XL (LETTERS ON XENAKIS)
by
NATHANIEL BOBBITT
_Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.3 (May, 1993)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu
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Introduction and References
Xenakis remains a musical figure whose methods
have literary implications. To consider the personality of
Xenakis, a musical and architectural thinker, becomes a
means to extend literary tasks in favor of physical and
sensory aspects of experience, behavior, and prerformance.
Xenakis stands as a reference point on how to work with
techology and how to wonder about a technological outlook
within the writing process.
In XL, Xenakis appears as the means to consider the literary
task of treating greater quantities of detail and spatial
reference within writing. The next step is clearly textual
instability and a generative prose form.
A. Breton's political/scientific approach, also in Xenakis
-Collaboration and collectives
-Science, Center of Mathematical and Automated
Studies, compare Xenakis interest in musical
cognition with Weil's thesis on Descartes' Science
and Perception
B. What are the exercises which develop an aleatory sense
of treating greater quantities of data, all at once,
via:
-Symmetry
-Asymmetry
-Computational complex patterns
C. "Objects in action," compared with optical illusions
complex observations rather than the consideration
of fallibility, hallucination:
-Consider the juxtaposition with regular hitting
hangers; scrapping tangle as frictive noise as
a rythmic source
-Waterdrops on a metal plate & microtonality
D. Irrational quality to be found in "objects in action"
-Acceleration in glissandi
-Multiphonic versus microtonal drone
-Octave glissandi...at a microtonal degree
These irrational qualities anticipate a "siren"
activity that tempi studies in Carter on the player
piano.
***
I. B.F. Skinner & Xenakis as models for the commentator's
(the friends') consideration of behavior as
quantifiable:
-Skinner...item...collection
-Xenaxis...group...manipulation
-Use of memory as heuristic module within the
sensorial practice: F(x, y)...sensorial
F (x',y')...memorial
-Skinner...behavior (habitual)
-Xenakis...performance (task realization)
Consider Skinner and Xenakis on math testing and the
mathematics of experiment testing.
M.
Adieux, when I get a chance to break away from the
hurry up and wait activity I write you, almost a symbol more
than anything. A symbol of what I should be in contact
with, not that I need reminding but all my mainstays are
packed away. The necessity of a new place takes over so.
The chance to meet with others is here, as I am a substitute
teacher. Each day a new school, another direction, and a
bus route to learn. The time schedule is that of the rural
doctor. What does the sense of patrimony and
grandfatherhood evoke for you: Such stodgy sorts perhaps
are not vivid enough for "your punk German, your computer
talk, cinema and the blurbs that run together." Yet you
were friendlier (than the other Darmstadters) as an ideal
separates...and allows one to respond. One day these
letters, notes, and discussion may serve a sentimental end,
that of being taken on as a companion in a stoic expression.
For now, necessity takes over from irony. Both are
merciless yet irony's heartlessness and pointed humor is
another story. Perish the thought, enter hunger, perish the
thought. I think of you as someone that asks for only a
good-humored naturalness, as the bitter and remedial feeling
after your desires are taken care of elsewhere. Instead
there is the commentary the breeze after so many close calls
and disinterested conversation between two commentators.
The word finally appears commentaire. The ability to work,
experiment, exchange over short periods, despite wider
lapses of conversation. Good commentator, good night.
_XENAKIS LETTERS_
1.2.0
M.
It hardly seems like it, but after two summers the term
"volumetric" has taken on a life of its own coincidental,
arbitrary, and unavoidable. I am content with this news
which I must explain to you...as it means undoing a tangle.
By now you know that I am always trying to find ways to
make more out of my sentimentality. The act of reading a
favorite is even more pleasurable if I can extend some
aspect of an author and respond to that attraction in the
reading. Better yet, someone shows me something "how to do"
and I use it. The call-backs, the sentimentality I live
over time through the debris of a better time, the reading
matter, the source of conversation, the identifiable regard.
You as commentator must have some idea about this as all
this work grew out of that name..."Xenakis"...with enough
associations and arbitrary ties, pointing out the same
name. The ones today regard measure and the study in
"pictures which make you think." Diagram, meditatio,
Archimedes appears...in particular, the cases of the
pendium, the bouyancy of things...offer the elements of a
study of volumetrics in Xenakis.
