Science and music: an interview with Iannis Xenakis

UNESCO Courier, April, 1986

It should be borne in mind that computer technology is only a tool. If I use mathematical functions or even sometimes physical theories in music, it is because there is a profound connexion between music and numbers. All of Pythagorean theory, of course, is based on this thesis. But it is a truth which derives from our own mental structure, nothing more. Once you have grasped this principle, it is easy to make use of whole chunks of mathematical thought, which is already present in music and even, in some cases, at a much more advanced stage than in mathematics.

For example, consider what happened when musicians in the tenth century invented musical notation, no longer relying on the vague indications of neumes, but using the staff and calibrated units of the characteristics of sound: pitch and duration. In doing this they transformed sensations which have nothing to do with spatial sensations into spatial notation.

Four hundred years before Nicole Oresme and six centuries before the analytical geometry of Descartes! Music was ahead of its time. I do not know whether Oresme or Descartes were influenced by musical notation, which did exactly what they did, and yielded even more abundant possibilities, since pitch and duration have nothing to do with space, whereas these two thinkers were working in space. This is only one instance where musicians, without knowing what they were doing, have stolen a march on knowledge and invention in other areas.

Do you see no sharp dividing line between traditional musical thinking and the most modern aspects of contemporary music?

None. There is even a fairly smooth continuum which has resulted, for example, in serial music. The escape from tonal functions made possible by "dodecaphony", and later by serial music, was only relative, since Schoenberg and the Vienna School adopted self-imposed restrictions in returning to manipulations of the polyphonic type that came in with the Renaissance. This was the criticism that I levelled at the serialist school in the 1950s. If Schoenberg had been familiar with the science of his day, including philosophy, physics and mathematics, he would have introduced the calculus of probability.

So the musician should keep up to date with contemporary knowledge?

Yes. Of course, this is increasingly difficult. But even without a thorough knowledge of every field, he should be familiar with as many elements as possible. For the essential core of knowledge--and this is what is marvellous--is easy to impart. For example, if one talks about degree of order or disorder, many people know what this means, but not explicitly. Now, in a film like Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein was perhaps the first to create a mobile art of this kind: he artistically directs drifting masses of individuals, statistical events, since we see crowds moving one way and then another. This procedure was followed by other film-makers in their turn, notably Abel Gance in his Napoleon (1926). If you tell people: this is what happens with clouds or galaxies or intrastellar gases, they understand immediately. I believe that there are fundamental concepts which are communicable.