Tuesday, June 03, 2008

STOCKHAUSEN'S ORIGINALE ORIGINALE

Just in case you thought the bizarre theatrics of LICHT were somehow new terrain for Stockhausen:
The stage actions consisted largely of normal activities undertaken by actors who were basically playing themselves: a poet played himself as "the poet," reading poetry on stage; a "painter" paints; a "film man" and "lighting man" and "models" go about their normal business, all within their allotted times (hence the title of the piece: "originals" playing themselves). A visual and aural complexity was created by the juxtaposition of these simultaneously occurring activities, creating an aura of absurdity which contrasted with the normality of the events themselves. In addition, some of the performers, such as the explosive performance artist Nam June Paik, went the opposite direction, performing bizarre actions within their roles. And certain elements of the set, such as goldfish swimming in a bowl hanging from the ceiling, contributed to this contrast between the mundane and the absurd.

Stockhausen added another layer of irony to the title by basing Originale on his previous work, Kontakte, rather than composing new music for the piece. So, at the beginning of Originale, we see a pianist and a percussionist (playing themselves, of course) performing Kontakte. However, there is a film camera and a tape recorder present, as well as a stage manager shouting instructions over the music. After a few minutes, the players stop and the tape of their performance is heard, along with the recorded shouts of the stage manager. Thus we see a pianist and percussionist, recording and filming themselves playing a composition which itself contains prerecorded sounds - performances within performances, by "originals" playing themselves...

...at one performance Paik was suddenly handcuffed to the scaffolding by a well-coordinated group of audience members who then disappeared. Everyone thought it was part of the show until Paik called "feebly but only half-intelligibly about his inability to get to the piano." For his part, Paik varied his performance each night, as he had done in Cologne, throwing curve balls to the cast and audience.

Adding to the general unpredictability was the concurrent protest undertaken outside the concert hall by a number of New York artists, including Henry Flynt, Tony Conrad, and George Maciunas, who collectively denounced Stockhausen as a "cultural imperialist." (Maciunas, the leader of the Fluxus art group, also considered Moorman something of a rival within the New York art world, though other Fluxus members were performing in the show.) -- From Ubuweb.

(View or download the film)

Labels: ,

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Stockhausen Field Guide

With the survey of Stockhausen's compositional career concluded, we thought we'd provide a consolidated list of the various posts. As threatened/promised, we will be delving into more specific issues concerning Stockhausen's work as we prepare for ARTSaha! 2008, which will partially focus on an 80th anniversary tribute to the man and his music.

First up will be the subject of performing Stockhausen, and why musicians should not be scared: Be not afraid!

(Ok, be a little afraid, but mainly...not.)

Posts in the Stockhausen Survey:
1950's
Sound-Cocktails All Around - Gesang der Jünglinge
Master of Both Time and Space - Gruppen

1960's
The World's First Mixtape - Hymnen
Take A Little Trip - Aus Den Sieben Tagen

1970's
Aum Bhūr Bhuva Svaha...Aum Bhūr Bhuva Svaha...Aum Bhūr Bhuva Svaha... - Mantra
Funk Upon A Time... - Tierkreis Melodien

1980's
Blinded By The Light - Donnerstag aus LICHT
Chamber of Secrets - Samstag aus LICHT

1990's
Everybody's Working For The Weekend - Freitag aus LICHT
The Artist Formerly Known As Stockhausen - Helicopter String Quartet

2000's
You Spin Me Right Round - Klang

Labels: ,

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

You Spin Me Right Round

"...what torments much more is the certainty of still not being accepted, of being smiled at, of being absolutely misunderstood." – Karlheinz Stockhausen
In 2004, Stockhausen faced a dilemma with which any composer would be familiar: After spending 27 years writing an avant-garde 7-opera cycle for each day of the week, what do you do next?

Well before he wrote the last note of LICHT, Stockhausen had already determined that his next project would be...(wait for it)...a cycle for each hour of the day.

If God had blessed Stockhausen with the lifespan of Verdi, we could surely have expected to see music for the millisecond. With Carter-esque longevity, perhaps he’d have gone on to write the ultimate spatial masterpiece after a ‘discovery’ of how to write music in the fourth dimension.

KLANG (Sound) occupied Stockhausen from 2004 until his death, and the writing continued in the same haphazard commissioning system as LICHT.

Klang SketchThe first hour (Ascension) was commissioned by the Milan Cathedral. It is scored for organ, soprano and tenor. The organist has to play in two independent tempi with each hand (see left), in addition to striking various percussion instruments.

Klang RehearsalAdditionally, Stockhausen required himself (or a sound projectionist) to be seated as per usual in the middle of everything, balancing all the sound to a precious degree.

Here, more so than in LICHT, the attention to the details of sound projection is at the heart of the matter.

Stockhausen explains, "LICHT points always to the divine in respect to the light, to the stars, to the SUN which gives us the light and life, to the visible world, to the eyes. KLANG reminds us of the Invisible; of the ears, the acoustic vibrations, before all of the INNER EAR, for the divine Klang, the mystic sound of the beyond with the voice of the conscience."

KLANG also differs from LICHT in its construction, which returns to the 'Moment Form' which occupied Stockhausen in the late 60’s/early 70’s in pieces like Mixtur and Mikrophonie. No formulas here.

The motley instrumentation of LICHT continued, however. The 2nd hour would be scored for 2 harps, the 3rd for piano:



and the 4th was scored for a giant, custom-made door:



The synthesis of extraneous knowledge and influences also continues unabated in the new cycle. For the color scheme of KLANG (and why wouldn’t it have a color scheme, after all?), he turned to Wilhelm Ostwald’s 1917 color harmony scale.

