Stockhausen Remembered

There are two posts left in our look back at Stockhausen's career (pardon our brief hiatus from that effort).

In the meantime, Artforum has turned to far more eminent acquaintances than ourselves to reminisce about the man in its March issue. Before it hits newsstands, substantial excerpts from the retrospective are previewed on their site, such as this wonderful picture from Dienstag and accounts from Robin Maconie, Morton Subotnick and Bjork:

Robin Maconie

Imagine Stockhausen as a quintessentially American composer. Think of Feldman, Brown, Charles Ives, Henry Brant, and Harry Partch, all of whom are refracted to some degree in his music. Forget the recordings he is alleged to have made with Miles Davis for Columbia, which nobody has ever heard: This is a composer whose imagery of freedom was forged in the weird hybrid jazz of Friedrich Hollaender and Kurt Weill in the decadent ’20s, nourished by the spread of black music throughout Europe in the flapper era of Josephine Baker, and reinforced at boarding school during the war by British Army radio broadcasts of American jazz, to which the teenager listened surreptitiously late at night. Energetic and raucous freedom is the message of the sardonic big-band interruptions of the song Frei” from the Drei Lieder for alto voice and chamber orchestra, a student work from 1950.

Morton Subotnick

Stockhausen was well known for his incredible ego, which I found fascinating, even charming. Once, in the early 1970s, we happened to be staying at the same hotel in New York. He had just read an interview I had done with the New York Times, and over breakfast he said to me, “That was a wonderful interview in the paper.” I thanked him, and then he leaned toward me very sweetly, shook his index finger at me, and said, “But you didn’t mention my name once!”

Bjork

stockhausen is gone

i feel sad

not only because of his exit but also i felt sad reading obituaries from a lot of classically educated music critics that talked about his greatness many years ago and then his failure later on . i couldn’t understand how measuring how much his repertoire is played in the world’s biggest classical auditoriums could show his impact on the world . for me , his greatness lies elsewhere .