Marginalizing Stockhausen

There's no question that no one marginalizes Stockhausen better than he marginalizes himself, but to invoke an oft-cited parallel, the mountains of execrable prose, not to mention the vast catalogue of woeful misdeeds, that were Wagner's non-musical legacy have done little to obscure his rightful place in the pantheon [Hell, the Nazis used him as a poster boy]. Scholarship has even gone out of its way to play the apologist for Wagner, and no doubt, one day it will for Stockhausen as well.

Karlheinz' only real sin has been a simplistic sort of honesty. He's been a bit too forthright about his internal life and his estimation of his own work. That's been the handy excuse to dismiss him ever since he fell out of fashion, but it's also the key to countering that same critical groupthink.

In his review of Robin Maconie's new book, David Schiff offers a rather concise summary of Stockhausen's impact and artistic trajectory. He demonstrates how Stockhausen stood well apart from his contemporaries in both the singularity of his music and his ability to sustain the myth of progress

Stockhausen, however, promoted each new work as a dialectical step forward and convinced many composers and critics that his own evolution set the pace for all the music of his time. Pointillism, the result of serial micro-management of pitch, duration, articulation and dynamics, gave way to “group” composition in which the statistical jumble of these elements was prolonged into phrases. These phrases then grew into serially determined “moments” that floated freely in an indeterminate ocean of time. Determinacy now morphed into indeterminacy, and serial calculation gave way to intuitive music-making.

This, dear friends, is where history should depart from the good composer's intentions. Just as scholarship has taken the teeth out of 'Judaism in Music' by unearthing Wagner's warm correspondences with Jewish colleagues and more fully developing a social narrative where such racism is a priori, so will scholarship have to do a fair bit of work in untangling Stockhausen's music from Stockhausen's words.

Ironically enough, it's those words that are integral to that process. By his own account, the birth of his intuitive music was a clarion moment more spiritual than it was musical. He'd suffered a nervous breakdown after his wife left him. He'd not eaten or slept for days when he sat at the piano and made a sound that he recognized did not come from him but was transmitted through him by a larger power.

That's not the kind of story that goes over well at cocktail parties. If some accountant you'd just met told you the story, chances are you'd edge away and try to find some folks who were talking about their fantasy baseball teams. Moreover, it's not the type of story that fits well into one's own personal narrative. It's difficult to switch from such mystical head space to the grocery store to pick up diapers and formula. So, it should be understood that, almost out of necessity, Stockhausen would invent a narrative where the singular experience that lead to his 'intuitive' music was incorporated into some sort of master story arc that leads up to his writing of LICHT.

Schiff points out that the climax in Gruppen was not born out of the process that Stockhausen claimed, but rather, it was ready-made to please the audience, and it is that process of weeding out the Stockhausen from the Stockhausen, if you will, that is the key to restoring the lustre to the most important canon of the contemporary era.