The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.
Interpretation
The musical scale defines the boundaries within which music can be created, allowing for artistic expression within those limits.
The quote by Iannis Xenakis emphasizes the idea that musical scales are not just arbitrary sets of notes, but rather structured conventions that shape the possibilities of musical composition. By establishing certain boundaries, they allow musicians to construct works that possess their own unique symmetry and coherence, showcasing the balance between limitation and creativity in the art of music.
In practice
In a music class discussing the importance of scales in composition.
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.
To make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means. This is intelligence in its broadest sense, which includes not only the peregrinations of pure logic but also the "logic" of emotions and intuition. My musical techniques, although often rigorous in their internal structure, leave many openings through which the most complex and mysterious factors of the intelligence may penetrate.
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.
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
I'm putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.
Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
There is nothing so necessary for men as dancing.
Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself- and to do so takes AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
Making movies is both entirely ludicrous and incredibly hard. It's a preposterous way to spend your time. You give up a lot for the privilege of doing it, and one of the things you get are relationships of immense trust that you see forged in situations of immense stress.
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