9. Iannis Xenakis’s Philosophy of Music, Stochastics, and the Postmodern Sublime

In his writings and compositions from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Iannis Xenakis makes clear his intent to compose music that escapes the inherited structures of the Western tradition. As a way to achieve this goal, he uses stochastic techniques in order to uproot listeners’ expectations, but in a manner more attuned to the psychology of listening than his serialist contemporaries.

One of his chief concerns is the hierarchy of temporalities as experienced by the listener and manipulated by the composer, a hierarchy whose levels range from the length of an entire piece down to microscopic sonic ‘grains’. His usage of stochastic techniques muddies the distinction between these temporal levels, disorienting the listener on multiple timescales. Such a state of disorientation, where one is unable to predict the course of a work, is a hallmark of what Jean-François Lyotard calls the ‘postmodern’ sublime, which is produced by avant-garde artistic works that, like those of Xenakis, eschew received models and notions of representation or allusion.

Drawing on scholarship by Brian Kane, I argue that Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is precisely what Xenakis aims to produce in his stochastic works, and that it acts as a preliminary mode of both composition and reception, helping composer and listener to break free from traditional constraints. This process allows for the production of new compositional structures and modes of reception, radically expanding musical possibilities.