Klang Technik
- Issue #62 (April '89) | Interviews
- By: Brian Morton | Featuring: Karlheinz Stockhausen
- Printable version
Roll over Beethoven, it's Vorsprung Durch Technik time! The most visionary - and least understood - of modern European composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen talks to Brian Morton about the 'time bombs' he has created to escape from the 'graveyard' of the Western classical tradition
No modern artist of any stature has shown such concern for the preservation, performance and understanding of his own work as Karlheinz Stockhausen. By the same irony, he remains one of the least understood of modern composers. As influential as Messiaen or Cage, he receives little of the affection heaped on those elder (and older) statesmen.
Part of that is raw Anglo-Saxon prejudice, equation of any Germanic surname with a ready reckoner of dispraise: "harsh", "cerebral", "theoretical", "unspiritual". Stockhausen is still treated with rather casual suspicion, running from charlatanry (the score for Es (It), made in 1968, the year of super-experiment, read: "Think NOTHING/Wait til 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 retain/The state of NON-THINKING/Then continue playing") to the charge that he "exploits" his own fantastically gifted children (trumpeter Markus, saxophonist Simon and pianist Majella are seasoned members of his regular consort; his own regular consort, Suzanne Stephens, is the dedicatee of most of his clarinet and basset-horn works).
Hostile critics like to see Stockhausen as a kind of latter-day Wagner, presiding over a comfortably egocentric Bayreuth (much as Pierre Boulez is presumed to enjoy paterfamilias status at IRCAM). As further evidence, they adduce his latest and greatest project, Licht, a massive 'opera' in seven parts corresponding to the days of the week, of which only "Thursday", "Saturday" and parts of "Monday" are currently written, and which will occupy Stockhausen and his extended family for the rest of the century. This looks to critics like a Ring Cycle for the 21st century,the perihelion of Stockhausen's ambitions; God, after all, rested one day in seven.
There is a certain problem in approaching Stockhausen, and that is precisely the extent to which he has already and obsessively charted his theoretical and artistic progress in lectures, notes and, above all, in interviews. There are at least three current collections of 'conversations with the composer', and it's tempting to suggest that it is these that form more of the substance of Stockhausen's reputation than sympathetic listening to his music. The 'libretto' to Samstag Aus Licht is a 200 page analysis of methods and intentions; rarely has a major work been so carefully self-documented.
"I am the first composer to deal with the new planetarian wave of activity in all the media," says the composer while in England for the annual Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. "I've made hundreds of films; for years I earned part of my income by giving talks on the radio. I got used to the fact that most organisers of concerts are now unable to study the music. Even in radio, they are managers. They all expect that the composer will write the programme notes. I didn't want these should be casually written, but that they could still be read in 100 years and help in creating performances. When such demands come when I am concentrating on a new work I do regard it as bothersome but I also pay attention because I believe that every impulse which reaches me has a meaning."
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Stockhausen's work-list stretches back to 1950 and includes over 180 (by his own count) performable works. The canon is never static; Stockhausen is an almost fantastically meticulous reviser and rehearser of his own composition, and he is now faced with the irony that some of his early important tape pieces are deteriorating rapidly, without the back-up of a realisation score to allow them to be perpetuated.
"Living in this transition of history it is important to leave things behind in a rather perfect state and not to leave a mess. The works will remain when I leave this planet. Until then I constantly try to improve the perfection of the performances. The ideal of the romantic composer was the torso, the fragment, unaccomplished, imperfect. This seems to have some significance for the bohemian concept of the artist. But I don't like it. A composer like Anton Webern I greatly admired when I started composing because his work - even his handwriting! - was so pure. After he was dead I asked his publishers to get me his sketchbooks and they sent them to me through the normal mail! I could have simply said that I had lost or not received them. Later on, they were sold for a million to some university. Someone allowed fragments to be performed and I found this absolutely unacceptable. I think if Webern had known he would have burned it. Something which I do not want to be performed should not be performed. I want to be the master of my work."
Part of that is raw Anglo-Saxon prejudice, equation of any Germanic surname with a ready reckoner of dispraise: "harsh", "cerebral", "theoretical", "unspiritual". Stockhausen is still treated with rather casual suspicion, running from charlatanry (the score for Es (It), made in 1968, the year of super-experiment, read: "Think NOTHING/Wait til 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 retain/The state of NON-THINKING/Then continue playing") to the charge that he "exploits" his own fantastically gifted children (trumpeter Markus, saxophonist Simon and pianist Majella are seasoned members of his regular consort; his own regular consort, Suzanne Stephens, is the dedicatee of most of his clarinet and basset-horn works).
Hostile critics like to see Stockhausen as a kind of latter-day Wagner, presiding over a comfortably egocentric Bayreuth (much as Pierre Boulez is presumed to enjoy paterfamilias status at IRCAM). As further evidence, they adduce his latest and greatest project, Licht, a massive 'opera' in seven parts corresponding to the days of the week, of which only "Thursday", "Saturday" and parts of "Monday" are currently written, and which will occupy Stockhausen and his extended family for the rest of the century. This looks to critics like a Ring Cycle for the 21st century,the perihelion of Stockhausen's ambitions; God, after all, rested one day in seven.
There is a certain problem in approaching Stockhausen, and that is precisely the extent to which he has already and obsessively charted his theoretical and artistic progress in lectures, notes and, above all, in interviews. There are at least three current collections of 'conversations with the composer', and it's tempting to suggest that it is these that form more of the substance of Stockhausen's reputation than sympathetic listening to his music. The 'libretto' to Samstag Aus Licht is a 200 page analysis of methods and intentions; rarely has a major work been so carefully self-documented.
"I am the first composer to deal with the new planetarian wave of activity in all the media," says the composer while in England for the annual Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. "I've made hundreds of films; for years I earned part of my income by giving talks on the radio. I got used to the fact that most organisers of concerts are now unable to study the music. Even in radio, they are managers. They all expect that the composer will write the programme notes. I didn't want these should be casually written, but that they could still be read in 100 years and help in creating performances. When such demands come when I am concentrating on a new work I do regard it as bothersome but I also pay attention because I believe that every impulse which reaches me has a meaning."
*
Stockhausen's work-list stretches back to 1950 and includes over 180 (by his own count) performable works. The canon is never static; Stockhausen is an almost fantastically meticulous reviser and rehearser of his own composition, and he is now faced with the irony that some of his early important tape pieces are deteriorating rapidly, without the back-up of a realisation score to allow them to be perpetuated.
"Living in this transition of history it is important to leave things behind in a rather perfect state and not to leave a mess. The works will remain when I leave this planet. Until then I constantly try to improve the perfection of the performances. The ideal of the romantic composer was the torso, the fragment, unaccomplished, imperfect. This seems to have some significance for the bohemian concept of the artist. But I don't like it. A composer like Anton Webern I greatly admired when I started composing because his work - even his handwriting! - was so pure. After he was dead I asked his publishers to get me his sketchbooks and they sent them to me through the normal mail! I could have simply said that I had lost or not received them. Later on, they were sold for a million to some university. Someone allowed fragments to be performed and I found this absolutely unacceptable. I think if Webern had known he would have burned it. Something which I do not want to be performed should not be performed. I want to be the master of my work."