The Wire

The Primer: Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen fulfils a seminal role in 20th century music, and there is no doubt in my mind – or his – that he will be equally revered and vilified in the 21st century and beyond. Starting out from Teutonic serialism, he fashioned a sound world uniquely his own: magical, mystic, uncompromising. His philosophical beliefs feed obtrusively into his art, as they should. He insists he is merely the channel for music, while accepting the kudos due a creator. That underlying conflict runs through his work. He will eagerly employ chance and performer discretion in his compositions, yet set strict limits, specific guidelines which ensure that the product is unmistakeably Stockhausen. Apparently secure in certainty, his business has been paradox, and the reconciliation of supposed incompatibilities, He invented World Music: in Kurzwellen and Hymnen, he literally plucked sounds from the air, drawing, from the celestial sphere of shortwave radio frequencies, essences of most cultures having access to the radio. In the stunning “Telemusik”, he went beyond collage to meld music from countless traditions into a startling, unique, fertile hybrid.

He has been at the centre of European music for five decades, studying with Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer, teaching Cornelius Cardew, Tim Souster, Kevin Volans, influencing Miles David, John Lennon, Philip Glass, magnetising, fascinating and/or exasperating berio, Boulez, Cage, Copland, Globokar, Kagel, Ligeti, Maderna, Nono, Penderecki, Pousseur… The list is endless, the selection arbitrary.


Chore Fur Doris/Choral/Drei Lieder/Sonatine/Kreuzspiel
(Stockhausen Verlag 1 CD)

Kontra-Punkte is Stockhausen’s official Opus 1, but in the early 70s, he admitted a number of earlier works into the authorised canon. All of the pieces on this CD, from 1950-1, pre-date Kontra-Punkte. Sonatine for violin and piano pays homage to Schoenberg. Chore and Choral would not obtrude at a Three Choirs Festival. The song texts in Drei Lieder are by Stockhausen himself. Already the composer inhabits his own mythology, as he would, more dramatically, in “Licht”. The String Man has torn his hands…has already sat a long time in the rain…his ear perceives…the never played”. Stockhausen’s is not the human-centric universe of the Romantics, where even the natural elements are projections of human passions. As early as “Kreuzspiel” he was looking into the cosmos, reflecting the stars in the use of “sound-points”, but perhaps the main significance of this piece lies in its reaching towards total serialism, systematising sets of pitches and durations.

Elecktronische Musik 1952-60
(Stockhausen Verlag 3 CD)
Kontakte
(Wergo 6009 CD)

This CD collects crucial documents in the evolution of electronic music. Electronic Studies I & II” attempted to apply serial principles to timbre and frequency, areas which resisted control in instrumental music. From this perspective their success was limited but, as music, Study I at least is a triumph. Despite the straightjacket of serial methodology, this alien song from a mistakenly-imagined future blooms richly and freely out of the ether.

Kontakte exploits differing perceptions of rhythm according to the speed at which they are presented. Stockhausen used it to develop Moment Form, where each sound event, though part of a structure or process, is viabe in itself, not dependent on that process or structure for its validity. (The Verlag CD features the purely electronic version, while the Wergo version adds piano and percussion soloists reacting to the taped elements, with David Tudor instead of Aloys Kontarsky on piano.)
[page break]
In the early 50s, Etude prompted a rift between Stockhausen and musique concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, polarising electronics between Cologne and Paris., sounds synthesised or found. A few years later Gesang der Junglinge” reconciled the methodological and philosophical dichotomy, knitting electronic and natural elements into a strange, exultant hymn praising God and celebrating the purity of the human voice, despite the electronic manipulation.

If music exists only in time, sound inhabits space. In Gesang Stockhausen experimented with placing and moving sounds. It had been done before, of course, not least by the Venetian Renaissance masters, but electronic technology gave Stockhausen a freedom that went beyond hocket and antiphonal devices, beyond simple echo and stereo effects, moving a singe sound as it happened. He designed the piece for five channels, with the boy’s voice assigned to its own overhead speaker.

Carre/Gruppen
(Stockhausen Verglag 5 CD)

Between 1955-7 Stockhausen tried similar spatial tricks with live performers in Gruppen, where three independent, equal (but not identical) orchestras flack the listener. The subsequent Carre has four orchestras with added mixed choruses using phonetic sound differentiations. The conductors face inwards, and the audience was meant to be ranged diagonally across a square auditorium. As in Kontakte, Stockhausen employs Moment Form. Carre, he said, “does not carry you along but leave you in peace”. The listener can elect to make the journey or simply enjoy the ever-renewed present. The music is not as meditative as this may suggest. There are violent outbursts, though nothing as intense as the most turbulent passages of Gruppen which predict the textures of John Coltrane’s Ascension and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. Significantly, having broken off from Carre to compose Kontakte, Stockhausen left composer and AMM-founder Cornelius Cardew to work up the score from sketches and instructions. During the 60s and early 70s he would increasingly relinquish direct control over the details of his music.