Wilhelm Ostwald's Color Scale[The inner numbers are Ostwald’s; the outer are Stockhausen’s. He preferred a procession from dark to light and back again.]

Stockhausen’s unbounded curiosity and his enthusiasm for drawing disparate, unrelated streams of thought (like Ostwald’s color theory) into his music forms one of the many constants in his compositional life. It recalls one of his earliest influences, which was the experience of reading The Glass Bead Game.

In the novel, the titular game is never explained directly. All we know of it is that it is a way of synthesizing knowledge into units which can be manipulated, rather like a mathematical or a musical system. Throughout the book, music is given an exalted place in the narrative, and the idea of being able to incorporate any piece of knowledge he encountered, be it the sound of threshing grain or the physics of nuclear fission, into a larger system with a harmonious purpose was profoundly appealing to the young Stockhausen.

In so many ways, LICHT was just a formalization of a relationship he already had to his output, which was very much in the spirit of the glass bead game. By the time he began writing under the mammoth rubric of LICHT, he had already been representing his works list as a spiral for several years. The early works were at the tightly wound center, and the later works on the ever widening outer expanses.

Stockhausen's Work List as a Spiral


The graphic design may be somewhat clunky, but the visual representation of his life's work could not be more eloquent. Spirals imply growth, by their very nature, and his works really did grow, one from the other, along a constant of creative genius. There is no vicious break with a past style, but rather a near perfect harmony with it, as he would so often slide back down the spiral’s axis to grab a concept or a sketch from decades earlier to use in a new piece.

A spiral also conjures up the image of uninterrupted endeavor, which we have highlighted before as one of the truly remarkable features of Stockhausen’s career. Several years ago, he mentioned to an interviewer that he feared passing away with work still to be done on scores and recording projects, and apparently, that is precisely what he was doing the night he died: editing KLANG for publication.

Such enduring consistency is astonishing in a creative artist, and for Stockhausen, the trait was solidified in events that occurred back at the beginning of that spiral. Well before Kontra-Punkte or even the first numbered work, Chore fur Doris, as with many composers, Stockhausen’s studies with a teacher helped solidify his personality and set him on his career path, but surprisingly, it wasn’t Messiaen or Meyer-Eppler. It was the author of The Glass Bead Game: Herman Hesse.

Herman HesseWhen Stockhausen was 20, he wasn’t sure what he was going to be. If anything, he suspected he might become a writer, and he even spent one summer break writing a novel about the life of Humayun, the Mughal Emperor. Less than two weeks into the writing process, with the set of brass balls only Stockhausen could possess, he sent some samples of his writing, including a few poems to Hesse, who had won the Nobel Prize just three years earlier. Accompanying the samples was a six-page handwritten letter which is a stunning revelation of Stockhausen’s frame of mind:
Dear Mr. Hesse,

That I finally worked up so much courage to choose this means in order to speak to you, I will perhaps come to understand one day later in life, and I believe—were I to gaze into a mirror, it would be found out—that my cheeks are burned scarlet, as though they had been whipped. It may be shame, desperate shame, or a clattering fragmentation of an unconsciously confident, trusting naivete, of a salvaged, forgivable boyish atmosphere. Forgive me nothing, not even the salutation “dear sir,” if you deem it to be immature impertinence. I cannot help but become calmer, once having taken the fatal step.

Why I wanted to write you, I have known at no point in time more exactly, to tell the truth. It may be that I could tell this unfathomable thing to my mother, but she has passed on; I do not even know whether she would have summoned up an understanding for my idle prattling—if so, it would have been for the first time: Where are the dead, who would understand us best? Though she did not relish all this, [she] must really have been very wise, as she voiced the opinion one night in the year 1933: in the loft is Heaven, in the cellar, Hell; at that time I had counted almost five yearly cycles—yet now I no longer know whether Heaven is not Hell and that time is not timelessness. However, this worries me less (I am certainly too stupid, to recognize despairingly that one cannot know anything); what torments much more is the certainty of still not being accepted, of being smiled at, of being absolutely misunderstood. And my father just didn’t understand it at all, as I believed him to know. Might it perhaps be different now, if he were not rotting in some moldy wartime hole in the ground? So there remains the sieved coagulation of people, whom I allowed to force themselves on me yesterday and aforetimes—they have all had enough of associating with each other, just as have I with any of them.
This is the letter of a boy who has lost everything and had nothing come along to fill the void. The mental distress that Stockhausen is under is starkly clear, and in August of 1949, he wasn’t so much reaching out to the Nobel laureate for writing tips as he was searching for a father figure, someone to help him finish the job of forming his personality:
forgive me, if in relation to liberty I cast you in a special role and begged something of you—it is the happiest feeling, the most beautiful experience of all mysteries: 'that love is woven through everything,' if one can ask a great man for something. In the distance the 'ability' is given to me, you have called me with your thoughts…I write down for you now some of my ungainly, most secret endeavours; please, grant me also this impossible effort and say just one word, if they withstand your examination.

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Music student in Cologne
Earlier in the letter, he explains that Hesse’s works seem to him like “thought-islands” which rise up above their author. This is an early iteration of a concept that would be so fundamental to Stockhausen’s work: that his music is greater than its composer and originates from a higher source.

We will unfold this concept in other discussions. However, as we bring this brief survey of Stockhausen’s career to a close, we are only further compelled to look at the way in which Hesse responded to the young composer.

First off, he dismissed out of hand the idea of reading Stockhausen’s writing samples. He wrote, "I am 72 years old, have had eye trouble for years, and am overloaded every day to the point of exhaustion. As for reading manuscripts, this is out of the question."

