PYTHAGORAS, LUIGI RUSSOLO, IANNIS XENAKIS, AND HEINZ VON FOERSTER ON MUSIC…
REGULARS' TABLE

Secretly recorded by JJ | 2007-05-11 [img.]

HvF: ... because mathematics is music for the mind and music is mathematics for the soul, somebody said once. Since Pyth grasped the interval within numerical values, there has been a strong trend in western music, which could be either called reduction of redundancy or augmentation of complexity. For example the twelve tone scale of Schönberg. But instead of twelve tones we could take eighteen...

Pyth: pouah!!!

HvF: ... eighteen tones would highly increase the possible combinations. At the moment when complexity is outgrowing us, computers come into play.

Pyth: I‘d say noise comes into play.

Luigi: YES. Noise… the Art of Noises is the logical consequence of marvelous innovations. In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. For several centuries, life went on silently, or mutedly. The loudest noises were neither intense, nor prolonged nor varied. In fact, nature is normally silent, except for storms, hurricanes, avalanches, cascades and some exceptional telluric movements.

Pyth: (shows his shank; it is golden): My down seems to be your up. You should practice hearing, so that you might learn to speak. I discovered music! I reduced music to a harmonic system, which is to produce things as beautiful as possible.
Once as I was intently considering music, and reasoning with myself whether it would be possible to devise some instrumental assistance to the sense of hearing, so as to systematize it, as sight is made precise by the compass rule- so thinking of these things I happened to pass by a brazier’s shop, where I heard the hammers beating out a piece of iron on the anvil, producing sounds that harmonized, except one. But I recognized in these sounds, the concord of the octave, the fifth, and the fourth. I saw that the sound between the fourth and the fifth, taken by itself, was a dissonance, and yet completed the greater sound among them…

HvF: Yes, yes, we all know about that. We will not have to hear the long version of the story: Let me explain, Luigi. Pyth reduced the chaotic plentitude of infinite possible tones within the octave to a system of seven tones by parting a string into two, three and five sections. In this he produced the octave, the quint, and the third. All this is quite in line with his ideology of integers being of divine origin, and the triad confessing the numinous principle, isn’t it, Pyth?

Luigi: What are you talking about?
Primitive people attribute to sound a divine origin. It becomes surrounded with religious respect, and reserved for the priests, who thereby enrich their rites with a new mystery. Thus is developed the conception of sound as something apart, different from and independent of life. The result of this is music, a fantastic world superimposed upon reality, an inviolable and sacred world. This hieratic atmosphere is bound to slow down the progress of music.
You, Pyth, with your mathematically determined musical theory, according to which only some consonant intervals were admitted, have limited the domain of music until now and made almost impossible the harmony you were unaware of.

HvF: Slow down, Luigi. I haven’t finished…

Luigi: Hah. First of all, musical art looked for the soft and limpid purity of sound. Then it amalgamated different sounds, intent upon caressing the ear with suave harmonies.
Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion.
We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.
roars, whistles, claps, snores, noises of falling water, snorts, driving noises, bellows, whispers, shrill sounds, mutterings, cracks, rustlings, buzzings, grumbles, jingles, grunts shuffles, gurgles, percussive noises, using animal and human voices: metal, wood, skin, shouts, moans, screams, stone, baked earth, laughter, rattlings, sobs,...

Pyth: You didn’t understand a word: I’m of the opinion that music, if properly used, greatly contributes to health. For I use it in no careless way like you, but as a purification – music used as medicine.
Certain melodies are devised as remedies against the passions of the soul, as also against despondency and gnashing of the teeth. Further, I employ other melodies against anger and rage, and all other aberrations of the soul. Another kind of modulation is invented against desires. I likewise use dancing, which is accompanied by the lyre, instead of the pipe, which has an influence towards insolence, being theatrical, and by no means liberal.
Did you get the point?

HvF: Hey Pyth! What’s that? You can’t distinguish it in means of cognition. That is pure metaphysics: look at Richard Wagner.
Musicians left the orchestra when playing the first time the ‘Meistersinger’. They said: That’s noise! We don’t want to continue producing it. We reject. That’s not music that’s Rock’n’Roll…

Pyth: Yes of course, and they were right… that Tristan accord… brrr…noisy!

HvF: But noise isn’t equal to noise. And there the guy is coming, who’ll tell you… Hello Xenakis!

