Continuing on the theme of Time in music, a thought on the music of Xenakis: ‘Ultimately, it seems Xenakis’ spirit was consumed by the music that is outside the scope of Time, but it is also clear that he was fascinated by the effect of pure rhythm and the prosody of language to awaken our understanding of antiquity and our emotions. The Time Traveller character in H. G. Wells’ novella The Time Machine explains, ‘There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.’ And I believe it is in this light that we can understand the convergence of Xenakis’ temporal and non-temporal musical ideas. Wells said, ‘The portion of the past that is brightest and most real to each of us is the individual past, the personal memory.’ For Xenakis, music was ‘an individual pleroma, a realisation’ (Formalized Music, New York, 1990) that presented timeless ‘cosmological’ and ‘philosophical’ arguments in the form of sound. However, it seems that his consciousness was steeped in the literature of the tragic poets and the universality of Greek philosophy so antiquity was in his blood as if it was a personal memory flowing through the rhythm and meter of his music.’ From ‘The Tragedy of Rhythm’ by Joel Baldwin.
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