Divergences and convergences between Xenakis and Cage's indeterminism

Xenakis and Cage could be described as the two main figures in the decades of the 1950-60's who were attracted by indeterminism and used chance in their music. They emphasized originality in both their theoretical and musical works and used chance in many and different compositional ways. Indeterminism shaped a large part of their works and theoretical thinking. Sometimes, their approaches of indeterminism, and of music in general, reach up to a point of difference that permit to qualify them as "oppositional" composers. Other times, their approaches seem to converge. In this paper, the divergences and convergences between Xenakis and Cage's approach of indeterminism in music will be discussed. We will focus on the theoretical thoughts that they formulated and we will try to outline certain aspects that appear interesting. More precisely, we will discus the traditional versus scientific indeterminism in parallel with the western-eastern dipole, the imitation of nature "in her manner of operation", the relation of Xenakis with revelation, intuition and emotions, and finally, we will emphasize the two composers’ search of freedom