有意思的部分——显然地应该去思考什么样的经历塑造了Xenakis这样的人；对各音乐家及风格的评论；对其音乐的解释，这部分应该结合音乐去听。也许有时间再读一读那本Formalized Music。对Varga也很会问，值得推荐。

下面的摘录无关紧要。

This defence mechanism remains with me today. Because of this I write completely original music. I know it sounds ridiculous, but sometimes a sentimental melody can move me to tears. However, I don’t want to be moved.

Why not?

Because music shouldn’t be listened to in this way. These feelings were planted in me because of my experiences as a child. It reminds me of my family and my time at school. Also it’s not the music itself that affects me so much, but simply its subjective colouring.

In my view, the same music will evoke quite different reactions in two or three hundred years, because the terms of reference of the listener will be completely different. I am sure that Bach’s compositions had a completely different effect on his con temporaries than on today’s audience. It is not that the music itself is laden with emotions. The music does not dictate that we must be happy here or sad there. The reaction is defined by the society in which we grow up. European music says something completely different to a Chinese audience than to a European one, and we hear Chinese music with totally different ears from the Chinese themselves. But that’s obvious.

I reacted against music because I felt I was too sensitive. Music could even bring me to tears. It was silly. But it still happens today. I have realized that emotions can envelop me in connec tion with other things as well - such as architecture, sculpture or poetry. This became clear when I was fifteen or sixteen, in other words during adolescence, when one undergoes deep, dramatic changes. It was then that I decided to concentrate seriously on music - first of all by learning to play an instrument.

You were a sensitive child and had had a lonely and unhappy life - it was natural that you should have taken refuge in an imaginary world where you felt at home. You must have felt nostalgic for the old Greece, the age of Pericles.

Yes. I felt I was born too late - I had missed two millennia. I didn’t know what there was for me to do in the twentieth century. But of course there was music and there were the natural sciences. They were the link between ancient times and the present, because both had been an organic part of ancient thinking.

I discovered Plato and read almost all the dialogues - the Republic, the Banquet and the shorter ones too. I didn’t read much Aristotle but a great deal of Thucydides and Xenophon. And I devoured the poets, mainly Sappho, whom I particularly liked for the musical quality, the imagery and language of her poems. I read them in the original Aeolian dialect.

I also studied historical writings on ancient Greece and visited the sites of great historical events. I remember making several visits to a mound in Marathon which has a relief at its foot that was made by Aristocles in the fifth century b c . The original is in the Archaeological Museum of Athens. It shows a soldier, stand ing, in archaic style. There’s a quotation from Aeschylus’ The Persians carved into the stone. It goes something like this: ‘The Athenians have destroyed the power of gold-bearing Medes.’ I made pilgrimages there and projected myself into that age…

How about Romanesque and Gothic?

I didn’t know Romanesque architecture and I didn’t like the Gothic. Because it was Gothic. The Greeks, you know, always thought of themselves as special, with regard to both the East and the West. Even today we say we’re going to Europe when we leave the country.

And how about Honegger?

Honegger? That was interesting, I must tell you about that. He taught composition at a course run by the Ecole Normale. There was no entrance examination and you had to pay a fee for the lessons. His method consisted of the pupils playing their compositions for him to comment on, and then they would discuss them in front of the class.

After a while I volunteered a piano piece I’d written. He asked me to play it, and when I had finished he said: But there are parallel octaves here! Yes, I know, I replied, but I like them. He became more and more angry and finally said: This is no music! Perhaps the first few bars are - but no, even they are not music! I said nothing but stopped attending his classes.

…

We then came upon the piano piece that had aroused Honegger’s wrath. I asked Xenakis to play it on the upright piano in his studio. Thefirst few bars, which Honegger reluctantly accepted as music, added up to a solemn melody accompanied by consonant chords which all of a sudden, at a spot marked by an asterisk indicating the beginning of the section rejected by Honegger, seemed to lose direction, consonance giving way to dissonance. Xenakis had also written the first half of Honegger’s remark over thefirst bars, omitting the second half (about how even thefirst few bars were not music) because he was ashamed of it. There was another quotation as well: ‘He regarded this passage as atrocious because of the parallel octaves and the retard once heard before.’ On reading this comment Xenakis played the passage over two or three times, to recapitulate what Honegger may have meant.

‘Sacrifice was only performed once, never again. Unfortunately, the recording is lost. A friend suggested I should show it to Boulez, who was then in the process of preparing, together with Scherchen, the programmes of the Domaine musical. Boulez said my music was too simple (to others he said I didn’t know enough about music) and that music had to be complex. I engaged in a debate with him, saying that if music reaches a point where it has become too complex, you need a new kind of simplicity. Com plexity is not synonymous with aesthetic interest. We argued like that, and eventually it led to our first row, which lasted several years and deepened further after my article on the crisis of serial music.

