4 July 1992, Delphi
Computer Music Conference/Festival
PART I
Thanassis Rikakis: It's definitely a great honor for us to have a very distinguished line of speakers here at this conference. We're very, very thankful that they're here and we're looking forward to an interesting discussion. The form of the discussion will be as follows: Mr. Mâche, Mr. Lansky, and Mr. Reynolds [composer and producer of first custom-designed AC3, Dolby 5.1 DVD, WATERSHED], in that order, will have a question for Iannis Xenakis [author of Formalized Music], and then they will go around once more. So, it will be in the form of an interview. Once that has progressed and has become very interesting, I expect, we will try to open the discussion to questions from the floor. Without any further delay, therefore, I would like to ask Mr. François-Bernard Mâche to pose his first question.
François-Bernard Mâche: On parle anglais, non?
Iannis Xenakis: ...soviétique.
Mâche: Well, I think I have to speak in English, because it's easier for the translators. Yesterday, I was making a lecture, and I had the idea of invoking the god Apollon as an example of what I was saying about the relation between instrument and computer. I noticed that Apollon plays the lyre, but that he is not the inventor of the lyre, the inventor being Hermes. I might add that here in Delphi, Apollon rules for nine months, but the three last months of the year are under the law of Dionysus. So, there are two gods for music and one instrument-maker involved in this quotation, and I should like to ask you: Who is your god in music, Apollon, Dionysus (yes, I am addressing you [Xenakis]), or Hermes? Or, any other.
Xenakis: I think I will start with the goddess Aphrodite. [laughter and applause]
Mâche: I like music from the sea, I also like Aphrodite, but she's not properly in charge...
Xenakis: No. This is anti-feminist, what you are saying.
Mâche: Well, the choice I offered you is already wide enough! It's between the god who invented the instrument, the god who uses it most of the time and best of all, and another god who has also some claim to be the god of music, Dionysus.
Xenakis: You prefer Dionysus?
Mâche: No, no. I'm asking what is your preference.
Xenakis: You see, there were other musicians that defied Apollon, and they were killed by him. So, he is a killer. He is not a good musician only, but he's...
Mâche: That's right.
Xenakis: Whereas, Dionysus also killed - Pentheus. That was because he was not a believer. And he was not a musician anyway.
Mâche: The same problem. He killed. All the gods killed.
Xenakis: All the gods, yes.
Mâche: But I think it's safe. They have to kill some, to punish.
Xenakis: Yes. You have to punish, yes. The gods have to punish.
Mâche: You agree.
Xenakis: No. No, I don't agree. [laughter] This is why I do not believe in gods or whatever. Do you?
Mâche: Ah, yes - especially in Greek gods, who are really efficient.
Xenakis: There is always a way with the Greek gods to get away, whatever you do. If some god is bad to you, you can ask another god, like a favorite, or something.
Mâche: Without any reference to the gods, do you think that a composer must be also an instrument-maker now, with the computer?
Xenakis: Ah, the computer. Not necessarily. I think that the computer brought something which is basically different from what the instrumental, traditional music had. That is, the way to go to the tiniest unit of information, that is, to the bit that is making the sound. But the sound, what is it? It is not just one event, it might be the whole music, a Beethoven Symphony; for me, it's "the sound." The tiniest sound is already a complicated, complex - could be - complex thing that necessitates all sorts of operations to produce it. And the computer gives us this possibility which did not exist before.
Therefore, composing music has many layers. One more with computers, which is the fundamental, ground level, let's say. And then sounds, more or less complicated, and the chaining of the sounds, how you line them up and how you transform them, then polyphony, kind of, orchestration, the architecture of the piece. So from the tiny bit to, not an hour - it's too long - let's say thirty minutes of music: it's a whole bridge of thought that you need to know to produce music today. Difficult, of course. You don't agree?
Rikakis: I don't want to jump ahead of Paul Lansky who has the second question, but I'm sure you [Mâche] have some thoughts on this issue. You had some last night that were fairly strong. Would you like to address a second question or would it be related to this issue which has been discussed?
