Iannis Xenakis citations

“The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.”

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Iannis Xenakis

Formalized Music

“Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one…”

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Iannis Xenakis

Introductory notes for Diatope performance, 1978 http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/148xenakis.html

“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 [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal.”

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Iannis Xenakis

Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, ISBN 1576470792