Autonomous and Heteronomous Music

In chapter four of “Formalized Music”, Iannis Xenakis established the distinction of two musical

practices according to the autonomy of the musical work in relation to outside actions, its self-

contained character. There are autonomous musical pieces which follow a set of rules

predetermined in a score according to a historical tradition, which even when they leave room for

improvisation or the open combinatorics of chance, their unfoldment follows a linear programming.

The constructions of these works are determined by and restricted to the “score practice”. A second

class of works, the heteronomous, could be described roughly in opposition to the previous

category as being determined by forces beyond the score tradition. In this class, we could include

music whose interactive action produces complex patterns of feed-backs (not necessarily

predetermined) in which the purpose of the interaction does not even follow the internal structure of

the musical art.

What Xenakis is talking about is the projection of different kinds of order structures upon sound, or

even upon different kinds of time canvases. The result is a different kind of musical phenomena, a

divergent tradition which has old roots in the world of the Pythagoreans. Lejaren Hiller told me

once about a conceptual piece of music (I mean a piece which does not require its actual

performance) which fits the category of heteronomous music. The idea was to put the estructural

vibrations of a building into actual sound via a morphism that would transform the inputs of several

sensors distributed throughout the building into audible frequencies produced by a synthesizer.

Hiller, like Xenakis, were more interested in the “intelligence” put into the work than in the

aesthetical results. I think that conceptual music opens new worlds of possible aural experience and

that beauty enters into the system not as a primary consideration, though it is precisely beauty what

makes the concept to be a musical one.

A closer look to Xenakis distinction raises two basic questions: in relation to what are score rules

autonomous? In what sense is the traditional practice of music an independent realm in relation to

the more general one of human aesthetic action?