VART3456: Reading Response - Iannis Xenakis and John Cage "Two Sides of a Tossed Coin"

I've always been aware of some of the significance in the work of Iannis Xenakis. I've marvelled at his glorious, psychotic, dischordant compositions and the aesthetic beauty of his notation systems. Though cacophonous, unsettling in parts and seemingly arbitrary - there is a grander sense of order that is tangible, the details of which having been beyond mine and realistically, outside of academia - most listener's comprehension. The detail of Xenakis' compositional method in the construction of Pithoprakta outlined in this essay not only developed my understanding of Xenakis' almost mythological status amongst academics and contemporary experimental electronic musicians, but my understanding of the grander significance in the unique role of stochastic processes in art/music as a means to enrich our understanding and perception of not the nuances of music or sound, but of the utterly intangible constructs yeilded by all of the discplines of science, mathematics, physics et al.

I wholeheartedly uphold the argument made by Xenakis paraphrased within the essay that "in certain cases chance operations could represent a composer's intentions more closely than any other compositional process." The common notion that aleatoric methodology is arbitrary, indolent and ultimately inconsequential is not one that I share. My obessesion with the paradigm that encompasses, but is not defined by the concept of aleatoricism was formulated not through research but by my own creative practice, and before this - the music I found myself being affected by most deeply.

The essay first posits Xenakis and Cage as opposing poles in the spectrum of compositional methodology then uses Cage's postulation in the opening quote - that he and Xenakis could be in fact approaching the same objective through different means - as a catalyst to explore the merit of this through the analysis and comparison of Xenakis' Pithoprakta and Cage's Fontana Mix in great technical detail. The author draws a parallel between the two composers in their concept of time, both having a developed instrinsic, detailed understanding of the mechanics of time itself that were not compatible with conventional metronomic notions of meter in a musical sense. This was formed by the observation (particularly by Cage) that the perception of time in a musical context is able to be manipulated  - thereby rendering standard metering to be in many respects obsolete and mistakenly upheld as a fundamental compositional construct. In many ways it became Cage's mission to, in the author's words, "..to do away with clock time.." thus many of his pieces are primarily reflections and explorations of this.


The essay touches on the irony inherent the necessity of rules and structure to effectively develop aleatoric process where the intent is to manufacture chaos. Anyone who has explored aleatoric methodology in a meaningful context can testify to the absurd paradox demonstrated here.

In the instance of Cage's Fontana Mix the objective was in the author's words, "suspend the flow of time" whereas, I would argue that this is not the most accurate choice of words to describe Cage's intent with this piece. I would argue that is was Cage's intent to suspend not the flow of time but in fact subvert time itself.  We commonly refer to quite simplistic absolutist notions when using the verb Suspend in contextual relation to the concept of Time, considering time to be in either a binary state of either ON or OFF. This illustrates what an absurdly simplistic comprehension of this concept we still possess. Time, like most elements of perception is entirely relative.

The lengths that Cage went to in his compositional process to subvert linear causality were as detailed and methodical as the stochastic methods employed by Xenakis in In measures 53 through 60 of Pithoprakta. Neither composer approached their objective with an intent that could be seen as remotely arbitrary. Cage systematically removed emergent bias from his probability tables that determined the sounds used and the event durations in the Fontana mix, thus eliminating causality and subverting Einsteinian relativistic notions of time. Xenakis employed a framework from theoretical physics used to explain the mechanics of the properties of matter itself (in this instance gas) in a very decisive, direct, procedural methodology that sonified this fundamental concept of everyday experience (how the temperature of air is constructed on a molecular level) through an orchestra. When in the context of the almost entirely imperceptible domain of theoretical physics the implications of this are deeply profound. This section of Pithoprakta can be seen more as a landmark scientific text than a musical composition. By examining the mechanics of time itself, deconstructing it to the essential elements of cause and effect and thus highlighting the competing dichotomy of the temporaral framework of Newtonian concepts and relativistic concepts of Einstein, Xenakis manages to demonstrate that each exist entirely independently and illustrates them both imaginatively and succinctly by using a non-recursive process to compose these 7 measures populated by musical events that are causally unrelated - in the author's words, "During the 18.5 seconds of Newtonian time needed to play this passage, Einsteinian time stands still." The implementation of Boltzmann's formula through a developed probability based procedural composition system on an orchestra of human performers renders this piece no less profound even purely in the historical context of musical achievement.