On Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mindful Listening, Eschewing Duality, 9/11 etc.

[One mp3 album below the fold]

In his book on David Bowie's Low album, Hugo Wilcken refers to Karlheinz Stockhausen's work as "dryly cerebral" and the composer himself as "more admired than listened to."  A bit harsh to this fan, though my guess is that the latter statement is basically accurate, i.e., the name-drops and influential tags far outnumber the instances of mindful, attentive listening to Stockhausen's recorded works.  As a part of my lifelong quest for new musical forms and languages to explore and assimilate, I have spent the past 20+ years trying to counterbalance this unfortunate statistic.

When he passed away on December 5, 2007, at the age of 79, Stockhausen left behind a monumental body of work that includes compositions for electronics (Telemusik, Gesang der Junglinge); pianos (the Klavierstücke, Mantra); vocal ensembles (Stimmung, Chöre für Doris); small ensembles (Aus den Sieben Tagen, Mikrophonie I); and large orchestras or multiple ensembles (Gruppen, Sternklang, Hymnen (Third Region).)

To the diligent and focused listener, Stockhausen's music reveals an unpredictable, organic universe, packed with arresting dynamics and subtleties of timbre, wild rhythmic exchanges, bursts of soul-shaking noise, as well as surprising innovations of melodic and meditative envelopment; endurance tests (Mikrophonie I) and warming spiritual journeys (Sternklang) present themselves in equal measure.  It's my belief that a full and enduring appreciation of Stockhausen's work must go beyond mere listening, beyond what is immediately pleasing to the ear, into an understanding and embracing of the concepts and processes that were the life's blood of every one of his compositions.

Many of Stockhausen's 1960s works were scored with non-specific instructions for the performers which allowed for individual "intuitive" expression and improvisation within a pre-prescribed environment.  Here is where, for me at least, things start to get really interesting.  This approach is at play in works like Prozession, Kurzwellen and Aus den Sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days), the latter being a series of 15 "text" compositions for smaller ensembles, wherein the composer-prescribed settings sometimes included actual physical conditions imposed upon the players themselves.  This is perhaps best exemplified by the piece Goldstaub (Gold Dust), and it's worth quoting the score, if only to provide a window into the composer's mind and the new levels of composition and performance he was continually striving at in his work, often eschewing the standard duality between art and its environment, between the composer/performer and the universal:

live completely alone for four days
without food
in complete silence, without much movement
sleep as little as necessary
think as little as possible

after four days, late at night
without conversation beforehand
play single sounds

WITHOUT THINKING which you are playing

close your eyes
just listen

© 1973 Karlheinz Stockhausen

The vast majority of Stockhausen's recorded works are available on CD, directly through Stockhausen Verlag, and though the cost of these releases is a bit prohibitive, they do not disappoint in terms of remastering, packaging and extensive liner notes.

For your own deep-listening pleasure, I present 2 mp3s, a rip from vinyl of a recording not available through Stockhausen Verlag, the 1967 version of Prozession [Side 1, beginning, 50MB] [Side 2, conclusion, 40MB] performed by the sextet I consider to have been Stockhausen's "rock group":  Alfred Alings and Rolf Gehlhaar on Tamtam (a large, flat-faced gong); Johannes G. Fritsch on viola; Harald Bojé on Elektronium, Aloys Kontarsky on piano, and the composer himself on filters and potentiometers.  This is the same sextet that performed on the 1968–69 recordings of Kurzwellen released by Deutsche Grammophon.  This is also the ensemble Prozession was originally composed for, with whom Stockhausen regularly toured.  See this link for Rolf Gehlhaar's personal remembrances of Prozession.  From the liner notes:

"The musical events are not notated in detail, but are rather variations of events taken from my earlier compositions, which the instrumentalists play from memory...For every event the score prescribes for each player the degree of change with which he must react, either to the previous event that he has played himself or to an event that another has played.  Thus in the moment of performance an "aural tradition" is established between my earlier music and this Prozession, as well as among the players.

...Single events undergo chain reactions of imitation, transformation, and mutation, all players often binding themselves for long time spans to one musical network of feedback."

© 1969 Karlheinz Stockhausen

Dryly cerebral?  Perhaps on paper—but not sonically, not for those who know how to really listen.

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Much has been written about Stockhausen's remarks on September 18, 2001, when asked for his thoughts on the terrorist attacks that were only a week old.  One writer observed the composer's "radical artistic egocentrism" and "mental descent into hell."  Always a fan of the broad stroke, the composer's comment that the 9/11 attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" is somewhat less surprising to those familiar with Stockhausen's philosophies on art and life.  You can read in greater detail about his full statement and the subsequent furor here.  No doubt the composer's concepts in general aimed to extend far beyond standard instrumentation and musical ideas, into other physical and traditionally non-musical realms, this being especially evident, for example, in his Helikopter-Streichquartett.  His comments may be shocking to some in their apparent detachment from the human suffering that occurred, but taken in full context they make a more complete statement hardly representative of mental degradation; such was Stockhausen's vision, warts and all.