But to this sprawling, desperate letter from a completely unknown student, he wrote a generous, deeply empathetic one-and-a-half page reply:
It will be best if I say to you in plain words how your letter has pleased me.

What has pleased me is your gift, it promises something: it is not that of a man of letters but that of a poet.

What has also pleased me is the sincerity with which you seek to make clear to yourself and to me the problems of your life and of your generation. Together with that gift, it is something positive and beautiful.

…What has not pleased me…is much about the tone of your letter which reminds me of what the foreigner imagines as "German youth": something extravagant and enamored of pain and desperation, "Faustian" and therefore philosophically Existential, which we foreigners don’t think much of. This youth, intoxicated with tragedy and greatness, was once, when he roamed about with backpack and guitar, half comical and half charming. Soon afterwards, however, he became excellently adapted to warfare: conquering, torturing, and other activities, which we likewise do not think much of.

Something else about your letter which does not please me has more to do with the universal—that which you have in common with your generation—than with the individual. It would make me happy therefore if you would direct all your energy to shaping and bringing to maturity that which is individual, unique, and beautiful in you, and to diminishing as much as possible the other, collective thing, or at least to distrust it; it is a dowry without much value."
With pinpoint precision, Hesse dissects not only the issues that Stockhausen faces in forging an identity in the wake of so much loss but all of post-war Germany. Hesse has little tolerance for self-pity. One of the masters in The Glass Bead Game is blacklisted from giving private lessons to pupils because he has a tendency towards melancholy (maybe even thoughts of suicide). Such indulgences must be avoided in Hesse's world view, and certainly cannot be passed on to students!

But the real kernel of truth that shaped Stockhausen in that letter is Hesse’s urging to cast off any sense of the universal, any sense that he shares a common lot with the rest of his generation. Instead, he pushes Stockhausen to focus on what sets him apart, what makes him an individual voice, and if there is one singular trait of Stockhausen’s writing, it is the uniqueness of his voice.

For the next year, the two stayed in correspondence. Stockhausen openly referred to Hesse as his teacher at one point, and after he had submitted some of his poems to a publisher in October of 1949, Hesse sent him a remonstrance via postcard:
It does not please me that you want to earn money right away with your manuscripts. You have the good fortune to be able to do this with music and thus keep your poetical activities away from this area. If music is more sacred for you than poetry, perhaps then you can earn your bread by writing for newspapers, etc., but that means at the same time a farewell to poetry.
In 1950, the following year, the spiral of Stockhausen’s life work would begin.

The farewell to his teacher came on September 22, of that year. He apologizes for his "helpless bawling", and he thanks Hesse for helping him to form his personality, the same personality which would be such an elemental force in shaping so much of 20th century culture.

Stockhausen uses another metaphor of organic growth to describe the transformation that Hesse cultivated. He compares his newly formed personality to a crystal, formed from the salt of his tears:
"I stumbled over it, when I stole secretly into my garden, whereas my foot stepped nimbly over the other stones…

...Very, very dear do I hold the great, crystalline stone today. You have thrown it to me, and it has blossomed like an eternal rose. Thanks be to you, and thanks be to the God of grace, who let me stumble over it."
Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Cologne Studio

Stockhausen's dedication

Labels: ,

Monday, March 17, 2008

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’.

Labels: ,

RIP, Dorothy Stone

How tremendously sad. Dorothy was a founding member of the California EAR Unit, with whom echo has performed.

Their body of work is vast. Here they are, with Dorothy, performing Stockhausen's Dr. K-Sextet.

'Dr. K' is Dr. Alfred Kalmus, who turned 80 in 1969, when Universal Edition asked several of the composers on its roster to compose short works for a concert in his honor to be performed by, coincidentally enough, Fires of London.

Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, March 01, 2008

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 .

Labels: , , , , ,

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Helicopter Quartet

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Tonight's Programme

Improvisation II, Joseph F. Di Ponio
Almglocken Melodien, Thomas Kozumplik
Lecture on Indeterminacy, John Cage
Songs of a Bad Seed; mvt. 1 - innocense, in a sense, Josh Schmidt
Entrance and Formula, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Capricorn, Leo and Aries from ‘Tierkreis’, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Lecture on Indeterminacy, John Cage
Songs of a Bad Seed; mvt. 2 - escalatings of agression, Josh Schmidt
Walls of Waves, Lorne Watson
Lecture on Indeterminacy, John Cage
Songs of a Bad Seed; mvt. 6 - torch song of a latch-key kid, Josh Schmidt
Variations #2, John Cage
Chickchi, LOOP 2.4.3

Music From Almost Yesterday
Barrow Street Theatre

January 15, 2008, 8:30 PM
27 Barrow Street @ 7th Ave South
New York, New York 10014
info@barrowstreettheatre.com

Joe Drew (trumpet), Edward Ludvigson (guitar), Steve Gilewski (bass), Thomas Kozumplik (percussion), Josh Schmidt (reader), Tim Splain (keys), Lorne Watson (percussion)

NOTE: 'Entrance and Formula' contains Michael's formula from LICHT in its entirety.

Labels: , , ,

Monday, January 14, 2008

Everybody's Working For The Weekend...