Messiaen taught you that it was enough for you to listen, to hear as much music as possible, and that you didn’t need any academic training.

Yes, he said that the first time I saw him after class.

The scale relates the distance between pitches: it’s a structure out side of time. Modes on the other hand include the outside-time structure of scales and also in-time structures such as percentages of notes or melodic pattern.

===

I had also written to Dimitri Mitropoulos in New York about Metastasis. He replied that he was too old to conduct new music and suggested that I send it to Donaueschingen, where music like that was supported …

I had a Polish disciple, by the name of Penderecki, and that he was writing music with many glissandos like mine.

As far as Varese was concerned, I greatly appreciated his music and liked it .¡| but it didn’t have any influence on me. I shall have more to say f about this later on - anyway, I regarded him as one of the most ' original composers of the century.

Incidentally, I didn’t tell you the truth when I said that Scher- f chen was the only one to take an interest in my music. Nicolas % Nabokov was another: He had established a European cultural í foundation, financed by the Americans. After all, in those years | nobody but the Americans had money and many times they spent it with generosity. At the first competition run by the foun- -1 dation Metastasis won first prize. The jury included Nabokov I himself, as well as Boris Blacher and some others. I won 10,000 1 Swissfrancs—that was the first time I had made money outof my music. Berio also received a prize which he shared with some- ; body else.

I conducted conversations with Takemitsu and other gifted musicians and I realized that most Japanese composers didn’t actually know the wonderful traditional Japanese music, they didn’t understand it and were indifferent to it.

In the course of that visit I made the acquaintance of Yuji Taka- hashi, the brilliant pianist, who must have been around twenty then. His recitals consisted mostly of the works of contemporary composers. A few months later I received a letter from him: he was very poor, he wrote, but he wanted to commission a piano piece from me. I was moved by that gesture.

和高桥悠治这么早就认识了呀。。。Herma是给他写的吗。。。

Then, in 1963, Aaron Copland phoned unexpectedly from New York. Did I feel like teaching at Tanglewood, he asked. It didn’t take me long to say yes.

–

Bernstein devoted a series of concerts to avant-garde music, conducting works by Cage, Brown, Ligeti and myself. But he made a mistake: on entering the podium, he gave a little speech saying he thought it was his duty to present so-called avant-garde music to the public, even though he himself was not interested in it at all! … Bernstein eventually wrote to me explaining he hadn’t meant it like that. Of course.

哈哈哈哈操

It was years before I was able to work in the studio, in 1957. That’s when Diamorphoses was realized for Enrico Fulchignoni’s film, Orient-Occident, followed by Bohor, which created a scandal in Paris. I had dedicated Bohor to Pierre Schaeffer although he hated that music.

I became convinced - and I remain so even today - that one can achieve universality, not through religion, not through emotions or tradition, but through the sciences. Through a scientific way of thinking.

interesting…

By way of introduction, I would like to quote Fernand Léger: ‘Every artist holds a weapon in his hand and attacks tradition with it. ’ Do you agree with him?

No, I’ve never had a weapon, nor do I have one now. I’m not against tradition. I fight for different goals but that doesn’t mean I want to destroy tradition, provided it doesn’t destroy my object ives. But even then I wouldn’t use arms against it. I would let it live!

When I first heard Debussy (very late on, at the time of the war against the British, in December 1944; that was also when I became acquainted with Bartók) I felt that his music was closest to what I was searching for. More than Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms, whose music I heard more often than Debussy’s and Ravel’s.

Berg?

A romantic old chap. I like his Violin Concerto.

In science, aleatoric is used to mean ‘probable’. In mathematics, an aleatoric variable is an exact ly circumscribed notion. The serialists, however, loosened up its meaning and identified it with improvisation. They continued to write rows, because that was what they were used to, but gave the interpreter the choice of playing this or that, here or there. The interpreter could choose according to instinct. However, that is not aleatorism but improvisation on a given material computed according to the serial system.

Cage’s music can be interesting, until he relies too heavily on the interpreters, on improvisation. That’s why I’ve kept aloof from this trend. In my opinion it is the composer’s privilege to determine his works, down to the minutest detail. Otherwise he ought to share the copyright with his performers.

He (Schoenberg) put music in another kind of prison.

That’s right. Gage was looking for maximum freedom - not the freedom of thinking but that of intuition. That was again a mis-, take, or rather it was too partial.

