Iannis Xenakis Quotes

#1. The listener must be gripped and whether he likes it or not, drawn into the flight path of the sounds without special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss

Iannis Xenakis

#2. Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one ...

Iannis Xenakis

#3. Do you realize that we're meteorites; almost as soon as we're born, we have to disappear?

Iannis Xenakis

#4. The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as totality, is a new sonic event.

Iannis Xenakis

#5. The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.

Iannis Xenakis