Why "Think Classical"? Or Why Xenakis is the First and Only Classical Composer

I have been thinking for a while why I called my blog "Think Classical", especially since I don't actually believe in the notion of "classical" music. Even limited to the music of Haydn and Mozart, I believe that the term is a falsely applied one, since neither based their compositional theories or aesthetics on anything from the Classical world of the ancient Greeks or Romans. No music from classical times has survived since the ancient Greeks and Romans had no system of musical notation. Classical music simply does not exist. In fact, the term “classical” here at Think Classical applies more strictly to the classical thought of the ancient philosophers, thinkers and writers. The foundations of that classical thought are the foundations of modern thought. Kant and Hegel are both deeply influenced by Plato and Aristotle, although there is a marked pre-Socratic influence on Hegel too. From that I have recently extended into the sphere of understanding history, along with social and political philosophy as we have discussed Evans, Adorno, Frantz, even Bakunin along with Hegel and Schelling.

If anyone came here for a discussion of what is commonly and vulgarly called "classical music" then they are most certainly in the wrong place. However, recently I have been thinking greatly about the extraordinary music of Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001), who was well read in the classical Greek writers. He thought of himself a classical Greek in the modern world. Perhaps with his many allusions to the classical Greek world, his Pythagorean blend of mathematics and music, and his drawing of inspiration from the philosophy of the classical world, that here for the first time we have a composer who truly deserves the epithet of being called a “classical” composer.

Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001)

The Philips pavilion designed by Xenakis

From Xenakis: Formalized Music—Thought and Mathematics in Music

We see to what extent music is everywhere steeped in time: (a) time in the form of an impalpable flux or (b) time in its frozen form, outside time, made possible by memory. Time is the blackboard on which are inscribed phenomena and their relations outside the time of the universe in which we live. Relations imply architectural structures, rules. And, can one imagine a rule without repetition? Certainly not. I have already treated this subject. Besides, a single event in an absolute eternity of time and space would make no sense. And yet, each event, like each individual on earth, is unique. But this uniqueness is the equivalent of death which lies in wait at every step, at every moment Now, the repetition of an event, its reproduction as faithfully as possible, corresponds to this struggle against disappearance, against nothingness. As if the entire universe fought desperately to hang on to existence, to being, by its own tireless renewal at every instant, at every death. The union of Parmenides and of Heraclitus. Living species are an example of this struggle of life or death, in an inert Universe launched perhaps by the Big Bang (is it really inert, that is, without any changes in its laws?). This same principle of dialectical combat is present everywhere, verifiable everywhere. Change—for there is no rest—the couple death and birth lead the Universe, by duplication, the copy being more or less exact. The "more or less" makes the difference between a pendular, cyclic Universe, strictly determined (even a deterministic chaos), and a nondetermined Universe, absolutely unpredictable and chaotic. Unpredictability in thought obviously has no limits. On a first approach it would correspond to birth from nothingness, but also to disappearance, death into nothingness. At the moment, the Universe seems to be midway between these two chasms, something which could be the subject of another study. This study would deal with the profound necessity for musical composition to be perpetually original—philosophically, technically, aesthetically. 

Xenakis: p.266 - 267

Having been established, the question (ἔλεγχος) embodied a Wheel of Birth sui generis, and the various pre-Socratic schools flourished by conditioning all further development of philosophy until our time. Two are in my opinion the high points of this period: the Pythagorean concept of numbers and the Parmenidean dialectics—both unique expressions of the same preoccupation.

As it went through its phases of adaptation, up to the fourth century B.C., the Pythagorean concept of numbers affirmed that things are numbers, or that all things are furnished with numbers, or that things are similar to numbers. This thesis developed (and this in particular interests the musician) from the study of musical intervals in order to obtain the orphic catharsis, for according to Aristoxenos, the Pythagoreans used music to cleanse the soul as they used medicine to cleanse the body.

All musical theorists, from Aristoxenos to Hucbald, Zarlino, and Rameau, have returned to the same theses colored by expressions of the moment. But the most incredible is that all intellectual activity, including the arts, is actually immersed in the world of numbers (I am omitting the few backward-looking or obscurantist movements). It will not be the ek-stasis (Orphic, Hindu, or Taoist) that will have arrived at one of the supreme goals of all time, that of controlling the quality of reincarnations (hereditary rebirths παλιγγενεσἰα) but the very force of the “theory”, of the question, which is the essence of human action, and whose most striking expression is Pythagorism. We are all Pythagoreans.

On the other hand, Parmenides was able to go to the heart of the question of change by denying it, in contrast to Herakleitos. He discovered the principle of the excluded middle and logical tautology, and this created such a dazzlement that he used them as a means of cutting out, in the evanescent change of senses, the notion of Being, of that which is, one, motionless, filling the universe, without birth and  indestructible; the not-Being, not existing, circumscribed, and spherical (which Melissos had not understood). 

[F]or it will be forever impossible to prove that things that are not are; but restrain your thought from this route of inquiry. . . . Only one way remains for us to speak of, namely, that it is; on this route there are many signs indicating that it is uncreated and indestructible, for it is complete, undisturbed, and without end; it never was, nor will it be, for now it is all at once complete, one, continuous; for what kind of birth are you seeking for it ? How and from where could it grow ? I will neither let you say nor think that it came from what is not; for it is unutterable and unthinkable that a thing is not. And what need would have led it to be created sooner or later if it came from nothing? Therefore it must be, absolutely, or not at all. 

—Fragments 7 and 8 of Poem, by Parmenides  

Besides the abrupt and compact style of the thought, the method of the question is absolute. It leads to denial of the sensible world, which is only made of contradictory appearances that "two-faced" mortals accept as valid without turning a hair, and to stating that the only truth is the notion of reality itself. But this notion, substantiated with the help of abstract logical rules, needs no other concept than that of its opposite, the not-Being, the nothing that is immediately rendered impossible to formulate and to conceive. 

Xenakis p202—203

One of the many works by Xenakis inspired by the classical world: