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Composer Stockhausen dies aged 79
Staff and agencies
The Guardian
December 7, 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most influential composers of the
20th century, has died at the age of 79, it was announced today.
The German composer, best known for his groundbreaking work in
electronic music, died on Wednesday at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg.
He will be buried in the forest cemetery in Kuerten, according to the
Stockhausen Foundation.
Stockhausen, who was born in the village of Modrath, near Cologne, in
1928, studied at the National Conservatory of Music and the University
of Cologne. He composed 319 individual works over his lifetime,
according to his official website.
The composer's widespread use of electronics throughout his work has
had a significant impact on classical, avant-garde and electronic
music.
His breakthrough came in 1956, with the release of Gesang der
Junglinge (Song of the Youths), which blended electronic sounds with
the human voice.
Four years later, he released Kontakte (Contacts), one of the first
compositions to mix live instrumentation with pre-recorded material.
A wide range of musicians, including Miles Davis, Frank Zappa and
Bjork, have cited him as an influence.
Stockhausen was married twice and had six children.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,2224071,00.html
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Karlheinz Stockhausen
Both a rationalist and a mystic, the composer's influence stretched
from Boulez to the Beatles
Ivan Hewett
Friday December 7, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
KARLHEINZ Stockhausen, who has died aged 79, was one of the great
visionaries of 20th-century music. He was fond of quoting Blake's
lines "He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity's
sunrise"; and like Blake, the pursuit of his vision led him down
strange, and often awkward paths. The results earned him a reverence
among a cult following which is unique among 20th-century composers;
but they also earned him a fair amount of ridicule. Roger Scruton's
memorable judgment, that Stockhausen "is not so much an Emperor with
no clothing, but a splendid set of clothes with no Emperor" sums up
the sceptical view, which in Anglo-Saxon countries has become the
dominant one since the 1970s.
When Stockhausen was 18, and a music-student in war-devastated
Cologne, he read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. This
crystallised the conviction, already forming within him that "the
highest calling of mankind can only be to become a musician in the
profoundest sense; to conceive and shape the world musically."
Stockhausen had reason enough to avert his eyes from the world as it
was. His early life was tormented by Nazism and the war it had
unleashed. When he was six years old his mother had been taken into an
insane asylum; nine years later she was legally killed, one of the
victims of the Nazis enforced euthanasia policy. Meanwhile his father
had become an enthusiastic Nazi, and eventually fought on the Eastern
front, where he went missing and was presumed dead. Stockhausen
recalled how as a boy he heard marching songs played incessantly on
the radio; an experience which left him with an abiding hatred of
regular repetitive rhythms in music. Not all his early experiences
were negative ones. The boy was profoundly impressed by the Catholic
ritual of rural Germany, where his father had been a schoolteacher,
the Easter procession of young girls was recalled, 45 years later, in
Act 2 of Montag, one of the cycle of seven linked music-dramas named
Licht (Light) to which Stockhausen devoted the last third of his life.
All this might create the impression of a musical crank with a taste
for electronics and vast stage spectacles. What is often forgotten, in
the noisy polemics around Stockhausen, is the fact that his visions
were put into practice with a colossal speculative and practical
intelligence, which earned him the respect and enthusiasm of musicians
as diverse as Boulez and the Beatles.
Stockhausen was fortunate in that his speculative turn of mind, and
his impatience with inherited forms and vocabulary, caught the mood of
the times. Although the Stockhausen of the 1980s seemed a lonely
figure, he was not so in the 1950s. As he put it "At the middle of the
century . . . an orientation away from mankind began. Once again one
looked up to the stars and began an intensive measuring and counting."
We see him, in these pictures of the summer music schools at
Darmstadt, as just one of many lean, impoverished, idealistic young
composers, indelibly marked by the war, and determined to rework the
language of music from scratch. They were all possessed of a self-
confidence, and an impatience and scorn of their elders, that seems
astonishing in these creatively diffident times. Two older composers
they made an exception for; one was Anton Webern, whose rigourous form
of serialism was to be an inspiration for them; he, however, was
already dead, killed accidentally by a member of the occupying forces
in Vienna. The other was Olivier Messiaen, in whose class at the Paris
Conservatoire many of these composers came together.