"…art consists also of craft—that is to say, complete technical mastery. As for music, several lives aren’t enough to get near it." – Karlheinz Stockhausen
It's counterintuitive to think of Stockhausen as a facile genius, like Mozart who claimed to write music 'as a sow piddles' or Dylan who once said, "My songs were there before I came along...I just sort of took them down with a pencil." The logorrheic composer, who never failed to back up a new piece with a rationalization and whose liner notes define excess, seems the furthest thing from the type of prodigy who simply writes down what he hears. However, he was more Gregorian than anything else, but instead of one dove dictating to him, he had dozens:
"Often I find myself overwhelmed by thousands of visions, too many for me to make them all come to life...I'll never be able to realize the flood of ideas that assaults me day by day."
His attraction to systems was a byproduct of the information overload, a way to corral the psychotic din:
"I am not interested in serialism as such. It's just a technique which I have found, myself, to express the thoughts I have, or to organize the masses of images and sounds that come into my head."
From Mantra on, he would call his system formula composition. Its roots lie in the early orchestral piece Formel (1951), which bore all the incipient traits of this late style, and it bears much in common with serialism. The theme is often heard in inversions, transpositions and more rarely retrograde form, but in a substantial departure, its Schenkerian skeleton plays an enormous role, particularly in LICHT.

The cycle is centered around three themes for Michael, Eve, and Lucifer. Together, they aggregate into a superformula, which Stockhausen mines for musical material, but they also reduce to a Schenkerian kernel called a nuclear formula , which reveals how much of the final formula is ornamental.

Notice how, unlike Michael and Eve, Lucifer's melody is incomplete, almost deficient. It starts with eleventuplets (recalling the Mantra formula) and ends with 'colored silence'. In case you've ever wondered what's up with all the counting in LICHT, it's because that silence at the end of Lucifer's melody is colored by the instrumentalist counting aloud to the number 13. So much of the clicking and hissing and extended technique of LICHT is derived from this foreground ornamentation.

Stockhausen calls on everything from the intervallic character of these themes to their rhythmic durations to generate the material in his operas. In fact, the length of the entire cycle was calculated in advance by Stockhausen on the basis of his superformula. The composer typically found that the operas would be one-third longer than he had intended, because, as was his wont from the beginning, he broke freely with his plan to accommodate complete musical gestures.

Hearing him explain how he works all this out is a little like Alice encountering the White Rabbit: the intense flurry of activity and concentration attracts our attention while only part of our brain registers the nonsense of it all. Still, we follow him down the rabbit hole. Once, when a student struggled to identify the formula embedded in a passage of LICHT, he took exception to a repeated pitch that fell outside the formula structure. Stockhausen's explanation was simple, "Well, I wanted to repeat that note."

For Stockhausen, this superformula was a liberating force. He often compared it to a Gestalt or a genetic code. He said that he could spend the rest of his life composing with it by 'regarding individual elements, pieces, sections, moments, or scenes as dialects, and formulating them in a style of their own; thus coloring this abstract formula image and making each one into a local music."

He broke Wagner's record for Most Operas in a Cycle in 1996, when Leipzig staged Freitag in four sold-out shows. That same year, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival would host Stockhausen as its centerpiece (Bjork was there, and apparently loved it). Oddly, critics who had seen Freitag staged just weeks before, found the same material sorely lacking at Huddersfield, especially when paired with older masterpieces.

It's hard to cry foul, though, as performing these pieces outside of their larger framework is indeed challenging. One of the chief rewards of Stockhausen's entire canon is that of submitting to his will. The sheer strangeness of LICHT all makes a kind of sense when you let go and follow its internal logic. And make no mistake, Freitag didn't let up on the strange.

That 15-minute 'greeting' from Thursday? It's now over an hour in Friday, and the lobby is lit entirely by candles.

That giant statue in Monday of Eve with her legs spread? Okay, it's hard to top that, but in Friday Stockhausen manages the trick by portraying a swingers' party onstage with various objects engaged in sex acts, like a pencil and a pencil sharpener.

Did the first four operas seem infantile in spots? Well, Stockhausen ups the ante with an entire children's orchestra (white, representing Eve) in a race war with a children's choir (in genuine blackface, representing Lucifer, no less).

This is narrative stripped of context and pared down to essential moments, like Boris Godunov on a diet. Paul Griffiths captured the essence of the Freitag experience in his review for The Times:
Imagine that beings from another planet have picked up a television broadcast of a play from Earth. The signal is badly corrupted: not many of the characters can be made out, almost none of the text, and whole scenes have been lost. Still, the beings decide to put on their own performance of what they can piece together. Their drama, like the original, lasts for three hours, but the only characters are a man in black, a woman in white with flowers, and a king, all moving through elongated versions of the scenes that could be partly deciphered: Ghostly Apparition, First Self-Communing and so on.

This is approximately the impression made by Stockhausen's Freitag."

Labels: ,

Friday, January 04, 2008

Chamber of Secrets

"Look at all the radio and television programmes, the endless series of programmes meant to explain everything about everything. Do you know what’s come into the mind of my gardener these days? He’s gone along to West German Radio and said: ‘Look, here I am. My business is gardens and I want to talk about gardening.’ I assume that the chap hasn’t done anything up to now except spend his time putting manure on my roses and looking after them and those of other employers like me; but now he’s gone up a step, and from this moment he’ll be a radio panelist. Instead of manuring and cultivating, he’ll talk about manuring and cultivating; he’ll explain how and why his tomatoes are redder and bigger than anyone else’s. In a word, endless chatter. The point is this. Can you tell me how it is that all of a sudden the craze for knowledge has sprung up, this verbal mania, while the thing that counts above all is intuition: understand the secret of a work of art and, why not, the mysteries of a rose? Excessive reasoning will end up destroying the faculty of understanding and knowing about things in depth. Words are often misleading and therefore dangerous…I’ve always believed, and I still believe, that in order to describe a bird, you first have to kill it." – Karlheinz Stockhausen
For a guy whose own published writings extend to ten volumes at present, endless chatter should hardly offend. Stockhausen could talk you into the ground, and his manner of speech was far from helpful. After his first trip to Astoria, he'd probably describe it like this, "Through a process I invented of experimenting with the New York City subway system, I have discovered a new borough called Queens." He could then regale you with separate 3-hour talks on Queens itself, the experience of discovering it, and how to use the process he'd invented.

