The impact that music produces often exceeds our rational
methods of investigation. Movements are created inside you,
you can be conscious of them or not, you can control them or not, they are
in you""
Xenakis, interviewed by Lyon, 1974.
“Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or
hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform
rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it
spreads towards the tail, replacing the rest. A wave of transition thus passes from
the head to the tail. The clamor fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and
rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity.
Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect
rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also
spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns
and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The
crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a
detonating calm, full of despair, dust, and death. The statistical laws of these
events, separated from their political or moral context, are the same as those of the
cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from complete order sive
manner. They are stochastic laws.”
Xenakis, "Free Stochastic Music"
Xenakis, reputed composer and architect mentored by Le Corbusier,
created a new sonic paradigm that ended the hegemony of mid-20th-Century serial music
by adopting a much more complex approach to composition and sound synthesis.
He modeled his music according to mathematical formulas from physics and statistics which
he believed to be the basis for "the explanation of the world, and consequently the sonic phenomena".
He specifically relied on the law of large numbers,
which often revealed "an asymptotic evolution towards a stable state (stochos)".
Rather than through religion, emotions of tradition,
Xenakis thought that science was the only way to reach a universal truth.(Xenakis, interview 1996)
This truth comprised not only the natural world, but the human cultural world as well.
Mathematical stochastic processes could according to Xenakis also be applied to other fields like human history,
and the study of other arts. For example, the Poisson distribution that he used in "Pithoprakta"
was formulated by Poisson in the 19th century to theorize about the number of wrongful convictions in a given country.
Math became a creative tool for creating unheard sounds and a new musical era.
However, Xenakis' underlying epistemology was not so different from the serialist composers:
that one can achieve universality, not through religion, not through emotions or
tradition, but through the sciences. Through a scientific way of thinking" (interviewed by Varga, 1996, 47).