Messiaen's experiments in extending arithmetical forms of organisation
beyond pitch, to embrace rhythm, timbre and dynamics, confirmed
Stockhausen in his belief that this was the way forward. But over the
next few years he was to take the serial ideas into wholly now areas.
Like Ligeti and Boulez, he passed through a "pointillist" phase, in
which the texture is splintered into individual notes, and like them,
he soon became dissatisfied with it. Several key works of the 1950s,
all since confirmed as classics of the century's music, found a new
way of utilising the serial idea, in which the elements to be
organised were no longer "points", but groups of variable length, each
defined by certain overall features such as speed, density and range.
The title of his most famous (and some would say best) piece, Gruppen,
has a marvellous exuberance, in which fantasy and rigour feed off one
another.
By this time Stockhausen had already become the acknowledged leader in
what was then a fledgling medium; electronics. In the threadbare
studio of the Paris Technical College he worked on a new dream: "I now
wanted a structure, to be realised in an Etude, that was already
worked into the micro-dimension of a single sound, so that in every
moment, however small, the overall principle of my idea would be
present." He worked on this idea with obsessive thoroughness, later
recalled by Pierre Schaeffer, the director of the studio: "He
absolutely refused to follow my advice; he did not want any advice at
all . . . what I remember is a charming young man who . . . could have
been involved in a mutually interesting exchange of ideas, but just
did not want to listen to any rational view of things and clung on to
his Study on One Sound with a perfectly natural sense of ambition."
As a critique of Stockhausen's approach, this seems wide of the mark.
The real problem about Stockhausen's approach was not that it was
irrational, but that it was altogether too rational. Like Ptolemaic
astronomy, it was wedded too much to ideal abstractions, and could not
mesh with the real world without a vast sense of strain. It also
needed much special pleading on the part of the listener, a problem
epitomised in the conclusion of Schaeffer's story: ". . . he got down
to splicing and came back very happy, and we said, 'Well, fine, let's
have a listen to it.' So we played back the tape - and all you heard
was 'Schuuut'. That was Stockhausen's sound study: a sort of
'Schuuutt'. He was terribly pleased with it . . ."
This anecdote echoes the accusation levelled at Stockhausen's music as
a whole, that the vast ideas it contains often sound chaotic or merely
ugly. He was accused, by Hans Keller in particular, of having no ear
(an accusation also levelled against that other mystical rationalist
of music, Iannis Xenakis). It is certainly true that Stockhausen's
music never has the exquisitely gorgeous sonorities of Boulez, or the
hypersensitive shadings and nuances of Ligeti. What he has in
abundance is the ability to focus a long and apparently rambling
argument in a sudden, blazingly dramatic gesture. Stockhausen's music
contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century
music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy's L'après-midi d'un
Faune or the upward swoop that ends Schoenberg's Erwartung. Take for
example the closing pages of Gruppen, where apocalytic brass chords
are teased from one orchestra to another over the listener's head; or
the moment in Kontakte where an electronic wail descends into the
depths and turns magically into a series of pulses. This amazing piece
was created by the same laborious cut-and-splice techniques which had
left Schaeffer so unimpressed in 1951, only eight years later, they
yielded what is still felt to be a masterpiece of the electronic
medium. That Stockhausen could achieve such a result with such
primitive means (as they now seem), in the face of scepticism from his
professional elders, and constant hostility and incomprehension from
audiences, is a tribute to his strength of character and his
unwavering visionary purpose. The obvious fact that it could not have
been achieved without a high degree of pragmatism, of "making do," is
often overlooked. The visionary in Stockhausen was always allied with
the meticulous calculator and the practical musician and studio
technician. "Don't give me ideas, give me sounds," he would say to his
composition students. This gives the lie to another frequent criticism
of Stockhausen; that he was the prisoner of rigid, "mathematical"
systems of composing. On the contrary, he was always finding ways of
letting spontaneity in. In all his pieces there occurs a little bit of
devilment that does not actually belong in the construction of the
whole thing. "It shows that I can always allow myself to escape from
my own house, from my own system . . ."
That urge became stronger with the years, fueled by his contact with
oriental music and religion. As his fame grew, Stockhausen began to
travel the world on concert tours. The encounters he had on these
tours with Indian and Japanese culture reawakened the religious streak
which had lain dormant in Stockhausen since his childhood. It led him
to reconsider how his overriding aim in music, to achieve an absolute
unity, a "oneness" of form and material, might be brought about.