Xenakis: What’s up. Again in serious discussions you three?
Listen, it is the wrong questions you are posing…

Luigi: Yes, exactly. It is not about harmony or proportion, or symmetry…

Xenakis: Wait. First you are loud. Your propagandist speech is annoying.
Let’ s talk about noise and numbers and how to get them together with the help of computers because computers might be the troubleshooters to you.
I admit, I also like it to the onset of madness, when a person suddenly realizes that an environment that had seemed familiar to him has now becomes altered in a profound, threatening sense...
Luigi: YES. That’s it. Stirring machine noise…

HvF+Pyth+Xenakis: SHUT UP!

Xenakis: I write the music that I trust when I am writing it. And I do not think I am continuing some tradition of European music. I met Messiaen, who made me discover the possibilities of abstraction starting with Beethoven and Stravinsky. I said to myself–they’re crazy, those guys. Why don’t they really do everything? What criteria dictated their choices? Tradition? But what is tradition? So I deduced that, theoretically, one could do everything. This was what clicked into place in my head.

HvF: Yes, but: act always so as to increase the number of choices!

Xenakis: Bullsh... The problem is one of power and freedom of action. A bad composer, a bad artist does only what he has been taught. He is incapable of making a creative blunder. To make such blunders–maybe brilliant ones!– one cannot have mental rails. Freedom then means total responsibility. One can go everywhere. One chooses to go there and not elsewhere.

HvF: Ah, I like your idea. It is getting complex, and I love complex…

Xenakis: The problem is not one of complexity but of power and of freedom of action…

Luigi: You said that already. For me, I..

HvF+Pyth+Xenakis: SHUT UP!

HvF: We are free! The complement to necessity is not chance – it is choice! Am I apart from the universe or am I a part of the universe?

Pyth: Well, the answer to this question…

Xenakis: Sorry, Pyth, please spare us your number mysticism.
Music cannot lead to mysticism. The imbeciles who listen to it that way are the mystics. Mysticism is a drug. One thinks that one is making mysticism– look at Messiaen!– but the high value of his music is elsewhere: Religious sensitivity evolves so quickly that before long this mysticism takes on the appearance of superficial froth, linked to the colors of times.
Likewise, mathematics has withstood millennia thanks to its inner force. This force is both rational and intuitive: A machine is able to compute, but it does not understand mathematics. A work of art, it too, remains thanks to its hard yolk. It is neither the perfumes of an era nor the mysticism, which gives it the power.
Music, today, must go through the stages that the sciences encountered in the nineteenth century. Sounds must be likened to signs and symbols. The significance of music is found in them, in their physical relation, and not in the psychological conditionings. Whence my idea of symbolic music.

HvF: Ah, for this reason the computer turns interesting to you…

Xenakis: Not purely…it is a basis for my compositional work. As for computer science, it provides the necessary equipment, the hardware as the Anglo-Saxons call it. However, music is the sonorous rendering of thought. If this thought is limited to veins of feeling, it does not go very far, Luigi; but if it is modeled by philosophic and mathematical procedures, then music becomes a part of fundamental research. I believe that with this type of scientific approach, we could have another perspective on music, even on that of the past– and that we could create the music of the future.

Luigi: This is thus the perfect marriage between artistic creation and technique?

Xenakis: Yes, almost perfect, but beware, technique can submerge the user: We must defend ourselves; it is good to use techniques, but we have to dominate them, to stay on the alert. Technology allows the exploration of new domains proposed by theoretical thought and esthetics; but once these domains are explored, we must push further. In fact, computer science is a product of simple rationality; as a composer, I unceasingly bring complexity, sometimes irrational, to this rationality.

Pyth: But the reality of music is the auditory experience of harmony based upon ratio.
Sound that lacks proportion is ugly and useless noise…

Xenakis: The qualification “beautiful” or “ugly” makes no sense for sound, nor for the music that derives from it; the quantity of intelligence carried by the sounds must be the true criterion of the validity of a particular music…

Pythagoras of Samos (between 580 and 572 BC–between 500 and 490 BC) was an Ionian philosopher and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. He is often revered as a great mathematician, mystic and scientist.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifestoes The Art of Noises (1913) and Musica Futurista.
Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002) was an Austrian American scientist combining physics and philosophy. Together with others, he was the architect of cybernetics.
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was a Greek composer and one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century. He was a major figure in the postwar
development of musical modernism.