The Artist Formerly Known As Stockhausen

"I think that every call to write the next part of LICHT is meaningful. I take any call, any question which comes from outside, as a challenge. And the basic system of LICHT is so abstract and so general that I can make any formation and any music with this formula. For the formula is not bound to material. It is like a genetic code, and then organic works of very different kinds can come out of this formula. A commission is not just a human affair but it is a spiritual call." – Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen’s most famous commission came from Professor Hans Landesmann of the Salzburg Festival in 1991. He asked for a string quartet, and Stockhausen’s first reaction was to reject the offer based on his nearly career-long avoidance of obsolete 18th century forms. If he hadn’t written for an orchestra in decades, why would he write for a string quartet?

But then Stockhausen had a dream!

No, it wasn’t of the quartet joining in an old Negro spiritual. It was of the quartet flying in the air, with each player isolated in separate helicopters from each other, an almost sadistic riposte to the call to compose for the standard ensemble of chamber music. He even dreamed that the audience was watching the performance on video monitors which showed close-ups of each performer: “When I woke up, I felt strongly that something had been communicated to me which I never would have thought of on my own. I did not tell anyone anything about it.”

The Helicopter String Quartet would form the third scene of Wednesday, which continued the loopy deconstructed narrative of LICHT. Flying musicians was certainly not a new idea in Stockhausen’s head. When he was 25, he wanted to put orchestra members into chairs that would fly out over the audience.

The Austrian Green Party complained about the pollution of the helicopters for such an extravagance as a musical performance, and in apparent solidarity, the general director of Austrian television and radio inflated his rental fees for the necessary AV equipment, pricing the production out of the Salzburg Festival’s range, despite the fact that they were already promoting it for their 1994 season.

The premiere would eventually take place in Amsterdam at the Westergasfabriek, a gentrified industrial complex. A key part of the concert included post-performance debriefings of the Arditti Quartet and the Royal Dutch Airforce pilots who flew the helicopters. Irvin Arditti admitted, “It’s a wonderful experience, but quite distracting, because you want to keep looking out of the window and not at the score.” The cellist’s pilot remarked, “when I saw him playing very fast, I tried to turn and fly faster to influence him,” and Irvin Arditti’s pilot actually admitted to trying to mess him up with “sharp turns and loops”.

The piece itself is all surface material from the superformula. The counting and glissandi from Lucifer and Eve’s formulas are the main musical materials as the strings match the rising and falling of the helicopter rotors. It is astonishing to think that Stockhausen managed, over several decades, to complete LICHT by fulfilling commissions in this patchwork manner. Nearly every moment in the opera pulls double duty as a separate concert piece which fulfilled some commission and allowed him to keep writing what he wanted, and therein lies the most overlooked portion of Stockhausen’s legacy: his entrepreneurship.

Beside the twin accomplishments of inventing electronic music, and pioneering total serialization, a third landmark in the career of Stockhausen stands out as a chief girder of his legacy, and that is the career itself. Depending on their bias, historians will point to either Mozart or Beethoven as the first freelance composers. Stockhausen is the first major classical music figure to control every aspect of his intellectual property. The control was hard-won and a product of life lessons that have been repeated innumerable times by artists of all genres.

Everyone from Ike Turner to Billy Joel has been on the ass end of an exploitative publishing deal. As a very young man, Stockhausen entered into a contract with Universal Edition that was not as beneficial to him as it should have been. As his scores grew more complex, he grew frustrated with UE’s inability to print them in the manner he envisioned. Those shortcomings, coupled with an imperfect contract, lead him to part ways with his publisher and set up his own imprint in 1969. For the rest of his life, Stockhausen was fond of repeating the mantra that all profits from his Verlag go to paying off the original loan he took to set it up.

Twenty years later, his one and only record label, Deutsche Grammophon, dumped him from its roster. So ingrained was the pairing of DG and Stockhausen in the collective imagination that the label even saw a Greatest Hits package as a viable product. As the 90’s beckoned and CD’s began their domination of the market, the label could no longer justify the math, as Stockhausen explained, “Deutsche Grammophon keeps telling me, that a record MUST sell at least 50,000 per year because DGG MUST pay 15,000 employees per month.”

