"Music is not a language...": Listening to Xenakis's electroacoustic music

When Iannis Xenakis wrote, in the Diatope presentation: “Music is not a language. Every musical piece is like a complex rock, formed by ridges and designs engraved within and without, that can be interpreted in a thousand different ways without a single one being the best or the most true. By virtue of this multiple exegesis, music inspires all sorts of fantastic imaginings, like a Crystal catalyst” (Xenakis 2006, 261), he asserts an important change in music conception, which has little by little gained ground during the twentieth-century. Here, Iannis Xenakis probably criticises the idea that music can only be structured—and conceived—depending on a temporal and chronological axis. When we are listening to Iannis Xenakis’s electroacoustic music, we have to take into account this important assertion. Listener cannot consider Iannis Xenakis’s music like a succession of entities, of well-delimited phenomena. The listener doesn’t perceive a static musical structure composed of elements set in time, but he perceives a dynamical space. Thus, we have to analyse the particular confrontation between the different dynamical spaces and the listening..