Stockhausen was only interested in what he discovered for himself, and that insularity, coupled with the childish innocence that marks so many creative spirits, lead him to think he was discovering a lot more than he really was. That same sense of wonder made him internalize events as psychic landmarks that would re-emerge all over LICHT.

When he was all of five years old, his mentally ill mother announced that the cellar of their house was Hell and that the attic was Heaven. Sure enough, Eve would do as much in the first act of Donnerstag. During the production of that first opera, the chorus at La Scala struck over the writing in the final scene, which they felt was soloistic enough to warrant a different scale of pay. The dispute was resolved, but only after several performances of the premiere went by without that final scene.

In the final act of the follow-up, the choral strike is dramatized, replete with Italian comedian Piero Mazzarella playing the heavy. That same final scene pairs a text by St. Francis of Assisi with the coconut smashing ritual of the Kataragama festival, wherein supplicants light a coconut and throw it to the ground, hoping for it to split neatly in two as a good omen. By mashing up the ancient traditions of Catholicism, Buddhism, and Hinduism (not to mention those of striking musicians), Stockhausen creates a sort of hybrid exorcism rite that's hopped up on steroids and which climaxes with the release of a giant black bird.

The scene is so chaotic that during a performance in Holland, two animal rights activists walked off with the bird cage, intending to free it (apparently unaware that this would happen with or without their help). Stockhausen gave chase, eventually wrestling the bird cage from them, and the audience thought it was all part of the show.

The plot, as it were, centers on Lucifer, but this is Milton's Lucifer, the fallen angel, brought low by his ambition. This is the same Lucifer who shows up in the Urantia book...sort of. It's easy to see why Stockhausen would be drawn to the Urantian cosmology. Its byzantine bureaucracy puts Lucifer as one of the 'three System Sovereigns in Nebadon, the domain of Christ Michael', which contains 'ten thousand systems of inhabited worlds', of which Lucifer is 'chief executive' of 607. Stockhausen had the kind of brain that could keep that straight, if he were so inclined, but he was probably also attracted to the explanation given in the book for Lucifer's fall. "At some point in his experience he became insincere, and evil evolved into deliberate and willful sin." Insincerity is most certainly a trait Stockhausen lacked, and one he wouldn't suffer gladly.

Samstag is dominated by three massive solo works for piano, trumpet, and flute. In the opening scene, Lucifer dreams about destroying time and is bewitched by piano music. This is Stockhausen's Klavierstück XIII, and it is a doozy. The pianist has to do a great deal of vocalizing, in addition to playing all sorts of bells and strumming the strings with a bone mallet. But that's not the half of it, before K XIII is over, the pianist has played tone clusters with her ass and shot bottle rockets out of the soundboard.

This is all meant to take the piss out of extended piano techniques, and like the orchestra strike as well as countless other things in the opera, it is intended to be funny. It is a deadpan gallows humor that, again, calls Burroughs to mind. After all, K XIII bewitches Lucifer to death. No matter how obviously funny the sight of someone shooting fireworks in the middle of an opera is, it's easy to miss the joke with such a bone-dry delivery.

While it's not clear how much of the Urantian dogma Stockhausen believed, it is clear that he believed in reincarnation, or a much larger existence after death. Lucifer has only appeared to die. In the next scene, he is guided through the end of his physical existence by a tour de force for flute called Kathinka's Chant (aka Lucifer's Requiem). In it, Stockhausen mixes up the traditions of both the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead as the flutist (dressed as a cat) guides Lucifer's spirit to the afterlife.

When he reemerges onstage, he does so on stilts, and a wind ensemble is arranged on a scaffolding to look like a face. Stockhausen wanted the ensemble to move in coordinated ways that would make the face appear to dance, as though Lucifer were giving it lessons. That proved unrealistic, but the scene is an expansive big band jam, like the climax to Gruppen spread out over 20 minutes. Woven throughout is a disjointed trumpet obbligato which represents Michael's resistance to Lucifer. At one point, it seems as though Michael may win the day, but he is eventually chased offstage, which leads to the final exorcist rite.

This second installment of LICHT lead one critic to despair, "the thought of Stockhausen devoting his talent to this gargantuan pantomime for another 15 years is not a happy one." The public was grasping at straws, trying to make sense of a nonlinear narrative, searching for meaning in throwaway devices, and in the case of Samstag, wondering why the hell a La Scala premiere was being staged in a football stadium. At this point, Stockhausen was well and truly the only one in on his secret discovery: LICHT was not so much an opera cycle as it was a template for his compositional life.

It was a thematic playground for a brilliant and restless mind. Though we were all welcome to come in and play with him, it was almost as if our invitations got lost in the mail. Stockhausen seemed to sense that he was bollocks at illuminating his inner life (ten volumes notwithstanding), and it was a deficiency he'd seek to rectify in the following decade.

As a sequel, Samstag fails completely, but it is not intended to be one. Though it was written second, it is actually the final opera in the cycle, as Samstag (Saturday) is the final day in the week. Despite being chock full of astonishing music, the ultimate strangeness of the staged opera obscured the continuing quality of Stockhausen's writing. If Gesang der Junglinge, Hymnen and Mantra were wrapped into some cosmically trashy concept album (say, Kilroy Was Here), their aura would certainly dim. Such was the fate of the music from LICHT.

