Feldman: Do you feel that the fact that you’re so consistently productive brings you closer to perhaps an unconscious vision? I mean, I don’t know anyone besides myself that works like a lunatic as much as you do! I’m sure that you’re aware of this creative energy through the past.

Xenakis: Yes, I’m aware that I’m working very hard because I don’t do anything else. What I don’t know is if there is any progress. That is difficult. The meaning of progress in art is meaningless.

Feldman: But you see different. You might essentially do the same thing but from another angle, not from a clear linearity but from a kind of broken linearity. Do you feel that working the way you do brings you closer to your music or does the freedom that you feel comes from arriving at a certain distance from your music? Does it position you in a way to continue without being interrupted?

Xenakis: No, the problem is much more simple and complicated at the same time. Each time that I write a piece, I am afraid to repeat myself because there is no use in trying to do, say, music by Brahms or, which is the same thing, to compose music that you’ve done in the past. It has to be different. But how do you know that it is different? It is very difficult to work and do something different. The only way to escape from that is by just doing the things. Keep trying, and why shouldn’t you keep trying? Well, that is an interior problem. Bergson would say it is elan vital. I know that I’m working very hard, as you are working very hard. That’s all. I can’t escape from that situation. It’s also a bit sad, one should be able to make a complete blank in his own mind. That should be the maximum freedom. There are two contradictory trends, at least in what I am doing and I think that it also goes for people like you. One is that one forms some kind of, not “aim” but, let’s say, “environment”, “mind-environment”: we can’t escape from what we are. This means repetition and that means imitation and unoriginality, which is a bad thing because it is poor. The other is to change. So how do you balance these things? This is only through working without any criteria that will teil you that you are original or that you are imitating. For instance, you write something that looks like what you’ve written, say two or three years ago, but you’ve changed something which could be a seed for a completely different way, and then you have to be there and you have to be conscious that somehow this could lead you somewhere else. Perhaps that is a strategy in the work.

Complete conversation (PDF). Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis – In conversation. Edited by Vincent Gasseling and Michael Nieuwenhuizen