ABSTRACT
Like many of the composers who passed through Messiaen’s class, Iannis Xenakis also came to consider the nature of time and its relation to music as a central issue in his writings. For Xenakis, time truly is the time of mathematics, an axis of the plane on which musical events are distributed. For certain composers, who defined themselves in relation to or opposition with the post-war avant-garde, the discussion of ‘time’ became a site of discursive rupture. But Xenakis held a different relationship to the developments of science and mathematics, and for him time would not be affected by the music which passes through it. The position Xenakis holds in this discourse also sets the extreme modernism of this discourse into relief. The extent to which the broad concern with time in mid-century music was a symptom of a reflexive historical consciousness that defined many of the modernist motivations of that era.
