Iannis Xenakis

Seeing the national french symphony playing works by xenakis might have been the climax of my musical existence.
it was exquisite. it made the seasoned professionals sweat, all eyes so intent as to seem to be igniting the sheet music in front of them, absolute concentration for the music below, which is so completely beyond me as to belong in its own universe.

Transcendant.

I wish my mind could wrap itself around the compositions below, the pure technical nature of notes for a symphony come to life, a conceptual wilderness of strange and unusual creatures, capable of being symbols for something as organic and animate as sound, not just sound, but music.

I get strangely heated when I look at the compositions of xenakis-- the absolute perfection of planes, geometry, mathematics-- beautiful rich, so rich, those numbers and the way xenakis's mind organizes his music. That is what gets me, the way his mind was so alive! So intensely and violently alive, that he could envision translating his concepts into such a framework never before seen, considered, new and naked and raw and so pure in its inception that it hurts to look at it. This was the way this man's mind worked. Frick.

Thinking in 6-D, 100-D, dimensions and dimensions, infinities. Numbers not named, found, beyond human comprehension, hell, existence.

Like his mind was beyond human and something born in the ether.

that I almost believe myself thinking that somewhere in there must be the key to life, the universe, any and all meaning of everything everything everything!

An x and y axis to heaven.

Cells on fire from all of this (can everyone feel so passionately as me? it sort of hurts and interferes with the practicalities of living but I wouldn't trade it for the world).

Cells on fire! What a LOVELY way to spend an early Wednesday mornings!