XL (Letters on Xenakis)

Nathaniel Bobbitt

    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.