Xenakis: Look here, I answered a question and I want a reaction to what I said. [laughter]
Rikakis: I think you're not getting away. I tried to save you, but I think you're not getting away here.
Mâche: Well, in fact, what I was saying yesterday was rather different. I pointed out the danger of being an instrument-maker for a composer because he spends much time, and you know that you have been spending much time on this work lately. You succeed because you are also a mathematician, which I am not. I suggested that musicians who are not really fit for that work should be very careful before starting it because not only could they waste their time but also they could lose their real purpose, just like Stravinsky. He was playing piano and was fascinated by his own fingers, so he stopped playing. If you are fascinated by the computer, you may stop composing.
Xenakis: Of course, you must not be fascinated by the computer. It's a tool. You must be fascinated perhaps with what you have in mind. If you don't have anything in mind, you cannot be fascinated.
Mâche: Then we agree. I agree completely.
Xenakis: But the computer has to be like a tool and not like a goddess or a god - (goddess is better). And besides that, mathematics is a matter of culture. And I think that musicians who do know about physics today, astrophysics and things like that - not at all - or the tools of mathematics, these are passed by. By what? By the wide interests of their brains, the importance, the thinking possibilities of their brains. They don't have the mental tools to develop whatever they have.
Mâche: You think music itself cannot develop proper mental tools?
Xenakis: Yes, but this is not sufficient. Music always has been, since ancient times, at least, something very close to rational thinking and to mathematics. You know that, don't you? For instance, the Guido d'Arezzo way of writing music which was already in the writing of Byzantine music - after the alphabetical writing of ancient times - was a two-dimensional design for the sound: pitch versus time. And that was much before Erasmus [Desiderius Erasmus, 1466?-1536] started thinking in that way - and also Descartes with analytic geometry - so it is a fantastic step to put together two dimensions that have nothing to do together - did I say so? Yes, I did say so. They have to do with one another a lot; but as a substance, they are absolutely foreign to each other. What they have in common is the structure, the mental structure, because they are additive groups: both time spans and intervals. So, at that time, music was in front of scientific thought or mathematical thought, which became important later on.
Another example is polyphonic pattern, the melodic patterns that are read [in retrograde] in two dimensions, going from left to right then right to left. Then you take the inversion of the intervals and the retrograde of the inversion. Which makes a very important group [fourth order group] that Felix Klein discovered. (No, it was perhaps Évariste Galois [French mathematician].) It is the very important fourth order group, named by Felix Klein, a German mathematician. So, you see, there are many things that happened because of music, but were not known by musicians themselves...
Mâche: But look, Iannis...
Xenakis: ...because they had a poor understanding of things, except for Bach, maybe, Johann Sebastian Bach, worked with mathematical tools, kind of.
Mâche: ...you are quoting music which can appear, to some extent, as a demonstration of mathematical laws. There are musics which have no intervals; there are musics which cannot be treated by numbers because nothing is measurable.
Xenakis: I agree with you. What I said is only part of the musical reality of mathematics. But this means that we have such things in our heads. There are other layers which are absolutely impossible to grasp because you don't have even the words for them. For instance, I like the music of Johannes Brahms. Why? His harmony and his orchestration and his polyphony are more or less traditional, but he has other layers interest in what he did.
Mâche: And do you try to formalize this aspect which basically is not formalized?
Xenakis: No. Because maybe in perhaps two or three generations there would be some new tools, words, or definitions and one could start analyzing this. I don't say that everything can be mathematized or put into rational thinking. I don't say that, never. I'm sorry, you have misunderstood.
Mâche: No, no, I didn't say that you said it.
Rikakis: I think maybe this time I could get into the conversation. Next question, please.
Paul Lansky: Yesterday, François-Bernard was raising some very important and interesting questions about the nature of the computer with respect to the development of music history. An essential point which he raised which I think is worthy of discussion is whether it actually is a fundamental breakthrough in musical conception. I sometimes think it's not and I sometimes think it is. I don't have a firm opinion on this, but, last night we heard a computer piece of yours [Gendy3] and tonight we're going to hear some instrumental pieces of yours, and it has been evident to musicians for many years that content and timbre are functionally related. That is, that the way in which timbre functions in a musical context has everything to do with the meaning of the context. Now, you've certainly been moving between computers and instruments and orchestras longer than any of us and have a great many ideas about what the differences are in the way in which the computer can express fundamental ideas by means of timbre and the ways in which orchestras can express these ideas. I'm interested to hear any thoughts you have about how your ideas work when you're dealing with the computer and how they work when you're dealing with the string quartet.
Xenakis: You ask me difficult questions. I think that the problem of timbre, which is one of the most difficult to explore and to think of and to realize, is not solved yet. There should be experimentation. You take a violin, for instance, and you try to understand what happens with the sound, how it is produced and try to find the laws or rules that enable you to reproduce that sound, which is, again, a difficult task. Nobody has done that. Maybe Risset, or Max Matthews, up to a point. But it is not satisfying. Why? Because there are aspects of the sound that escape, for the time being. This is what Meyer-Eppler, who was a professor at the University in Bonn in the 50's, wrote: it is difficult to reproduce a living sound because each instant is different from the preceding one in a very tiny way that cannot be grasped. Almost unconsciously you do that when you are an instrumentalist, a performer. This happens, especially, when, for instance, Yehudi Menuhin plays with timbre on the violin. Another violinist, when he plays, immediately you see it's a different color of sound that he has, a personal color, and that, in order to reproduce that color with all the notes and so on and so forth, it's a whole life's problem, I think.
Lansky: Well, youíve certainly done some radical experiments with timbre. I know that over the years with UPIC and other experiments, you've made a determined effort to conceive of timbre in entirely new ways, as a functionally different thing. Your point about the problems of perceiving sound in terms of Fourier series is certainly something that a lot of people have agreed with.
My interest is this: As you do a piece for computer, you're working with UPIC, for example, or you're working with your concepts of the way in which to construct timbre, you're thinking in terms which would only be possible with the computer. In other words, you can't really ask a violin to create that timbre, because it's a completely different concept. And my question is a really difficult question to answer, and I don't think there is any way to really answer it, but I'm trying to see what kinds of thoughts you have about it. My question is how your conceptions of musical form and musical shape and musical structure differ when you're thinking for instruments and when you're thinking for computer, especially in view of these questions of timbre.
Xenakis: Well, you ask very difficult questions and I don't know if I can answer them in a sincere way...
Lansky: Everything you say I'm sure is sincere, so...
Xenakis: ...not pretending. The point is that I don't need to try with computers to imitate this sound that exists already. You don't need that. What is interesting is to explore other paths or ways or sounds or even evolutions of sounds that have never been done or realized, and that is the interesting point. You are like [Fridtjof] Nansen [1861-1930] who tried to find the North Pole - and I think he died.
Mâche: But he knew where it was. [laughter]
Xenakis: He thought he had found it, but it was not there.
Rikakis: Would you like to follow up or would you like to move along? Roger Reynolds?
Roger Reynolds: I don't know that this question has necessarily anything to do with the computer, but it has to do with the future. And I guess maybe I have to give a little framing talk in order to make the question meaningful, so if you'll permit me -
Last Summer, at the beginning of July, I was involved in a conference that you know about in Strasbourg. It was, strangely, only one day long. But it was concerned with the future of cities. And they had a few artists there, I think because they were interested in the question of the way the arts function in society and as cities change - there are now something on the order of twenty cities on our earth that have populations of ten million. When you begin to think in terms of this scale, you have to address questions of the homogeneity of audiences. You have to address questions concerning what can still be taken as a given in terms of the people who are listening to our work. My thought is that one might argue that there are generals or universal principles that operate in music, and I think in fact that your music in particular has an extraordinary generality of force that speaks across cultural boundaries with remarkable strength. Nonetheless, it seems to me that when one speaks of the most transcendental moments that we experience in music, there's a combination of the general and the personal reflection and resonance of culture.
So, the question is: If over the coming centuries or even the coming decades, the kind of thing that's happening in the United States in any of the large cities but most virulently in Los Angeles, if this kind of diversity increases and the heterogeneity of audiences becomes so pervasive that we really only can speak in generalities, then what implications will this have? I guess the bottom line of the question is this: is there a way we ever could replace the specificity of culture? Or, do you have any other notions about how we will be viewing these problems over the coming decades?
