Advice To Clever Children
- Issue #141 (November '95) | Interviews
- By: Dick Witts, Rob Young | Featuring: Aphex Twin, Daniel Pemberton, Scanner, Karlheinz Stockhausen
- Printable version
Earlier this year, Radio 3 sent a package of tapes to Karlheinz Stockhausen. The tapes contained music by Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner and Daniel Pemberton. Then in August, the station’s reporter Dick Witts travelled to Salzburg to meet Stockhausen and ask him for his opinion on the music of these four “Technocrats”. But first, they talked about the Geman composer’s own youthful experiments in electronic synthesis…
DW: When you started as a composer, how different were the conditions from today?
KS: I studied music as a pianist, and learning all the traditional techniques of composing, in an institution called Stadtliche hofschule fur Musik. We had about ten disciplines to study: choir, orchestra, conducting, piano was my main instrument, then musicology, harmony and counterpoint. I wrote several works in traditional styles, but also two works, so-called ‘free compositions’, one for orchestra and alto voice, a work which is still available on CD called the Drei Lieder. I started composing (at the age of) 20, 1948, the first time I considered (my) music (to be) of some general importance, and they are available, like the Violin Sonatina…
DW: Why did you consider those works a beginning?
KS: Because everything that could be studied with the professors at the conservatory, the other students also were able to write. So there was nothing special to write a fugue or to write a piece in the style of Hindemith. But it was special to write something different from all the composers. I wrote, for example, a small theatre piece, Burleska, together with two colleagues. We divided the piece into three parts. My part did not sound as the newspapers said (of the other two parts) like Orff, or like Hindemith, but different. So I was very proud that they said my section did not sound ‘like’ something.
I composed Kreuzspiel or Crossplay (1951), and I knew when I wrote it that it would sound like nothing else in the world. People were quite upset when they heard it for the first time at the national summer courses for comtemporary music in Darmstadt, where I conducted the piece; it was violently interrupted by the public. And since then, I have composed works from one to the next, always waiting until I’ve found something that I had never imagined before, or that sounded like anything existing.
DW: Can you hear a line, a unity, in everything you’ve written from Kreuzspiel to Licht
KS: Many lines; depends on which level. For example, space exploration in music is one line, then sound-and word-relationship is another line, from the beginning until today, then the discovery of polyphony in many-layered composition is another line; and that is what is essential, the discovery of sounds which are derived from formulas for particular compositions. That goes from the very first electronic studies until my very last works which I have just finished, which I call electronic music with sound-scenes for Friday From Light, which is two hours 25 minutes of music which I work on in the electronic music studio in Cologne. This is another line. Then the development from serial technique to formula technique is again another line. So it depends just where you touch my musical mind, and I will show you how many, many lines are running in parallel and crossing each other constantly in different compositions.
DW: Going back to Kreuzspiel-that was around the time you first started using technology…
KS: Yes. 1952, I started working in the studio for musique concrete, of the French radio. Because I was very intrigued by the possibility to compose one’s own sound. I was allowed to work in the studio of Pierre Schaeffer: I made artificial sounds, synthetic sounds, and I composed my first etude.: Etude Concrete. At the same time, I was extremely curious, and went to the Musee de L’Homme in Paris with a tape recorder and microphones, and I recorded all the different instruments of the ethnological department: Indonesian instruments, Japanese instruments, Chinese instruments; less European instruments because I knew them better, but even piano sounds…Then I analysed these sounds one by one, and wrote down the frequencies which I found and the dynamic level of the partials of the spectra, in order to know what the sound is made of, what a sound ‘is’, as a matter of fact; what is the difference between a lithophone sound or, let’s say, a Thai gong sound of a certain pitch. And very slowly, I discovered the nature of sounds. The idea to analyse sounds gave me the idea to synthesize sounds. So then I was looking for synthesizers or the first electronic generators, and I superimposed vibrations in order to compose spectra: timbres, I do this now, still, after 43 years.
KS: I studied music as a pianist, and learning all the traditional techniques of composing, in an institution called Stadtliche hofschule fur Musik. We had about ten disciplines to study: choir, orchestra, conducting, piano was my main instrument, then musicology, harmony and counterpoint. I wrote several works in traditional styles, but also two works, so-called ‘free compositions’, one for orchestra and alto voice, a work which is still available on CD called the Drei Lieder. I started composing (at the age of) 20, 1948, the first time I considered (my) music (to be) of some general importance, and they are available, like the Violin Sonatina…
DW: Why did you consider those works a beginning?
KS: Because everything that could be studied with the professors at the conservatory, the other students also were able to write. So there was nothing special to write a fugue or to write a piece in the style of Hindemith. But it was special to write something different from all the composers. I wrote, for example, a small theatre piece, Burleska, together with two colleagues. We divided the piece into three parts. My part did not sound as the newspapers said (of the other two parts) like Orff, or like Hindemith, but different. So I was very proud that they said my section did not sound ‘like’ something.
I composed Kreuzspiel or Crossplay (1951), and I knew when I wrote it that it would sound like nothing else in the world. People were quite upset when they heard it for the first time at the national summer courses for comtemporary music in Darmstadt, where I conducted the piece; it was violently interrupted by the public. And since then, I have composed works from one to the next, always waiting until I’ve found something that I had never imagined before, or that sounded like anything existing.
DW: Can you hear a line, a unity, in everything you’ve written from Kreuzspiel to Licht
KS: Many lines; depends on which level. For example, space exploration in music is one line, then sound-and word-relationship is another line, from the beginning until today, then the discovery of polyphony in many-layered composition is another line; and that is what is essential, the discovery of sounds which are derived from formulas for particular compositions. That goes from the very first electronic studies until my very last works which I have just finished, which I call electronic music with sound-scenes for Friday From Light, which is two hours 25 minutes of music which I work on in the electronic music studio in Cologne. This is another line. Then the development from serial technique to formula technique is again another line. So it depends just where you touch my musical mind, and I will show you how many, many lines are running in parallel and crossing each other constantly in different compositions.
DW: Going back to Kreuzspiel-that was around the time you first started using technology…
KS: Yes. 1952, I started working in the studio for musique concrete, of the French radio. Because I was very intrigued by the possibility to compose one’s own sound. I was allowed to work in the studio of Pierre Schaeffer: I made artificial sounds, synthetic sounds, and I composed my first etude.: Etude Concrete. At the same time, I was extremely curious, and went to the Musee de L’Homme in Paris with a tape recorder and microphones, and I recorded all the different instruments of the ethnological department: Indonesian instruments, Japanese instruments, Chinese instruments; less European instruments because I knew them better, but even piano sounds…Then I analysed these sounds one by one, and wrote down the frequencies which I found and the dynamic level of the partials of the spectra, in order to know what the sound is made of, what a sound ‘is’, as a matter of fact; what is the difference between a lithophone sound or, let’s say, a Thai gong sound of a certain pitch. And very slowly, I discovered the nature of sounds. The idea to analyse sounds gave me the idea to synthesize sounds. So then I was looking for synthesizers or the first electronic generators, and I superimposed vibrations in order to compose spectra: timbres, I do this now, still, after 43 years.