"...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.
The 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.
Additionally, 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.
[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.
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.
When 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."
Labels: jodru, Karlheinz Stockhausen
The premiere would eventually take place in Amsterdam at the 
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. 
How tremendously sad. Dorothy was a founding member of the 
There are two posts left in our look back at Stockhausen's career (pardon our brief hiatus from that effort). 