Xenakis: This is a general question about where we are going, not only in the arts, but in thinking. For instance, we saw the collapse of the communist regimes, although the course of what they were pretending goes back into ancient times with Plato and the equality of people and so on and so forth, democracy, that is. But some forms of human [behavior] escaped them: the will to power, and not only the will to power but the destruction of whatever they are not themselves, the egotistic aspect of man. But on the other hand, they try now to implement a kind of capitalistic system. In the States, for instance - which is much more capitalistic than anywhere else - you have also socialist ideas, because you cannot escape that: how to help people when they are sick or when they don't have enough to do. Maybe not the state, but there are organisms that take care of that. But today, you don't have any specific, very strong ideas, in that case. Nowhere. Not even the Chinese anymore.
So, what remains? You can see that already. For instance, the Japanese people, what are they doing? They try, they invent things which are first rate in electronics, or in cars. And that means that the human mind can exercise itself, no matter what happens. If there are poor people, if there are rich, if there are twenty million people in Mexico City in a world that has no hierarchy whatsoever, if there are people dying of starving or misery, in Brazil, in Africa, then you have wars. We don't know, I don't know where this can lead.
If a music is interesting, it is because it appeals to people. Which people? It's a kind of élite. This élite is moving, changing all the time. It might disappear. Like what had happened with Egyptian art when the Greeks did their own art. It was forgotten until the end of the 19th century when it was again discovered and became first class.
It's very difficult to answer that question. The only thing that we can say, at least what I can say to myself is, "It's interesting to do such and such" ; so, I try to do it.
Reynolds: Well, let me ask it then in a slightly different way.
Xenakis: No. Yes. Sorry.
Reynolds: Yes or no?
Xenakis: What do you think about that as an idea, as a composer? You don't need to have everything OK. You could do your music in your kitchen or whatever. [laughter]
Reynolds: What I'm trying to get at is that specifically in the United States, two things are happening. I don't mean that this is calculated, it simply comes about. There are two kinds of responses to this extraordinary lack of common acculturation and knowledge on the part of audiences. On the one hand, we have a proliferation of specialist organizations - early music groups, and so on, late music groups, computer music conferences. On the other hand, we have Prince or Madonna, which is gauged to stimulate in an intense but extremely generalized fashion. So that what might have been in the past the kind of resonance of the center where the individual takes part both in the universal and in his or her own cultural experience, this seems to be disappearing from the performing arts. I'm willing as you seem to suggest to give it up, but I'm asking whether there's any way that we might address that issue. I think that, in a way, your music does, because of this extraordinary generality of appeal, generality of force, in the manifestation of sonic experience.
Xenakis: You are very kind, thank you so much. I think that these problems are related to the main one, which is creativity - the creation of something that didn't exist, that's new. To start with creativity (That is a word which is very much used but is sometimes meaningless.) in the following sense: that it is something different from what existed before, that you did something which is new, be it in music, be it in politics, be it in cosmogony, whatever, whenever. And, if, for instance, the newness is distant enough from the past, then it's a great jump that might not be understood or appreciated by lots of people. But this is the tendency, I think, that is general in our universe today, starting with mankind, but also with animals, with the plants. Don't forget that the dinosaurs disappeared sixty-five million of years ago after a huge amount of development and refinement. They were not just living in the lakes because they were too heavy; it's a false idea. But this means the living matter but also perhaps the not living matter, the atomic level. What happens? Perhaps the new particles beneath the actual ones that we are going to discover with the new...
Reynolds: ...particle accelerators...
Xenakis: ...accelerators, yes, in Europe or in the States, will give us a clue to the fact [that] there are changes in the laws of physics, changes that many not occur instantly but take some time. But there are still laws. There is also the problem of the evolution of the universe. We know so little, it's only about seventy years now that we started to think about the galaxies, and so on. I think there is a part of the movement of creativity that is our, unfortunately, our destiny: to do things that are interesting and different, whatever you do. For instance, my gesture, like this [gestures], I have done it billions of times, perhaps, in my lifetime, but it was different now from all the other ones. It's not important, it's not interesting, only in that aspect that it's different from the others - you cannot go twice, as said Heraclitus, twice across the same, the same...
