of event: "In summary, you don't like silence." Xenakis: "Silence is banal" (ibid.). Death; silence; dreadful traps: these are the elements Xenakis's poetics disdains. They are affirmative, not didactic or expiatory or even celebratory; phenomenological, not formulaic; ultimately Dionysian, not Apollonian. The simple hearing of his music suggests this, but it takes patient and even indulgent reading to allow his writing to confirm it. The situation is not helped in these books by translation, or editing, or design. Arts/Sciences: Alloys is translated in an appropriately conversational style, but hardly idiomatically. "Decorticated" (once even "decortiting") is

100 used, where "examined" would be quite as accurate. In Formalized Music, "causality" becomes "casuality," "abscissa"loses its final vowel; "referential" gains a double "r." These are trivial typographical errors, but lead one to wonder about accuracy of the many lines of symbolic logic (mathematical notation) and computer programs. And indeed the misprint noted by Paul Griffiths, in his review of the first English-language edition of Formalized Music (Musical Times 96 [1975]: 329) is reprinted without comment or correction in the new edition, which does however enter a new line on page 170, in a different typeface and skewed on the page, in order to incorporate a new endnote into chapter 6.

NOTES, September

1993

In the face of the complexities of the task, and the deference due Xenakis's position, these problems of production are more than offset by the heroics of publishing such commercially unrewarding volumes. The much more accessible nature of Nouritza Matossian's book, along with the increasingly popular recordings of Xenakis's music, will undoubtedly arouse interest in Xenakis's own books; they are essential to the literature on music of our time.

CHARLES SHERE

Berkeley,California

ANTIQUITY AND MIDDLE AGES in Ancient Music and Musicians London: Egypt. By Lise Manniche. British Museum Press, 1991. [142 p. ISBN 0-7141-0949-5. $10.95. (Available from: Dover Publications, 31 E. 2nd St., Mineola, NY 11501).] There has long been a need for a readable, semipopular book on ancient Egyptian music. This Lise Manniche has provided, managing to marshal a mass of information into ten well-organized chapters. Inevitably there is overlapping between the different sections. Many of the musical instruments had a variety of functions, so that "Music for the gods" is much mentioned also in "Military and processional music," while "Music and sexuality" inserts itself into more discussions, perhaps, than the evidence warrants. It is, of course, the nature of the surviving evidence that is crucial to any study of the subject. The author sums up the position well. Except for the meagrest hints, so far unintelligible, no musical notation has come down to us from ancient Egypt. Mathematical and medical treatises abound, to name but two technical subjects, and it is hard to believe that, if musical notation ever existed in ancient Egypt, archaeology should not by now have produced evidence for it. It is easy to credit, on the other hand, that musical instruction depended on demonstration and word of mouth, becoming more and more the preserve of jealous professionals. What remains, then? In the first place, a wealth of actual musical instruments, percussion, wind and strings, scattered widely among museum collections; but also scenes of musical activity carved and painted on tomb and temple walls, as well as statuettes and models of musicians at their labors. Manniche gives a useful survey of this material, pointing out at the same time that in the case of string instruments, for instance, nothing is known about the tension to which they were strung and very little about the string gauges. Most wind instruments have altered shape over the centuries so that the spacing of their holes can be used only as an approximate guide to their original position; and the reeds through which they were sounded in antiquity have survived hardly at all. There are many helpful quotations from such classical authors as Herodotus, Plato, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Athenaeus. These indicate what a wealth of Egyptian musical tradition survived into the Graeco-Roman world and what a strong impression it made for good or ill. The English versions used are mainly from the Loeb Classical Library, with such adjustments as seemed warranted by the author. Inaccuracies have crept in: Athenaeus, for instance, is here credited with citing a work by Juba on the "monaulos," whereas Juba's remarks occur