Among the intellectual achievements produced by Xenakis during his lifetime, one may contain his greatest ambition: “formalised music”. This is the title of one of his many writings on music from the 1960s. By “formalised music”, Xenakis generally meant the ability to structure an idea according to the stages required to realise it.
In other words, formalising a musical idea means first determining priorities, then hierarchies, then functions, applying those functions, making choices and carrying out operations. For Xenakis, formalising an idea meant determining a system capable of generating or realising the idea that had been conceived.
I never had the opportunity to meet Iannis Xenakis and directly ask him questions touched closely by formalised thought: the creative act, the relationship between inspiration and rational thought, calculation and gesture. The importance of this aesthetic position is often ignored when considering his vast output. Yet precisely through this position—and only through it—a genuine distinction emerges between system and realisation, model and application, percept and concept. Xenakis might have recognised himself in the statement: “Any application of a model is always limited in relation to the model that generated it.” He often maintained that any musical application could be considered a special case of his compositional technique.
My musical experience, at twenty-nine, can only learn from Xenakis’s music and observe how much the current landscape has changed compared with his contemporaries Boulez, Berio and Stockhausen. In that splendid generation, thought and craft always mingled, producing not only the masterpieces we know but also profound musical theory. Relationships between music and other disciplines, space and sound, musical and graphic gesture strongly converged in Xenakis, turning many of his projects into research laboratories in which several disciplines fused.
One of his principles—the subject of his thesis—was precisely that arts and sciences should be alloys: fused together, not confused, as people too often imagine. Serial thought is often considered one of the most complex approaches used by composers in different countries during the same historical period. Xenakis demonstrated, in compositional practice as well as theory, not only serial music’s implicit inconsistencies but above all its relative complexity compared with fully formalised music. Consider UPIC, and the vigour with which he never ceased investigating calculable and “free” structures in music.
Formalised musical thought places Xenakis among those pursuing musical research, rather than merely musical craftsmanship. Once musical research is dissociated from producing new sounds by computer, it can exist only within thought belonging to formalisation. Xenakis undoubtedly represents one of its highest levels of awareness, and his compositional technique one of the most brilliant realisations of contemporary systems.
Perhaps one day groups of composers will return who can not only have their music performed in a concert hall but also discuss artistic content together. Perhaps among our contemporaries we will again find composers able to discuss architecture, philosophy and mathematics as if discussing a Bach fugue. We will discover a new generation expert in generative systems, formalised music and complex structures: composers writing books of music theory and capable of raising music to the status of a university discipline, not by a ministry’s decree, but through an indisputable reality and collective necessity.
Iannis Xenakis was all this: a man of interdisciplinary culture, musician, intellectual, mathematician, philosopher and engineer.
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi