The glib use of the terms ‘random’ and ‘chance’ in the contemporary arts is almost without exception thoroughly anachronistic. It has been a philosophical and mathematical commonplace since the Port Royal Logic in 1662 and Bernouilli in 1713 that there is no absolute polarity between chance and determinism; that there is, rather, a continuous spectrum between pure chance at one end and pure determinism at the other; that both pure states are rare; and that it is, moreover, possible to argue with as rigorous a logic, with as extended a mathematics and with as fruitful results at the chance end of the spectrum as at the deterministic end: to describe and manipulate degrees of disorder, or the movement from order to disorder and from disorder to order.

Readers of Tempo will already be familiar with some of Xenakis's basic ideas on music, from the abridged translation of some of his writings published in Tempo 78. These theories have provoked a good deal of comment, and it is worth considering his latest work, Nuits, in relation to the implications of them. The mainstay of the theoretical substructure underlying Xenakis's textural style is his critique of musical ‘causality’, i.e. the thematic process in music from the classical style right up to the total thematicism of integral serialism. On the analogy of the sciences, where the causal principle has been superseded by probability theory, the development of occidental music beyond the impasse of total serialism can only be ensured, Xenakis contends, by means of a ‘rationalisation of chance’ articulated in generalised musical textures, the morphology of which is governed by statistical laws.

Like most present-day Hungarian composers, Zsolt Durkó is scarcely known even as a name in this country, so for a start it will help to place him in a wider context. He was born in 1934, an exact contemporary of Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, and a near contemporary of Maw, Williamson, Bennett, Crosse and Goehr—a member, in other words, of that gifted generation whose formative years were post-war, and who now stand at the very centre of new music in the sixties. British composers have had their obstacles to surmount. In Hungary politics and music history have posed obvious problems. But in the music which is beginning to percolate into Britain, whether, by Bozay, Petrovics, Hidas or Durkó, they are seemingly mastered, and Durkó's work at any rate pays lip-service neither to ideology nor to the two great figures of twentieth-century Hungarian music, Bartók and Kodály.

My new system of air-conditioning, then. It's easy, once you know all about the hot air that has to be conditioned. Thereafter, it's a matter of using a filter with the right devices, two of them. But first let me start right in the middle—of my last article, that is. David Simmons, it will be remembered, made the contemporary composer ask, ‘How in this age of ubiquitous noise, violence, change and conformist pressures can I maintain and express my intuitions?’ In the last issue, I dealt with this question logically. Now, I propose to examine it psychologically.