Stochastic process in music in the example of Iannis Xenakis's "Herma" and "Evryali"

Beginning to be seen as a paradigm shift in the arts since the end of the 19th century, modernism is based on the understanding of creating a work of art technologically and socially in accordance with the revolutionary 20th century. Modernist art fuses with world war, world crisis, and potential world revolution. Therefore; From the late 1960s onwards, a striking backlash against modernism became increasingly evident, which became fashionable in the 1980s under labels such as postmodernism (Hobsbawm, 2006: 694-695). Modernism implicitly assumes that art is progressive, and therefore today's style is superior to that of yesterday (Hobsbawm, 2006: 693). This definition is one of the most important proofs of the determination that modernist art has evolved into avant-garde art. Sociologist Jürgen Habermas also sees the avant-garde as the pinnacle of modernism. The aesthetic modernity that Baudelaire mapped transforms into the avant-garde movements that form the pinnacle of dada and surrealism. In other words, modernism evolves in the avant-garde by "evolving" and intensifying. "Doing the untested, trying the untried" affects all fields of art. Valid, established, dominant versus philosophical, political, religious, social, etc. avant-garde art, which holds the ground of opposition, brings with it a reaction against the existing one of the basic qualities that make up the movements. On the other hand, the experimental art process begins with the movement, finds a field of application, and thus artists expand the field of experimentation. The term avant-garde makes the art of the 1950s distinctive about a century after it was first used in the field of art (Erdal, 2013: 53-56). Musical styles of the 20th century change at an unprecedented rate, keeping pace with technological advances. Xenakis' work in the 1950s concerned the application of probability theories, defined as "stochastic music", to musical compositions. In this study, the works titled Herma and Evryali written by Xenakis for solo piano will be examined.