''Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition'' is a book by

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

, and

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

Iannis Xenakis Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; , ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and enginee ...

in which he explains his motivation, philosophy, and technique for composing

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

with

stochastic Stochastic (; ) is the property of being well-described by a random probability distribution. ''Stochasticity'' and ''randomness'' are technically distinct concepts: the former refers to a modeling approach, while the latter describes phenomena; i ...

mathematical functions. It was published in Paris in 1963 as ''Musiques formelles: nouveaux principes formels de composition musicale'' as a special double issue of ''

La Revue musicale ''La Revue musicale'' was a music magazine founded by Henry Prunières in 1920. ''La Revue musicale'' of Prunières was undoubtedly the first music publishing magazine giving as much attention to the quality of editing, iconography, and illustrat ...

'' and republished in an expanded edition in 1981 in Paris by Stock Musique. It was later translated into English with three added chapters and published in 1971 by Indiana University Press, republished in 1992 by Pendragon Press with a second edition published in 2001, also by Pendragon. The book contains the complete FORTRAN program code for one of Xenakis's early computer music composition programs GENDY. It has been described as a groundbreaking work.

Editions

*Xenakis, Iannis. 1963. ''Musiques formelles: nouveaux principes formels de composition musicale''. Special issue of ''La Revue musicale'', nos. 253–254. Paris: Editions Richard-Masse. *Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. ''Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition'', translated by Christopher Butchers (chapters 1–6), G. W. Hopkins (chapter 7), and Mr. and Mrs. John Challifour (chapter 8). Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. *Xenakis, Iannis. 1981. ''Musiques formelles: nouveaux principes formels de composition musicale'', expanded edition, Paris: Stock Musique. . *Xenakis, Iannis. 1992. ''Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition'', second, revised English edition, with additional material translated by Sharon Kanach. Harmonologia Series No. 6. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. . Reprinted Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001.

References

1963 non-fiction books 1971 non-fiction books Music books Mathematics of music {{music-publication-stub