ABSTRACT
The brief analytical discussion that follows has a simple goal: to illustrate a purely negative point at which time departs from the question of music, at least for the discursive moment that began with Messiaen and ends in Xenakis. Xenakis viewed at least part of his compositional process as an exercise akin to the mathematician or physicist, whose models seek to describe phenomena in the natural world. In many of Xenakis’s works, the efforts to create the sonic realization of geometric transformations is obvious: ascending and descending glissandi, ordinally situated patterns in various sequences, ‘game’ like spaces that can be traversed in multiple ways.
