B ut of what essence are these materials made? This essence is the intelligence of man solidified in a way: intelligence that seeks, questions, infers, reveals, and foresees at all levels. Music and the arts in general seem necessarily to be a solidification—a ‘materialization’—of intelligence. Naturally, this intelligence, though humanly universal, is diversified by the individual: by talent that distances one individual from the others. Talent is therefore a kind of qualification—a gradation of the vigor and richness of intelligence. For intelligence is, fundamentally, the result—the expression of billions of exchanges, of reactions, of transformations of energy in the cells of the brain and the body. One could, taking astrophysics as a visual aid, say that intelligence is the form taken by the minimal acts of cells in their condensations and their movement—as happens with the particles of the suns, planets, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies born of or turned back into cold interstellar dust... To think up music as composer, craftsman, and creator, it is first necessary to study solfège, notation, music theory, and even an instrument over a long time. And since, in addition, musical creation is considered superfluous, very few people are able to attain it. Thus the individual and the society are deprived of the formidable power of free imagination that musical composition offers them. We are able to tear down this ‘iron curtain’, thanks to the technology of computers and their peripherals. The system that has succeeded at this ‘tour de force’ is the UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu)...”T he performance by International Contemporary Ensemble and Steve Schick of five major works—‘Psappha’, ‘Echange’, ‘Akanthos’, ‘Palimpseste’, and Xenakis’s final composition, ‘O-Mega’—is an opportunity not to be missed. It’s at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, tonight at 19:30. Anticipating this ICE performance got me to listening to the recordings I have of Xenakis’s music. I have never been lucky enough to hear a ‘live’ performance like this...
— Iannis Xenakis in a typically ‘expansive’ moment in the 1970s, quoted in ‘The Art of Music: Tradition and Change’ by William Christ and Richard DeLone.
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X enakis’s ‘Morsima/Amorsima’ score says that ‘moros’ = ‘fate’ and ‘amorsima’ = ‘that which does not come from fate’. It was composed on an IBM 7090 in Paris, in increments/revisions between 1956 and 1962, and it was, like Xenakis’s ‘Achorripsis’, supposedly entirely stochastic (random, computer-generated). To me, this beggars belief.
F ew have ever performed a deep-dive source-code review of what Xenakis programmed, nor compared what the 7090 generated to what Xenakis actually wrote down as a published score. Oh, yes, there are people who have ported the FORTRAN code in Xenakis’s book to FTN95, and, yes, the code does run—it does produce things. It has calls to the built-in FORTRAN random-number function; it modifies global variables and accesses the system clock to accomplish a modest degree of runtime indirection and aleatorics, in the limited ways that the FORTRAN language was (and is) able to support.
B ut these source-codes do not produce things that have any close resemblance to any composition that Xenakis actually published. And the in-line commenting of the source code is terrible. The rats' nests of GOTO statements upon GOTO statements are nearly impenetrable-incomprehensible, even by the not-so-great software engineering standards of his day. A static analyzer would be the thing to use with this wild-hare code, not manual ‘desk analysis’! PRQA used to sell an analyzer called QAfortran™. I don’t know whether this is still available. I don’t see it on their website...
W e have lots of software things today that serve as composition-aids... PWGL, Vielklang, Max/MSP, Jitter, harmonization plug-ins in Finale® and other notation applications… all sorts of things. And in the 2000s [almost] nobody goes around touting their use of composition software in the way that Xenakis did. By the same token, [almost] nobody is embarrassed to say that they do use them, or to forthrightly confess the methods by which the tools contribute to the compositional process.
X enakis’s code supposedly causes the [specifications for the scored—] sounds to be generated as a directed-graph (digraph). First the [random] sequence of pitches is generated, with each note’s time of specified onset—it’s time coordinate. Then its timbre is generated (the instrument that is to play it; and its articulation: arco, pizzicato, glissando, and so on). Then the velocity of attack. Then the gradients in loudness (dynamic changes in loudness during the time interval the note is sounded... legato, accent, marcato ^, staccato, slur, portato/martelé ... sforzando, subito whatever) and in pitch (vibrato or not, glissando beginning and ending, shakes’ frequency and pitch-width). Then the duration. Not sure whether the program had anything in it to specify the (random) mode of releasing each note.
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