Reynolds: ...stream...
Xenakis: ...stream. So, this is, I think, the main problem. Now if you are accepted or "crowned" with a Nobel Prize in music or whatever, that's different, it doesn't bear any consequence on the deeper, inner nature of man. So, it's not a challenge, we are like this. I don't see why we forget that. No?
Reynolds: I agree completely that the thing that one does as a composer is to pursue those things which are fascinating and to become immersed in that process of exploration. Perhaps what you are saying is that, viewed from the largest evolutionary perspective, these matters take care of themselves.
Mâche: If everybody agrees, I feel obliged not to agree entirely. You said Heraclitus said that you never cross twice the same river, but music knows repetition and repetition is a very important feature in music. And composers had deliberately forgotten this law for, say, twenty years, from 1950 to 1970. We were all responsible for that illusion that we could create music without any repetition, without reference to anything else than itself. Do you still think that repetition is something which means the contrary of this necessary evolution, which symbolically brings us back to a definitely finished era? Or, since you yourself use repetition in some recent works of yours, what is your opinion about the symbolism involved in repetition in music?
Xenakis: When you say repetition, it is "thinking again about the same thing." This is what I think of as the meaning of "repetition." And you have that in the variation music in older times. You had some idea and then you varied it. But what I don't like in repetition is that I am annoyed, I am - it's dumb. When it is twice the same thing, I say, well, he could have done it a little different so that again my attention is caught, and my interest also. I think it's the laziness of the composer. And you see, for instance, for me, the most interesting percussion system in traditional music is, or used to be, music from India. They had so much variation, tiny variations, for the same things when they were repeated, that you are called, you are driven by that music. But when you don't have that, it's mechanistic, things which are dumb. That's it.
Mâche: But you don't exclude periodicity, and very strong periodicity, especially in théâtre d'art, for example.
Xenakis: No, no, no. Periodicity is necessary, but the periodicity is not absolutely the same. How much it should be different, that's a matter of your sensitivity, that is, of the composer's point of view, of the performer's. But it has to be something steady that you repeat, of course, without staying in it, repeating the same thing for twenty-four hours like Satie did, or La Monte Young, afterwards. I think it's interesting from another point of view: psychological. You get bored and you want to kill the pianist. [laughter] But musically, it's meaningless, I think.
Rikakis: Do you want to pick up where they left off, Paul, or do you have some other ideas?
Lansky: I have another question I'd like to ask. You're an architect, and mathematician, and philosopher, and composer, and it's obvious that you bring all these things to bear in your music, at least I like to think it's obvious. Now the question I have is, what do you expect of your audiences, in other words, since all these things are, in a sense, brought to bear in your music, what kinds of expectations do you have that listeners will, will...
Xenakis: That's an easy question.
Lansky: I'm glad I've got an easy one.
Xenakis: I don't care what they think. There are so many different kinds of audiences. I can't do a statistical thing: I prefer these audiences; therefore, I will write a specific music for them. No. The problem is what is the specific interest in what I am doing, and that's the important thing. And if the solutions are interesting, then perhaps there will be two or three people at the beginning, and then more than that. But who cares? I'll be dead in ten years, or maybe five, or maybe tomorrow. You are not responsible for what has been done. There are composers who write their compositions thirty years late. I don't believe in that because then they belong to a stratum that is in the past. If the public is interested in that, it is the public's fault.
Lansky: Let me make my question a little harder, then. One of the things that Roger was getting at in his question is that there is a conception of music and entertainment in which it's a one-time experience, in other words, people will turn on the television or watch a movie and basically go from beginning to end without having any difficulty understanding it; and it'll be something that they won't want to do again. Now, this is obviously, at least I think this is obviously not the case with our music. I would state strongly that it's not the case with your music, because I would say, in many cases, your music is very difficult and it presents a great many challenges. Now, I can't believe that you do not regard yourself as challenging listeners to rise to the conceptions of your music.
Questions? ping@rogerreynolds.com