Author's Note:
These quotes refer back until we consider curvature and
foci in the forms of volume, but what I am after is the
place of acceleration and temperature in volumetrics, the
sonic boom in winter and summer according to crisp heat in
the skyline. Archimedes was gained from Weil, as your news
on Xenakis's use of the etch-a-sketch all pose one question:
how graphism informs acoustics.
Ever since someone said, "the concert was no good
because of the acoustics," the relationship of sound and
space was there, but what little advantage do we take of
the notion. Steering clear of metaphor--the pendulum, the
remote focal point, gravity, centrifugal force align:
acoustics, graphics, math, music, and architecture--without
metaphor.
The first example will be mine...regarding clusters in
the form of the siren, the warning signal, and radiated
pitch.
1.3.0
M.
Tell me something, when you are out at the club, at
what moments does imagination take over from the body
slamming. How weightless do they get or is it controlled
busting one's head into a wall. Is it just black and blue
or does clotting appear.
Yesterday I read about India, rioters after an act of
self-immolation. Degrees of frenzy, hunger, and new friends
fear the insipid.
_XENAKIS LETTERS_
The tenets of Logic:
-To think faster, to learn (heuristic models) within
correction and error.
-To handle greater quantities of data
-Applications for a math primer for everybody:
-Selection
-Mathematical Expectation
-Weighting test criteria
-Qualities of experimental testing as fundamental to
quantification rather than 1:1 quantification of
behavior.
Conclusion:
Seek modes and resolve application tenets:
-rythmic comparison of irregular (odd numbered)
figures at irregular durations.
-interval in an interval
-compare two-sided lineal time scheme
Stroking facial movements to stimulate memory in
dementia patients is comparable to a normal person's
stroking of face when one is engaged or interested.
Yet the dementia patients ramble and stroke themselves
but it is their hair which they stroke. What role can
stroking have in neurological functions in intelligence and
cognition:
-memory
-learning
-concentration
-recollection
-attention
1.4.0
M
One can concentrate by straining the forehead to
attempt to focus one's attention or shake one's head. The
relation between gesture and intelligent functions is a
means to consider therapy and neurological stimulation
without drugs.
When dementia patients forget, several steps are missing:
-image of concentration
-direction of image (contextual relation)
-inability to hold onto the image
*) slipping away of name--object association
*) slipping away of verbal--phonatory mode
Dementia is a regression into a childlike
consciousness: sensorial and pre-speech. Reinforce
sensorial rather than verbal lapses.
We are living very modestly and that stops me. As
always rules the motto "go broke in a beautiful place." The
lake here, the amplitude of space, the triangle with Toronto
and Canada are reasons for you to come up. The absence of
identity makes it even a better place. One is free of
influence, one can just bounce off objects in action. The
radio reception is fair. The whole thing could improve.
1.5.0
M.
Aural blocks of sound, the siren, the warning signal,
or the sound block in desphase are most active when taken in
their coupling or drone state. Stasis in these blocks is
like gridlock in which the immobility of a section of a
population flow swells until it stops and only can vibrate
without forward motion for a while but the particles slide
through, ungluing the gridlock. The gridlock is never fully
immobile, neither is the stasis, in an aural block. The
sonora block can be considered as a gridlock. The gridlock
can be considered a compact space in a maximal growth
pattern which virbrates within itself and then passes onto
more discrete space and motion...becoming mobile interactive
again amazing fluttering reeds, tongues, and ureal sounds.
_XENAKIS LETTERS_
XL.2.0
M.
This series you will find in one piece but it has grown
over a disperse set of circumstances, which in a way
fragments, this study upon arhictectural design in Xenakis's
Phillips Pavilion. I wish this series were more solid, I
have found few mathematical conclusions, I have been left to
observe and pick at the bones for procedural observations.
It was comforting to hear from you after those months
in which I had no address to send you. Now you can call.
The fact that German has outweighed programming and
computation...on with change.
Your mode of ruling out the waste and your admitted
oversimplification are all parts of the commentary. What I
ask is that we should go into collective research, rather
than work on solos and then join, to give solos.
"Find yourself a programmable young thing." If said
what kind of hell would break out, in the form of a swollen
lip.
_Outline_
The success of this series would be the elaboration, of
automated simulation and manually composed reconstruction
problems. First condsider architectural design as it holds
for acoustic activity.