The Children of Xenakis

It has a lot to like and a little something for everyone.

The characters are put in interesting situations and the results lead to more and more excitement. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is because I felt there were a handful of scenes that didn't pay off. Though they may have been setting up something for the sequel, which I'm excited to read!

Editorial Reviews

It was recommended to me by a friend. I thought was a great read, especially for a genre I don't usually dive into. The story line and characters are well developed.

I would read more of Taylor's work. Gets to the point quickly and keeps you captivated throughout the story. Great character development, vivid descriptions. I am about to purchase vol. I am adding Rad Taylor to my list of favorite authors. This book was a great read. I am a science fiction buff. Dean Kootnz is one of my favorite and one of the best fiction writers I have ever read. Rad Taylor ranks right at the top with him.

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I can't wait to read his next novel. Simply put, the book is a great read. It's a true page-turner, very suspenseful. As the story of Dom and Bella unfolds, you can't wait to see what's going to happen next, especially when the baby enters the story See all 11 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

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The Children of Xenakis. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. It allowed me to perceive a new world of musical possibilities, which I proceeded to explore without delay. Years before this encounter, when I had bicycled through Attica and visited monasteries in Peloponnesus, I had listened to the sounds of nature and known then, unconsciously, that these sounds had real dignity and constituted music.

Similarly, when I participated in the bloody demonstrations of Athens, we came together soundlessly in the narrow streets to emerge as vast processions in the broad main roads, and as we gradually approached the German command center, rose up a highly rhythmic clamor of slogans. The entire city was filled with this cadence. When we arrived against the tanks and machine-guns that shot at us, the slogans, the cries of the crowd punctuated by the machine-guns, the pounding feet of those who fled, all this composed an extraordinary musical phenomenon.

During the cold nights of December, as we fought against the English, I heard another music. It wasn't a pitched battle but a series of skirmishes, in which people took shots at each other from house to house, with long intervals of silence, and each detonation reverberated on and on through the town, accompanied by tracer bullets, which added to the echo the spectacle of gunfire.

All these memories would surge up years later in my first composition, Metastaseis, and those that followed. The work of composing music led me to realize that the main obstacle which a musician encounters is the difficulty of controlling and judging his own inventions. In this sense music is probably the art in which the dialogue with self is the most uneasy. This is why musicians always need to rely on an instrument as a guide, generally the piano, following its invention, in order to hear their score.

But the piano didn't permit me to master the new forms that I was conceiving. Thus I turned to modern techniques that might put an end to these never-vanquished limits. Mathematics and computers brought me the answer I sought. I had for many years noted, as have many others, that there is a close relationship between music and mathematics.

In the same way, Aristoxenus, in his Elements of Harmony , foretold what modern mathematics have demonstrated: For my part, thanks to mathematics, and notably probability, I was able to go further into the internal understanding of music and also its practice, searching for all the mathematical possibilities of the sound combinations that I invented. Computer science led me to construct, In the early s, a new apparatus: The Upic is an even more advanced machine which means that, thanks to the combination of an electrical drawing table and pencil with a computer and a speaker, anyone can compose music by drawing, and can then correct the drawing after listening to the result.

The method is accessible to people who have mastered neither computers nor musical notation, and who cannot play an instrument. So adults and even children can compose their own music without prior apprenticeship, and are able to immediately evaluate what they have created and their taste.

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The use of modern technology is not a sudden disruption in the history of music. Music has always been, and continues to be, both sound and number, acoustics and mathematics, and this is why it is universal. Even to express sensuality or emotion, which music suggests admirably well, musicians all over the world proceed by grouping sounds by pitch and by intensity according to mathematical laws that are invariable. But today musicians have at their disposal a range of instrumentation, thanks to computers, whose possibilities are incomparably greater than the classical music chamber, and these possibilities, together with mathematics, mean composers can take their exploration of self to new depths, or can transform our representations of the world to make them more true.

It is now possible to deepen and to command a musical intuition in all its density.

The musical creator today is comparable to the astrophysicist who investigates of the mystery of the galaxies. But the astrophysicist does not create the galaxies he is exploring, whereas the musician actually produces his, by his creative act. The Diatope is the movement of the galaxies placed within reach of mankind. Music, the daughter of number and sound, on an equal basis with the fundamental laws of the human mind and of nature, is naturally the preferred way to express the universe in its fundamental abstraction.

Modern science brings us to a more primeval knowledge of music, and by expanding the imagination of the musician it moves him towards unknown horizons. The music that I composed for years was thus a sort of dialectical movement between what I was writing as a musician, with my instinct and my senses, and what I was diversifying by a theory-based approach commanded by the computer.

But this research, which was rather simple in its principles, gave rise to a number of misunderstandings.

Rad Taylor (Author of The Children of Xenakis)

I began writing down equations, thinking that I would demonstrate how you can make music with new rules, like counterpoint in the past, since that is also a rule that can be framed with mathematics. But many people surmised that since there was mathematics in my music, it must be cold. They paid no further attention to what they were hearing. I was often devastated by this incomprehension.

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I handled it better once I realized that I will never know what people understand from music. Whatever I place there, consciously and probably also unconsciously, is perceived by the listener in a way that is perhaps not completely different, but sufficiently different in any case that you can never immediately draw conclusions about the meaning or value of a piece of music. These uncertainties in the appreciation of music are not restricted to contemporary music.

I have encountered the same variations during performances of works by the classical musicians I prefer: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Monteverdi, Chopin. Music does not transmit a representation in a direct and immediate way. It acts more as a catalyst. The composer chooses his music because it creates in him, via the ear that detects repetitions and symmetries, an effect that promotes expression of his representation.

This music then sets off in the listener a psychological effect that may be close to or far from that which the musician has felt. Moreover, music comprises several levels of comprehension. It can be sensual and only sensual, in which case its effect on the body can be very powerful and even hypnotic. Music can also express all the facets of sensitivity. Please review your cart. You can remove the unavailable item s now or we'll automatically remove it at Checkout. Continue shopping Checkout Continue shopping. The Children of Xenakis by Rad Taylor.

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Chronology: 1922 - 1954

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