Towards a cosmic music

156 Pages·1989·6.334 MB·English

by  Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tim Nevill

Towards a
Cosmic Music
Texts by
- Karlheinz
Stockhausen
Selected and translated by
Tim Nevill
$58
-~ ELEMENT BOOKS
© Karlheinz Stockhausen 1989
Translation © Tim Nevill 1989
First published 1989 by
Element Books Limited
Longmead, Shaftesbury, Dorset
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced
or utilised, in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, without permission
in writing from the Publisher.
Designed by Jenny Liddle
Cover photograph © Clive Barda, London
Cover design by Max Fairbrother
Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Billings Ltd, Hylton Road, Worcester
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 1928—
Towards a cosmic music.
1. Music. Aesthetics
I. Title
780'.1
ISBN 1-85230-084-1
Contents
Preface: Master Musician and Mystic - vii
Richard Steinitz
Foreword — Karlheinz Stockhausen
1 - Stockhausen as Myth
2 . Spiritual Dimensions
Spiritual Dimensions - Sirius
3 - Beyond Global Village Polyphony 19
The Decisive Question - You Are What You Sing -
Integration of Past and Present - World Music
4 - Intuitive Music 35
Redefinition - Archetypes - From the Seven Days -
Either/Or
5 + Supra-Humanisation
Manifesto for the Young - Self-Discovery -
Vibrations - Body and Spirit - Supra-Humanisation
73
6 N Synthesis
" Synthesis - The Essential Impulse
CONTENTS
7 - Light - the Summation
Cosmological Composition - Surmounting Death -
Process - The Glorification of God
8 - The Way Ahead
123
Appendices
1. Chronology of Life and Works
2. Five Revolutions Since 1950
3. Comes Awakening, Comes Time . .
4. To the International Music Council
5. Mantra
Sources 139
Selected Discography 143
Selected Bibliography 145
Preface: Master Musician and
Mystic
For nearly four decades, Karlheinz Stockhausen has remained
one of the most daringly original, artistically and spiritually
elevated composers of our age. His music and personality are
at once charismatic and compelling, yet also unsettling and
provocative. Stockhausen’s work captures and challenges us
not only in its sound — mind-stretching though this can be -
nor merely through its innovatory technical brilliance, but above
all for its bold and controversial spiritual aspirations. Both as
technical wizard and as visionary guru, he has continued to
draw a vast following, almost unique outside the pop and rock
domains.
Stockhausen has composed an astonishing variety of music,
some of it of apparently contradictory intent. His music con-
fronts the plurality of experience and seeks to reconcile its
opposites. For a young composer emerging from the painful
effects of the Second World War, these extremes must have
seemed at times violent. Isolated from normal musical influ-
ences, he came suddenly and belatedly upon the music of first
Schoenberg, then Webern, whose impact upon him was revel-
atory. For a while he became, as he has admitted, ‘the most
abstract, abstract composer’. But the seeming incompatability
between the preoccupation with technique of the early pieces,
the ‘intuitive’ music of around 1970, and the vast autobiographi-
cal panoply of the 7-opera cycle on which he is now engaged
is really only skin-deep.
The serialism which Stockhausen embraced so wholeheart-
edly in the 1950s was a means of organising a world in flux,
ordering not just fixed objects but their dynamic properties,
through relating degrees of change. Stockhausen was concerned
with mediating between dualistic pairs of concepts (sound-
silence, clarity-complexity, horizontal-vertical, and so on), and
with resolving surface diversity into something homogeneous
vii
'Y
STOCKHAUSEN: TOWARDS A COSMIC MUSIC
A
and immutable. ‘Serialism’, he said, ‘tries to go beyond the
incoherent multiplicity of things. It tries to find unity w1‘thout
destroying the individual elements, and that means to inter-
connect’. Already the search for an ordered equilibrium was
effectively a spiritual quest, even the tendency to elevate the
‘truth’ of the structural logic over its audible intelligibility. (An
interesting parallel can be made with the ancient performance
tradition of the Chinese 7-stringed zither whose music, accord-
ing to one authority, ‘was conceived to be not sound but a
transcendent power’).
In the 1950s, Stockhausen led the development of a new
language, an extraordinary containment of explosive energies
within rigorous structure. Yet, the remarkable imaginative and
dramatic qualities of the early pieces like Kontrapunkte, Kontakte
and the Klavierstiicke need no apology. Exploration of new con-
cepts led him to electronic music, performance virtuosity, and
to 3-dimensional extensions of musical space. Kontakte, indeed,
is a significant mile-stone, paralleling developments in the plas-
tic arts which seek to involve object and onlooker in a constantly
mobile interaction with each other. Here quadrophonic loud-
speaker groups set up, for the first time in music, a continuous
vortex of electronic sound within which two live instrumental-
ists represent fixed points. The polyphony of spatial movements
and speed of sound-transference become as important and
absorbing as pitch, duration, and timbre.
The mobility of sound encountered in such pieces as Kontakte
was most perfectly realised in the spherical auditorium of the
German Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka, when works
by Stockhausen were diffused live for 5% hours daily for half
a year to a total audience of a million people. Immersed in the
fluidity of multi-directional sound, the listener is effectively
transported outside any localised context of space or time. Much
earlier, Stockhausen had remarked in a radio talk how electronic
music has liberated an inner world of the imagination: because
there is nothing to see ‘the inner eye opens to visions of time
and space which overstep what the laws of the physical world
around us permit’, It is this imaginative extension of mere hear-
ing that led Stockhausen to develop a visual and theatrical
aspect in virtually all his music since the early 1970s. He didn’t
initiate music-theatre; but few composers have done more to
insist on the theatrical, multi-dimensional possibilities of musi-
cal performance than Stockhausen, whose casting of instrumen-
talists as mime artists is one of the most important hallmarks
