Quote of the Day

There exists in all the arts what we may call rationalism in the etymological sense: the search for proportion. The artist has always called upon it out of necessity. The rules of construction have varied widely over the centuries, but there have always been rules in every epoch because of the necessity of making oneself understood…Now everything that is [a] rule or repeated constraint is part of the mental machine. A little “imaginary machine,” Philippot would have said—a choice, a set of decisions. A musical work can be analyzed as a multitude of mental machines.

—Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music