Labels: ,

Monday, December 24, 2007

Blinded By The Light

“It’s the same with all those conductors who shut themselves off from everything new. I look upon them as undertakers, exploiters of dead composers. They’re the Herods of modern music.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen
When Donnerstag aus LICHT premiered at La Scala on March 15, 1981 it was conducted by Peter Eötvös , directed by Luca Ronconi, and Stockhausen was credited with having composed the 'music, libretto, dance, actions, and gestures'. The composer sat, as per usual, in the middle of the hall, manning an enormous sound projection desk, the location a matter of utility, surely, but also a not-so-subtle illusion which made the entire production seem to materialize before its creator. The first act would only reinforce this atmosphere of megalomania as it dramatizes the deaths of Stockhausen's parents (played by Eve and Lucifer). The composer would be represented by no less than Michael the Archangel, who, in turn, is a stand-in for Christ.

The easy label for this is egocentric (and it has been unsparingly applied), but credit Stockhausen with at least having an operatic childhood. Most of us would have mini-traumas of dead goldfish and divorce to put onstage, Stockhausen's mum was euthanized by the Nazis for being mentally ill and his father died in the war. He left out his own experience tending to wounded and dying soldiers at a military hospital, but if the egoism of this prelude to LICHT is really to be considered a sin, let's bear in mind that the very act of composing is self-centered. And writing an opera after Wagner? Well, that's every composer's white whale. Stockhausen may set the bar, but he's hardly alone in the ego department.



By most accounts, the audience warmly received Donnerstag. The thought of the Stockhausen of pure electronic music, suffocating serialism, and unrepentant modernism premiering an opera on the stage at La Scala is strange indeed, almost as strange as the opera itself. To get to their seats, the audience would've had to walk past a chamber ensemble in the lobby which was playing a Thursday Greeting. Once in their seats, they would have been surrounded by a ring of speakers, which would project the voices of an Invisible Choir throughout the opera. Afterwards, trumpeters would play a Thursday Farewell from separate balconies above the theater's square.

In discussing LICHT, it's helpful to remember that opera originated as a marriage of disciplines. LICHT owes far more to Monteverdi than it does to Wagner in that sense. The chief contributor to its strangeness is the fact that Stockhausen's frame of reference is so vast. LICHT vacuums up the traditions of film, dance, mime, Western and Indian classical music, Noh theater, astrology, and Christianity, with tips of the hat to everyone from Bach to Brecht.

In Donnerstag, there are only three characters, but they each play multiple roles and have multiple identifying features. Stockhausen takes the tradition, so familiar through Bach's Passions, of pairing a solo instrument with a solo voice to the extreme. For long stretches of the opera, the only manifestation of the characters we see onstage are their instrumental doppelgangers.

Forget the leitmotif; it's for lightweights. Stockhausen's idea of total serialization is translated into a matrix of characteristics that he bestows on his three leads:




MICHAELEVELUCIFER
Voice: tenorsopranobass
Instrument: trumpetbasset horntrombone
Body:dancerdancer & speakerdancer-mime & speaker
Primary Color:bluelight greenice blue & blue green
Secondary Colors:purple & violetoff-white, opaline & silverblack green, black blue, & gray

In keeping with operatic tradition, Stockhausen's characters are well-worn archetypes, but as with a pitch set, the composer wrings as much meaning out of them as he can. Eve is not only the first woman, but she also slips into the role of Jocasta, seducing her son in the first act. Michael is at once the Archangel (Prince of Light in the apocrypha), Jesus Christ, and Stephen Dedalus. Donnerstag's loose narrative is his bildungsroman. Stockhausen would often compare these multi-layered characters to refracted light. So much of the writing in LICHT is the musical equivalent of a prism, shattering a single beam into its stunningly varied components.

After he is orphaned, Michael auditions for the conservatory, and the four-person jury is played by (who else?) Eve and Lucifer. Very rarely in the course of its three hours does Donnerstag sound like anything but a chamber opera. This economy of means is part of what many critics thought put the opera at odds with itself. In one moment, the staging is sparse, in another, absurdly grand. The entire second act is dominated by a giant globe, which opens in various spots to reveal the trumpeter Michael as he journeys around the world. A grand gesture indeed (the first of many in LICHT), but in a lowbrow visual pun, the orchestra, which sits at approximately the South Pole, are all dressed up as penguins.

From a dramatic viewpoint, the disparities continue. The odd but intelligible libretto of the first act is abandoned in the second for a completely abstract ballet set to a trumpet concerto. In the third act, snatches of scripture are sung in Hebrew and German by the invisible choirs as Michael ascends into heaven. Stockhausen summarizes the journey with an execrable acronym:
[Michael] experienced the
Melodies of CHILDHOOD with mother and father
Intensity of love through MOON-EVE
Chromaticism of the soul during EXAMINATION
Harmony of the languages on the JOURNEY AROUND THE EARTH
Audiogrammar of the emotions in the CRUCIFIXION
Ecstasy of polyphony in the ASCENSION, the
Light of the resurrection at the RETURN HOME.
The critical response to all of this was bewildered but admiring. Paul Griffiths titled his review for The Times, "A great creative mind talks to itself". He summed up the production as "an evening that is breathtakingly spectacular yet honest in taking account of the opera's discrepancies of vision and its weird mixture of cosmic imagination with juvenile smut and artistic shodiness."

Covent Garden bet on 60% of capacity when it gambled by opening its 1985-86 season with Donnerstag, and the final box office beat their wager by 20%. It is difficult to imagine an opera this bizarre captivating critics and audiences in 2007 as Donnerstag did in the early 80's. The level of engagement with Stockhausen's work puts the lie to the popular current narrative of a composer who cloistered himself in the last 30 years of his life.

