Master of Both Time & Space

"It happens every once in a while, in music as in other fields, that you find people specializing in one new aspect of musical forming, and becoming famous because they just specialize. A composer like Ligeti specialized for years in microstructures, the detailed composition of textures; or Xenakis, who has concentrated on stochastic distributions; or Penderecki, who was the cluster specialist for a long time. Every once in a while music produces its specialists, people who go very deeply into their narrow specializations, and vary them all the time. This is something we take for granted in painting, more than in music. Everyone has his so-called personal style. By which is meant that he has narrowed down his field of activity so completely that it only takes a fragment of a work for you to say, ah, that’s so and so.

And we can really say that universalists are becoming very rare in all fields, all the sciences. I tell my own students, if you want to become famous just take a magnifying glass and put it to one of my scores, and what you see there, just multiply that for five years. For example, if you see snare drums, then you start composing around twenty pieces only for snare drums. Snare drums of all different sizes: for fifty snare drums, for twenty, for thirty – snare drums on the roof, snare drums in the basement, big snare drums and very tiny snare drums, snare drums amplified and intermodulated. Then he will be the snare drum specialist, he will be know in Japan, he will be famous everywhere." – Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen was every bit the universalist, able and eager to write in almost any style, but he's no Beethoven. There will be no clear sorting out of middle vs. late. Techniques that were developed with the obsessive fervor that was his trademark were rarely abandoned. They simply took on different forms. For instance, the LICHT cycle is written with a system of formulas, which are melodies that govern the music in the same way a tone row does.

Like Berio, Stockhausen was a musical magpie, but the most appropriate comparison lies outside of music with William S. Burroughs, because unlike Berio, Stockhausen didn't steal from other composers. He stole from himself. The bulk of his canon is obsessed with time, whether it's the hours of the day, the days of the week, or the months of the zodiac, the theme of time keeps turning up like a character straight out of Interzone.

One of his earliest compulsive takes on time involved its relation to space. Stockhausen's fixation on this concept would become a brutalizing force in modern music, much to just about everyone's dismay. It all starts, more or less, with Webern:



See how each group of 3 notes is essentially the same? Half-step and a third leap.

Instead of creating a random order for all 12 notes, Webern devised a way to make even smaller groups of notes aggregate into a complete tone row, and this was the snowball that started the avalanche of total serialization. For, if a trichord could generate a row, couldn't it also generate rhythms, and dynamics, and all sorts of crazy things?

By the time Stockhausen got his hands on the idea of total serialization, he'd much bigger plans for it. In his mind, the parameters of a piece should extend to how it is perceived in three-dimensional reality. Anyone who's felt their dinner get rearranged in their stomach by Metallica's amps in the front row knows it's a helluva lot different than hearing the concert from the nosebleeds.

So, in August and September of 1955, in response to a commission from the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koln, he retreated to the Swiss village of Paspels to spend two months devising a piece that would realize this new concept of spatial organization. At this point, he'd already begun work on Gesang, and amazingly, he had yet to turn 27.

What he came up with was a piece for three orchestras arranged in a horseshoe around the audience. He'd call it Gruppen (Groups), not after the separate ensembles, but after the mathematical term. With his usual irrepresible zeal, he devised a system for organizing space which he saw as the equivalent of a musical scale:



At the premiere on March 24, 1958, the three orchestras were conducted by Stockhausen (I), Bruno Maderna (II), and Pierre Boulez (III). For most of us, that seems an electric line-up, a moment which we'd feel privileged to witness, but it's tough to fault those folks who'd see it as a virtual fountainhead for the noxious dogmas that would choke off musical innovation in the following decades, terrorizing young composers in the academy most of all.

What we've touched on in this already too long post is not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. The complexities of Gruppen are enough to fill dozens of articles and book-length studies. After all, those two months spent in Switzerland weren't wasted on crafting melodies and hammering out orchestraions. They were spent working out the serial organization scheme of the piece.

But what's important to bear in mind as we continue our tribute to Stockhausen's massive body of work is that the much loved climax in Gruppen is a departure from the rigid schematic which organizes the rest of the piece. The composer was great for a variety of reasons, one of which was that he knew his audience needed a big finish. Yes, the climax that Alex Ross aptly called 'a thirteen-bar freak-out, free jazz or avant-rock before the fact' and that David Schiff called 'Gabrieli rewritten by Stan Kenton' was a gimmick, tacked on to assure an ovation.


Always up to something...