For information on Stockhausen's background, his works, and his unique ideas on composition, I highly recommend the book Stockhausen on Music, a series of lectures and interviews compiled by Robin Maconie.  (Also see this online excerpt.)

For links to several Stockhausen obituaries, see this post on Alex Ross' blog, The Rest is Noise.

Comments

[DJ Stig]

Ahh the mp3 files aren't being found at the minute. Is this just because I'm in the UK, or has something gone terribly wrong. Hope they get put up, sounds like interesting stuff.

[WmMBerger]

The mp3 links are now fixed. Thanks for the tip-off.

[Ray Brazen]

Berger's blogging again! At last! All remains well with this world. And as always, enlightening to the core.

[illlich]

I think that, regardless of whether his music is dryly cerebral, or whether many people listened to his music much, his influence is grand; indeed, the fact that he is name-dropped so often should prove this. His ideas about music, despite how they might have ended up sounding, were clearly very influential. The quote about 9/11 might extremely glib, but I can sorta understand the logic-- no event in recent history has generated more thought, discussion, or emotion, for so many people (indeed, for the entire world, bar a few remaining stone-age tribes deep in the rain forests). The images of that day hit as hard (or harder) than those two iconic images of Vietnam (girl running from napalm, gun-to-head execution of saboteur), maybe only equaled by the various images of the Holocaust. I'm just not sure it's wise to call it "art" though.

[Petrina]

To be honest, I've never heard of this composer. I downloaded and am about half way through Prozession. Yeah, Sonic Youth owe him at the very least a tip of the hat (if they haven't already).

Had I read his comments on 9/11 immediately after the fact I would have found them inflammatory (much like most of America). But, much like the old comic adage that tragedy plus time equals comedy, I merely find his comments titillating. I'm no judge on what is art, but going back to illlich's comment about comparing images of the Vietnam War to the Holocaust, I do find it quite interesting that Stockhausen, a German, had made the comment in the first place. Comparing images of Vietnam to the Holocaust, as an American, is as glib as Stockhausen's comments on 9/11.

[Mogambo]

Thanks for this post! I've really only heard of Stockhausen through name-drops and one rather good documentary back inna day, so i look forward... the only music of his i've heard i remember as being like a cross between the aphex twin and can (especially impressive since it was a '40s or '50s piece) and rather cool and listenable.

His 9/11 comment was definitely an artsy ego-explosion moment, but i think most people outside the US have a bit more perspective on what is after all just one more terrorist event in amongst millions. Americans need to remember that the rest of the world not only exists but is vastly larger and more complex than their insular, xenophobic society and insensitive weirdoes like Stockhausen maybe help a little...?

[illlich]

Petrina: you can compare anything to anything else-- that doesn't necessarily mean they are "comparable"-- I was just trying to think of images of real-life horror; I could easily have chosen images of famines, plagues, or disasters, but mainly I was thinking about the evil inflicted by one man upon another, and those images were the "best" I could come up with. 5.1 million people died during the Vietnam War, including 4 million civilians in the north. I know it wasn't the cold efficient evil of the Nazis, but with those numbers in mind Johnson's comments about "bombing North Vietnam into the stone age" are indeed cold-blooded. Historians compare these kinds of events all the time-- Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, the Armenian genocide, the mass slaughter of American Indians, and native Africans. . . . The human tragedy is that we will always find reasons to hate each other or feel superior to others, and our ingenuity means we will always find new ways to kill each other.

[Krys O.]

There is an excerpt of Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet at this YouTube link and at said YouTube there is another link to a site to download the entire avi file.

[Nash Rose]

William, this post helps out a lot with the questions I raised a few weeks ago! I'm not sure I quite grasp yet what 'deep listening' involves...I sincerely hope listening to Goldstaub needn't be as involved as performing it! Your effort is appreciated.

[Jim Thompson]

Circa 1980, I found what I recall as being some old Folkways LP at the local community college that included Stockhausen and "musique concrete", and loved it. The one track of Stockhausen's I recall had mechanical, everyday sounds excerpted (we say "sampled" these days) with a sort of a science fiction bent, though I recall a couple of sounds reminding me of something like bad bathroom plumbing noises. At no time did I ever think it was intended to represent anything particular as a work, nor did I find that a failing. Years later, when I endured the "Noise Camp" put on (and the phrase is deliberate) by a group of overrated and egomaniacal Michigan 'noise' artists, I saw a handpainted vinyl LP scraping away at a volume that crumbled the ceiling tiles of a Royal Oak gallery, but this purportedly irreverent gimmick just made me remember Stockhausen creating sporadic rhythms in the '50s with the scratches of vinyl records. Remember, too, that Jean Shepherd played Stockhausen on his radio show, and Shep apparently did not suffer ignorance or inability.

[paul]

hey! the Time Stereo folks are NOT overrated or egomaniacal!