of his recent works. Further to liberate the performer, in the
1960s and 1970s Stockhausen embraced intuitive music and pur-
viii
PREFACE: MASTER MUSICIAN AND MYSTIC
poseful improvisation more boldly than any other composer.
He absorbed oriental cultures and expanded far-sighted visions
of a global musical unity, a restorative and reconciliatory music
for the post-Apocalypse. And he has often been the one to take
forward more imaginatively other composers’ innovations.
Recently Stockhausen has reverted more to conventional
notation, even to an overtly ‘thematic’ language generating a
multiplicity of characters from single unifying formulae. Increas-
ingly, however, he has blurred distinctions between concert-
hall, theatre, and temple, coming to regard the composer less
as a creator than as a privileged recipient, a vessel through
whom the cosmic, universal spirit may be encountered. Thus
Stockhausen has overturned inherited notions of concert-
giving, abolishing music-stands in favour of choreographed
movement, lighting, costumes, sound diffusion, and perform-
ance from memory, ideally with his own highly-rehearsed
musicians.
In the 1980s these ideas have become centred upon his extra-
ordinarily ambitious cycle of seven interconnected operas (one
for each day of the week) called LIGHT. However extravagant
their design, however strange and implausible Stockhausen’s
explanations of their cosmic parentage, the operas are in effect
a bringing together of separate musical pieces, a tableau of
kinsfolk related more by spiritual empathy than by chronologi-
cal narrative, or philosophical logic. In subsuming virtually all
his music of the last decade into this great theatrical project
(and as readily detaching components for individual concert
performance), Stockhausen has provided not only the grandeur
and spectacle of the large-scale, but also pieces of intimate and
exquisite chamber music, successors to the tradition of Mozart
and Schubert.
The astonishing fertility of Stockhausen’s thought is essen-
tially pluralistic. This book explores some of its preoccupations,
such as the composer’s preference for labyrinthine musical pro-
cesses rather than straight roads, which he compares to the
approach to a Japanese house that an architect of the old school
will always half conceal. So he prefers that the listener should
be ‘constantly unable to see everything that’s coming’, and thus
experience directly the mysterious process of creation. ‘Process
does not exist if you deterministically foresee the end right
from the beginning so that everything is really simultaneously
present’.
Stockhausen, indeed, has been deeply influenced by the East.
As a student he was aware of Indian history. During the early
1950s in Paris, he listened to Asiatic instrumental and vocal
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STOCKHAUSEN: TOWARDS A COSMIC MUSIC
Y
groups. But it was when visiting Japan in 1966 that the Orient
made an inescapable impact on him. After experiencing Noh
theatre, Sumo, gagaku, and shomyo temple music, he became
aware that the Japanese have an expanded time-scale with much
slower and longer events than normal in the West. He was
affected deeply by what he felt to be the artistic and contempla-
tive attitude which the Japanese bring to the activities of daily
life, exemplified in the Japanese tea ceremony with its gentle,
unhurried ritual creating between all present an unspoken and
restful harmony. This stretching of the time-scale, evident in
Sternklang and also in the operas, is something for which West-
ern audiences tend to be ill-prepared. One needs to be mentally
and physically composed in order to enter and absorb his slow
unfolding of the musical space.
Stockhausen has a gift for lifting discussion from the technical
to the transcendent. The writings and conversations translated
and brought together in this fascinating collection may seem at
time fanciful, occasionally naive. But Stockhausen’s concen-
tration upon music’s spiritual origins, social relevance, and the
aesthetic implications of technical processes provides an essen-
tial insight into his mind and methods. Throughout his life,
Stockhausen has been both intellectual and intuitive visionary,
master technician and mystic, and down-to-earth practical
musician transported by poetry and dreams. We are presented
with a paradox, but can at the very least admire his energy,
daring, and originality. . .
For forty years Stockhausen has been amazingly industrious,
his scores not just artistic creations but exhaustively detailed
documents of research, rehearsal experience, and performance.
He has composed a huge number of large-scale works, most of
outstandingly impressive and durable stature. Ultimately it is
the unforgettable power of this music which convinces, the
encounter with sounds as mobile and magical, strange yet as
entrancing as we are likely to hear.
Richard Steinitz
Foreword
The title of this book, Towards A Cosmic Music, and all the
headings for its individual sections were chosen by Tim Nevill
on behalf of Element Books. The sequence of texts and chapters
was also not composed by me, but devised by Tim Nevill so as
to make my views on God and the world accessible to other
people.
I am a musician. All my texts on music are elucidations of my
compositions, produced for scores, programme notes, news-
papers, journals, radio, and television; or else they were rec-
orded in interviews with journalists, students, and groups of
listeners, and then transcribed. Musical questions and general
issues thus intermingle in the original texts in response to spec-
ific questions and the course of conversation. I never sat down
and produced a text as writers do.
My medium is music. The essential thing is what is transmitted
through my musical compositions. If commentaries are added
to my music, they must always be considered in connection
with the music to which they are intended to lead.
That is why I have allowed Tim Nevill to select freely from my
texts, assembling a kind of introductory digest of my ideas.
The fundamental purpose of this selection of texts is to make
the reader aware that Stockhausen is a composer who has also
from time to time expressed himself in words, and that his
music expresses what is beyond words in a purer and more
universal language.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
22 February 1989