Previously this had been achieved by constructive means, in the
studio; now meditation, improvisation, and a willingness to allow the
"voices" of the world to speak in his music became more important.
One of the first fruits of this new inclusiveness was Telemusic in
which Stockhausen uses electronics to create a kind of world music.
Among the electronic sounds we catch fugitive glimpses of Japanese
monks chanting, folk songs, Christian hymns. This was followed by
Hymnen, in which the hymns of the title are national anthems from
around the world, electronically transformed, and Stimmung,
Stockhausan's own contribution to flower-power culture. The trend
towards spontaneity reached its apogee in 1968 with Aus den Sieban
Tagen. These were examples of what Stockhausen called "intuitive
music" a kind of group improvization guided by a series of verbal
texts. In 1970 came yet another new development, perhaps the most
surprising. This was a rediscovery of melody, now conceived as a kind
of "formula," whose components would no longer be simple notes, but
types of musical behaviour clustered round a note. This formula would
then be expanded over long stretches of time, surounded by the same
formula in a smaller form.
By this time Stockhausen was no longer the lean, rather hollow-cheeked
and impoverishad composer of the 1950s. He was now something of a
celebrity, with a reputation that had penetrated even into rock music
circles (his photo appears on the cover of Sergeant Pepper). He had
acquired the long hair of a rock musician (but not their appetite for
drugs, of which he strongly disapproved) and his domestic menage was
becoming ever more extraordinary. By the late 1970s the four children
of Stockhausen's second marriage (to the painter Mary Bauermeister,
who by now had parted from him), together with the children of the
first marriage, had been joined in Stockausen's self-designed house at
Kurten by two "companions" the flautist Kathinka Paeveer and the
clarinettist Suzane Stephens. Both of these, and the composer's
children Markus, Majella and Simon, were to become brilliant exponents
of Stockhausen's music, and in his seven-opera cycle they assumed
crucial roles.
This cycle was begun in Kyoto in 1977, with a notation for the three
"formulas" that attach to the three main characters of the cycle.
These are Lucifer, Eve and Michael. The whole cycle was a vast
creation and redemption myth, in which the dark angel Lucifer battles
with, and eventually is vanquished by, the Creator-Angel Michael and
Eve, who symbolizes "the rebirth, in music, of mankind." Three operas
would be centred around one character, three around the encounter
between two of them, and one would equally involve all three.
The combination of vast mythical ambition with a strict permutational
form is absolutely typical of Stockhausen. This is why it makes no
sense to divide his career into a rationalist and a mystical phase;
both were intertwined from the beginning, and they came together in
the serial principle, to which Stockhausen, remained loyal to the end.
(This is why his music has absolutely nothing in common with the
"religious minimalists," of the 1990s). In the early 1970s Stockhausen
declared that "Serial thinking is something that's come into our
consciousness and will be there forever; it's relativity and nothing
else . . . it's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world."
That may have been true of him, but it certainly hasn't been true for
the rest of the musical world, which has for the most part turned its
back not just on serialism, but on the whole modernist enterprise.
Like Boulez, Stockhausen had a contempt for post-modernism, and for
much the same reasons; it was nostalgic, lazy, parochial. But whereas
Boulez's activities as conductor and dirigeur of French musical
culture kept him before the public eye, Stockhausen retreated from
view. Every few years another mystical music-drama emerged from
Kurten, to be greeted with a mixture of awed puzzlement and amusement;
meanwhile a new generation of "post-modern" composers arose for whom
Stockhausen was anathema.
Is it true, as the more extreme of these young historicists claim,
that Stockhausen is nothing but a symptom of an aberration in the
history of music? If one based one's view of his achievement on Licht,
so often theatrically naive and musically otiose, the answer might
well be yes. But taken as a whole, Stockhausen's achievement must be
the most fertile in ideas, if not of perfectly achieved works, of any
composer of the 20th century. Those ideas are strenuous, boldly
speculative, and high-minded in a way that doesn't really suit our
more cautious age; but when the time to explore and dream comes again,
Stockhausen's music will be waiting for it.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, composer, born August 22, 1928; died December
5, 2007
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