As an opening salvo in a heptology, Donnerstag is a bundle of contradictions. It holds precious few clues as to what the rest of the cycle will entail, while at the same time, it neatly outlines all of its major devices. There is no cliffhanger or even dramatic tension which hints at the need for a series of sequels, yet its self-containment is clearly stretched to its limit as the opera all but bursts at its seams. For a variety of reasons, Donnerstag would be the last that most people would hear of LICHT. It is the most widely accessible of the seven operas, as it was released in a 4-disc set by Deutsche Grammophon. For most, LICHT took on the aura of a massive art project like Roden Crater after 1985, some bizarrely gigantic work that would eventually see the light of day in a few decades. Even now, four years after its completion, the entire cycle remains shrouded in mystery and most likely will for some time to come.

Labels: ,

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Stockhausen on the Internets, IV

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Funk Upon a Time...

"The whole movement [in America] toward a so-called pop art, in the visual arts as well as in music, I see as a disaster, really shameful for mankind, once orientated toward the highest, whose only goal in art was to glorify the divine and the cosmic spirit, and for whom everything in the human world was related to these invisible worlds. That this is now replaced, generally speaking, by garbage art, which celebrates material impermanence and decay, is a disgrace. It needs a tremendous mysticism to adore God through garbage; it is possible, but when you reach a point where images of a lipstick or hot dog have the same significance as the crucifix or Madonna in earlier cultures, it shows where a country is heading." – Karlheinz Stockhausen
There are loads of people who'd say of Stockhausen's music after 1975 that he was adoring God through garbage. He just simply lost people and did precious few favors for himself. Every time he opened his mouth, there were more and more bizarre statements coming out. The showstopper was the claim that he was from Sirius, the binary star system that, at 9 light years distance, is one of our nearest interstellar neighbors.

Stockhausen was fond of saying that he could travel with his mind to distant places. He'd say that he could close his eyes and transport himself to the French Riviera by focusing his mind on the scene. If you pressed him on whether or not this was imagination or actual transportation, he would insist the trip was real not virtual. Certainly, a psychiatrist would have a field day with the issue of whether or not Stockhausen was projecting himself into a fantasy world when he claimed to be from Sirius.

But his fascination with the cosmos was genuinely profound. He clipped any newspaper article he came across that had to do with space, especially the discovery of new stars. One of the things he was fond of doing was pronouncing prerequisites for musical education ('Every composer must spend time in an electronic music studio'), and after that book of photos from the Hubble came out, he became dead certain that every musician should look at it, because it 'is the best dictionary for musicians to compose by'.

Pedagogical theories aside, what matters to us most in this brief survey of his music is how this extraterrestrial fascination actually manifested itself in his work.

There are clunkers, to be sure, in Stockhausen's catalogue, and a disproportionate number of them come in the late 70's, after the composition of Tierkreis (1975), the twelve melodies for each star sign.




These melodies would turn up everywhere in subsequent pieces. In Aries (1977, for trumpet and electronic music), the tape part is a mix of noise and various electronic versions of the Zodiac tunes. The trumpet meanders between fragments of the various songs until it arrives with the tape in a unified final statement of the title tune. This naked appearance of ordinary, tonal melodies in Stockhausen's music would have been noteworthy had anyone been paying attention.

But by then, Stockhausen had almost completely transformed himself into some sort of Germanic Sun Ra, churning out risible quasi-theatrical music like the epic Sirius (1976). In fact, it was in discussing this piece where Stockhausen would so often repeat his infamous claim:
"I think that the culture of this planet has been mainly formed by visitors from Sirius, especially in the time between 9000 and 6000 B.C...I think that our main sources of present-day culture, as decadent as it may be in most parts of the planet, stem from visitors from Sirius whose main representatives were Isis and Osiris. Through a series of revelations which were at first quite nebulous, but have become more clear during the past few years, I know (as little as I know about details) that I have come from Sirius, myself."
Was this a giant put-on? Stockhausen almost always spoke earnestly. There's no reason to not take him at his word.

However, there is no reason to let such words scuttle his musical achievements. Neither Schoenberg's inane terror of the number 13, nor Prince's absurd name change make a dent in their standing as musical geniuses of the first rank. If this is what Stockhausen truly believed, is it really a big deal? The more important question, it seems, is whether or not the music is still good.

And it was. Though the late 70's was by no means a peak for Stockhausen, it was far from the end. Amazingly, there were still 30 more years of unrelentingly creativity ahead of him. In turning to LICHT, it's helpful to look at Stockhausen's program notes for Sirius, as they illuminate part of the aesthetic principles underlying the massive opera cycle:
SIRIUS, the alpha star of Canis Major--8.7 light-years distant--is the sun of our local universe. Two hundred million suns with their planets and moons circle around it and live from its light.

For the inhabitants of Sirius, music is the highest form of vibration. For this reason, music has attained its highest development on Sirius. Every musical composition is linked to the rhythms of the stars, the time of year and day, the elements, and the existential differences of the living beings.

The music, which I have composed and named SIRIUS transfers some of these principles of musical form and creation onto our planet.
This aesthetic statement of purpose is a veritable thesis for LICHT, which we'll discuss in upcoming posts.

Though the soup of cosmic electro-jazz schlock that germinated from Tierkreis is one of the least interesting part of Stockhausen's output, the Zodiac melodies themselves are a phenomenal starting point for musicians who are interested in adding the composer to their rep list. The melodies can be played solo or with the simple accompaniments provided, and they can be played in any octave on any instrument. They are a fantastic way to begin your musical acquaintance with the wondrous musical mind of Stockhausen.