(comment on Brahms) I’m attracted both by the complex form and by the melodic and rhythmic patterns of his compositions. The First and Fourth Symphony, the Piano Quintet, the sonatas for cello and piano and the last short piano pieces, which exerted such a strong influence on Schoenberg and others - they’re my favourites.

Your views on Mozart are notoriously unorthodox.

Yes, I think he’s trivial. There are, of course, exceptions: the piano concertos are beautiful and so is Don Giovanni. But he wrote too much. I think Haydn is purer and more abstract.

As far as opera is concerned I like Wagner and I find the nineteenth-century Italian operas dull, uninteresting, too natural istic.

I made notes while listening to your works. The adjectives ‘savage’ and ‘aggressive’ come up ratherfrequently. Your music sometimes inspires anxiety - it sounds like an irresistibly approaching doom. Where does that savageness come from?

It’s part of our everyday life. Too much music is nice. By savage you mean brutal, painful, don’t you?

Roughly, yes.

The universe is like that too. I don’t think music ought to be pleasant all the time. Profound music is never like that. Some times, perhaps, but most of the time it is fearsome. No really great music is tender.

The only instrument I don’t like is the flute - it has a silly sound.

However, what is impossible in the case of language can be realized in music. After all, music is not a language: it doesn’t have the task of expressing something through sounds and sym bols. Music stands by itself, there’s nothing beyond it. We can therefore use the Markov chain, provided the result is interesting.

While instruments were manufactured in order for one to play melodies on them - in other words, the models are in the pitch versus time domain - in sound synthesis we are moving in the pressure versus time domain.

at, for instance, is a noise. It’s too rich for the ear, we can’t perceive it as repetition, so, because our ear is nothing but a periodicity-counter, we put it in the noise domain.

For messages to be transmitted by intelligent beings they have to be differentiated from natural signals. The latter are more or less periodical. Do the messages sent by intelli gent beings also arrive in the form of periodic signals? To a certain extent yes, otherwise the result would be just noise, without any meaning. How can one differentiate between this periodicity and the natural one? That’s a very profound problem in the pattern recognition of signals.

你可以求出它的自相关函数。。。我不是学傻了就是喝多了。

I started out of perception. Everybody hears the intensity, dens ity (the number of events by seconds), pitch, the degree of order and duration of sound. We then determine the values of a given area of perception, for instance the perception of pitch. These form sets.

When we perceive two pitches we not only hear them but, on a more abstract level, we assess by comparison the distance be tween them. That is our second proposition.

The third: we are capable of repeating that distance and thereby receive new values of pitches.

Wouldn’t the easiest solution befor you to conduct your works yourself?

I don’t think so. It’s important that the performer should be able to maintain a certain distance from his repertoire. This detach ment would be impossible with the composer; he couldn’t be objective. Stravinsky was a very bad conductor. Also, prepar ations for a performance take a long time, and conducting re quires constant practice.

Pierre Henry’s studio was too small, and it didn’t have the equipment to interest me, while Stockhausen didn’t let anybody use the West deutscher Rundfunk studio - and it was in any case outdated, nothing had changed for twenty years. Nor was Scherchen’s studio suitable for the kind of experiments I wanted to do.

stockhausen你这么抠？

To get back to the Polytopes: is there any link between the music and the spectacle? The link is not between them but beyond or behind them. Because beyond there is nothing but the human brain - my brain.

MY brain.

The structure of the melodic scale is very important, not only in melodic pat terns - melodies - but also in producing chords of a different timbre. If you take a given range, and if the structure of the scale is rich enough, you can stay there without having to resort to melodic patterns - the interchange of the sounds themselves in a rather free rhythmic movement produces a melodic flow which is neither chords nor melodic patterns. That, perhaps, is what you mean. They give a kind of overall timbre in a particular domain.

You mentioned minimal music. That’s simply a by-product of Indian or African music. In fact, however, it has always existed. Bach is repetitive - like a motor.

In the past I experimented with music without a rhythmic pulse, that is, having no precise rhythmic sense. In my latest pieces I seem to have come back to very sharp and simple struc tures that are immediately perceptible.

Absolutely. I hate vibrato because it tends to be mechanical. It sounds so silly it spoils the music - either the melodic pattern or the style of the composition. There’s a European vibrato which has existed for two or three centuries - i t didn’t; exist before - and which students are encouraged to use all the time: it’s absolutely silly. If, however, you can control it vibrato can be a very interest ing aesthetic tool, for we’re certainly very sensitive to it.

The dynamic level of your music still favours f to fff.

That’s because I’m growing more deaf.