So, with the freedom from overhead that only an indie label can provide, Stockhausen set about printing his own CD’s back home in Kuerten along with his scores. His goal was to record his entire catalogue to his own exacting specifications, and truth be told, Karlheinz Stockhausen and the mass marketplace were never a good match to begin with. In the absurd parlance of our times, Stockhausen was always after an ‘artisanal’ product that no record company or publishing house, no matter how committed to quality, could spare the time or money to execute. One gets the sense that UE and DG missed Stockhausen about as much as he missed them. According to one executive, Stockhausen was “self-inflated, self-obsessed. He makes Wagner look like a shrinking violet. He’s impossible to do business with. He strips you bare. He’s relentless in his demands.”

In so many ways, Stockhausen’s move to self-publishing would foreshadow the conventional wisdom of the 21st century. By his own estimate, an artist as uncompromisingly experimental as himself had exceeded all expectations of similar figures from previous generations:

“…with my work, I reach incomparably more people than Webern did in his time. Even when one ignores the political obstacles. That happens also as a result of the explosion of the means of reproduction: photocopying machines and cassette-copying machines and tape recorders and record companies, radio, television.”

Had Stockhausen kept pace with online innovations, perhaps he’d get more credit as a trailblazer. In actuality, the development of his Verlag is roundly pilloried as an example of his increasing detachment from reason. Rather than recognizing Stockhausen’s publishing innovations as a groundbreaking way to insure both the quality and the legacy of his scores and recordings, they are seen as just one more way in which the grand old wizard of high modernism cut himself off from the world. The lack of digital distribution only deepens this misperception, and hopefully, the Verlag will quickly catch up in this arena (although major labels have hardly been ahead of the curve, and music publishers can’t even fathom the concept of e-scores).

Indeed, it is laughable that any publishing outfit in 2008 would operate entirely by mail order, but the Verlag products are not as exorbitantly priced as most people complain, and the staff is impeccably responsive, shipping orders without delay and replying to all queries almost instantaneously.

The through line in all of this entrepreneurial activity was Stockhausen’s abiding desire to have his meaning be understood. Take or leave the pieces themselves, he did not want them to be dismissed for want of clarity. The final step he would take with this concern in mind was to establish an annual performance seminar on his music.

Beginning in 1998, when he was 70, Stockhausen would take a few weeks out of the summer to occupy the local grammar school in Kuerten with his phalanx of interpreters. Markus, Kathinka, and Suzanne would all be there, along with academics like Richard Toop.

Anyone could pay a modest registration fee and audit any course. Performers would get daily lessons on Stockhausen repertoire for their instrument, and each midday, everyone would gather for a composition lesson from the composer himself. Each year, a different work would be discussed in mind-numbing detail. As tedious as Stockhausen’s lectures invariably were, they offered priceless access to his mind. Every evening would feature a concert of Stockhausen’s music, and the students who he thought performed his music the best would win cold hard cash.

In the final decade of his life, Stockhausen was opening the vaults to anyone and everyone who wanted to take a peek. He was the model of generosity at these courses, taking the time to entertain all queries, giving away his scores to students, and looking as happy as a clam to be surrounded by artists who had a genuine interest in learning as much as they could about his work. During the course, he would often claim to be training Stockhausen missionaries, performers who would go out and spread the word after he was gone.

We are products of these courses, and in fact, the very first ANALOG arts ensemble concert began with us surrounding a tiny stone church in the Maryland countryside playing ‘Thursday’s Farewell’ as the audience arrived. While it’s far from our only mission, we can’t see ourselves ever abandoning the effort to proselytize on Stockhausen’s behalf. Though we tone down the fervor and we rarely see eye-to-eye with him on any subject, ANALOG finds an embarrassment of riches in this man’s catalogue of work. As he would say, ‘several lives aren’t enough to get near it’.