The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.
Interpretation
The musical scale defines the boundaries within which music can be created, allowing for artistic expression within those limits.
The quote by Iannis Xenakis emphasizes the idea that musical scales are not just arbitrary sets of notes, but rather structured conventions that shape the possibilities of musical composition. By establishing certain boundaries, they allow musicians to construct works that possess their own unique symmetry and coherence, showcasing the balance between limitation and creativity in the art of music.
In practice
In a music class discussing the importance of scales in composition.
Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one.
To make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means. This is intelligence in its broadest sense, which includes not only the peregrinations of pure logic but also the "logic" of emotions and intuition. My musical techniques, although often rigorous in their internal structure, leave many openings through which the most complex and mysterious factors of the intelligence may penetrate.
The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as totality, is a new sonic event.
The listener must be gripped and whether he likes it or not, drawn into the flight path of the sounds without special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Have a strong vision about the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it.
Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
Music so softens and disarms the mind That not an arrow does resistance find.
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