Labels: ,

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Aum Bhūr Bhuva Svaha...Aum Bhūr Bhuva Svaha...Aum Bhūr Bhuva Svaha...

By 1970, Stockhausen had been composing almost exclusively non-notated music for six years. There were the text scores of Sieben Tagen, the titular arithmetic symbols of Plus-Minus, and the coded gestures of Spiral. Stockhausen was deeply immersed in music that owed a lot to John Cage's interest in handing over some of the authorship to the performer.

Spiral would be performed some 1300 times in the breathtaking pavilion at the Osaka World Fair. In classic Stockhausen fashion, he had built a spherical auditorium where the audience could be completely immersed in his music, having the sound come at them from a full 360 degrees, doubling the spatial feat of Gruppen.

[Also typical was Stockhausen's complaint that the platform for the audience was not built exactly in the middle of the sphere as he had envisioned.]


As we mentioned earlier, his attraction to intuitive music was to discover a method of crafting the ideas in his head more completely before he aired them. His return to fully notated music, would be a thoroughbred of a piece that demonstrated how completely he had achieved that goal.

Mantra is for two pianists, who also play wood blocks and antique cymbals, as well as manipulate sine-wave generators and ring modulators. The demands on the performers are profound, but the final result is a mystical experience 'above and beyond any criticism' as Paul Griffiths put it. Stockhausen calls the piece a 'miniature model of the stellar constellations', but more importantly, it is the first full-fledged work to use his formula method.

Unlike a tone row, a formula can, and does, have pitch centers. For instance, the formula for mantra begins with four repetitions of the same note:



This formula and its permutations were worked out during his time in Osaka, and in a flurry of activity, Stockhausen wrote out the entire piece in one 5-week stretch. If you ever get a chance, peruse the score for Mantra, and it'll give you a profound sense of what an extraordinary clarity of mind he possessed in order to do this. Stockhausen said of this period that it was 'the happiest composition time that I have ever spent in my life'.

Stockhausen insisted that Mantra is not a set of variations, but it is. The mantra (or formula) is repeated some 300 times in forms that stretch it to the limit. The variations are derived from the 13 characteristics that Stockhausen assigns to the formula. Factor in transposition and the sound processing, and the piece sounds infinitely varied, yet entirely cohesive.

Cage's prepared piano has nothing on Stockhausen's processed one. Mantra is a riveting concert experience, and a little over an hour doesn't seem enough time to fully encounter its brilliantly imaginative sound world.

Labels: ,

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Stockhausen on the Internets, III

We've updated the original list, as the postings keep rolling in. We should also point out that all we have done is link to English posts and articles. If this list seems large, multiply it by four, and you'll start to get a sense of how many Japanese, German, Spanish, and Italian bloggers (to name only a few) were affected by the news.

OBITUARIES

Gramophone
Liverpool Daily Post
Socialist Worker

TRIBUTES

2 depressed 2 get dressed
33/45
Allmusic
Alterdestiny
anglofritz
As a Dodo
Audio Lemon
Beat Portal
Bonobos Hump to Music
Bravo juju
Click Opera
Fader
Fred Sampson's Radio Weblog
The Gramophone & Typewriter Company (II)
Hearing Test
The Independent, Chris Schuler
Iron Tongue of Midnight


Jottings from the Wired
Landscape Into Art
Ludickid
Mcmurray Musings
Noise
noizone
notazionist
Notes from a Defeatist
Petulant Rumblings
Pillage Idiot
Playback
Reactor
Ready Steady Blog
Riskingit
Roger Bourland
La Scena Musicale
Stereo Kinetics
Surviving the Crunch
Synthesis Blog
Tampon Teabag
Thomas Moronic
Vleeptron_Z
Workingthrough
Wry on Rye

Labels:

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Take a Little Trip

"Play a sound with the certainty that you have an infinite amount of time and space" – Karlheinz Stockhausen from UNLIMITED


Now things get tricky. Not as if they weren't tricky before with all the total serialization and whatnot, but this is the point where most people stopped paying attention to Stockhausen, and it's tough to blame them.

In May of 1968, the composer's second wife left him. He'd just premiered Kurzwellen, and returned home to a letter from Mary Bauermeister informing him that their marriage was over. His reaction was understandable. He had a nervous breakdown.

He stopped eating and barely slept, and in the hyper-reality that surrounds such a psychological state, he sat down at the piano and played a sonority that he likened to a received signal on a shortwave radio. He felt that he had not played the piano, but rather that someone else had played the piano through him. He was just the conductor of a signal.

Stockhausen had experienced suicidal thoughts for years, but the break that occurred in '68 triggered an awakening in him that lead to what he called 'intuitive music'. He'd been searching for a more immediate method of composition, one where ideas weren't assembled from sketchbooks. He wanted a method where more fully composed ideas were developed all at once in the mind by first emptying it out.

The set of 15 text compositions that make up Seven Days are centered around this idea of stopping conscious thought to get at a deeper musical consciousness. From 'It', the most notorious of the set:
think NOTHING
wait until it is absolutely still within you
when you have attained this
begin to play

as soon as you start to think, stop
and try to reattain
the state of NON-THINKING
then continue playing
The epigraph is another score from the cycle in its entirety (well, aside from the little graphic swoosh that is printed beside the text).

While this cycle fits neatly into the framework of the fluxus movement, or the concomitant riots, it is of a seperate piece. The cycle contains some of the most challenging musical instructions in the entire Western canon.

Take any group of musicians not used to playing this way, set them loose on 'Unlimited', and after about 7 minutes of noodling, they'll think they've played for 30. Stockhausen would forbid even considering a performance by an ensemble that hadn't played together for many years (but then he would happily coach novitiates). Like Lukas Foss and othe