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This book [Formalized Music] is a
collection of explorations in
musical composition pursued in several directions. The effort to reduce
certain sound sensations, to understand their logical causes, to dominate
them, and then to use them in wanted constructions; the effort to materialize
movements of thought through sounds, then to test them in compositions;
the effort to understand better the pieces of the past, by searching for
an underlying unit which would be identical with that of the scientific
thought of our time; the effort to make “art”
while “geometrizing,” that
is, by giving it a reasoned support less perishable than the impulse of
the moment, and hence more serious, more worthy of the fierce fight which
the human intelligence wages in all the other domains—all these efforts
have led to a sort of abstraction and formalization of the musical compositional
act. This abstraction and formalization has found, as have so many other
sciences, an unexpected and, I think, fertile support in certain areas
of mathematics. It is not so much the inevitable use of mathematics that
characterizes the attitude of these experiments, as the overriding need
to consider sound and music as a vast potential reservoir in which a knowledge
of the laws of thought and the structured creations of thought may find
a completely new medium of materialization, i.e., of communication.
Iannis Xenakis
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