Given the crucial importance of the spatial relationships between each group of performers and the audience, both these works present major realisation problems. It was relatively easy for taped electronic sounds to be projected around an auditorium, with the speakers more or less surrounding the audience, but for Carre and Gruppen, Stockhausen somehow needed to get the same effect. The solution was a spherical performance space, with the audience suspended in the middle. His dream was briefly fulfilled in Osaka where a suitable hall was constructed for the 1970 World Fair.

Klavierstucke I-XI/Mikrophone I&II
(Sony Classical S2K 53346 2CD)
Klavierstucke
(Wergo WER 60135/36-50 CD)

In the notes for the Sony CD, containing 1965 performances of the Klavierstucke, Stockhausen – who evidently believes that your art’s what you eat – gives a detailed report on every meal, snack and drink taken by pianist Kontarsky during the days of the recordings. The first cycle, numbers I-IV, are ascetic miniatures written in Paris in 1952-3 when Stockhausen was studying with Messiaen. During this time he was evolving from “point” music to “groups” – or gruppen. “VI” exploits factors largely outside the control of composer or musician, its overall structure governed by the natural periods of sound decay and reverberation. “XI” displays Stockhausen’s first thorough-going application of aleatory principles, the score comprising irregularly distributed groups of notes which the pianist plays randomly within certain parameters: the pianist decides what order to play the groups in, but the score contains instructions in each group which affect the wy that the next, whatever it might be, is realised.
[page break]
The Mikrophonie, composed in 1964-5, were created in real-time, in front of an audience. The mechanics of sound production and transformation became integral to the performance. In “Mikrophonie I” two tam-tams are agitated by one set of musicians, while a second set monitors the results through hand-held microphones and a third modifies the sounds with filters and potentiometers. “Mikrophonie II” involves similar procedures but uses a chorus as he main sound generator, and patches in samples from earlier works. The results are electric.

The evolution from strictly notated scores to music which could only exist in performance was already discernible in the Klavierstucke, but with Mikrophone I & II, Stockhausen had no choice but to fuel in-flight. Forsaking serialist discipline, he strove to “mediate between organisation and non-organisation”. Characteristically, having set u a situation accommodating performer choice, Stockhausen modified the score during rehearsal because the interactions were unpredictable.

Hymnen
(Stockhausen Verlag 10 4CD)

Like a number of Stockhausen’s other works, including Kontakte, Hymnen from 1967 exists in more than one form. It can be ‘performed’ purely on tape as well as with soloists, when the problems of exercising control while using aleatoric and improvisatory elements rise again. Both versions are included here. This monumental ceremony, comprising four “Regions” totalling some two hours, also exists in a version with an orchestral third “Region”.

In the light of contemporary sampling and sequencing capabilities, Hymnen may seem technically primitive and clumsy, but it’s still a remarkable experience emotionally, an imaginative expedition which has no parallel. Where Telemusik and Gesang were compacted, their components smelted and transmuted into a dense conglomerate, Hymnen lays out its processes and constituents. Stockhausen builds the work from national anthems, banal tunes snatched from less than respectable employment and pressed into utopian service. He wants them to fetch all their disreputable baggage so that he can empty it out, mixing it with natural sounds, electronic interventions and the reactions of live performers, his citizens of Harmondie. Stockhausen’s comments on Carre quoted earlier seem better applied to Hymnen. Listeners have to be content with being on the train: with its slow pace, extended transformations, passages of near-silence and shortwave static. Hymnen requires you to meditate on your journey’s purpose rather than fret about arriving, while an insistent, rather sinister voice asks you to place your bets. Stockhausen puns with sound – as when crowd noises mutate into swamp-ducks – and a Brechtian (or proto-PoMo) episode lets us eavesdrop on a conference from the recording sessions themselves. Hymnen was my visa to Stockhausen’s empire, and it always provokes a special nostalgia.

Stimmung
(Stockhausen Verlag 12 2CD)

If Hymnen isn’t Stockhausen’s masterpiece, Stimmung (Tuning) from the following year must be. Written during a frozen Long Island winter, Stimmung incorporates erotic poems written for his wife together with a selection of the many names of God, but its foundation is a specified series of overtones on a B flat. The notes are to be sung softly, without vibrato, resonating only in the cranial spaces, but bringing out the overtones as strongly s possible. Live performances of this piece, around an hour-and-a-quarter long, can be utterly bewitching, with the six singers ranged in a semi-circle in the gloom. Chanted vowels and phonemes swirl in a twilight of consequential chords, with occasional fully-formed recognisable words darting out to illuminate the mists from within. The shifting textures suggest images which would later be given substantial form in the most effective scenes of Donnerstag Aus Licht. Play this through the headphones and slide into an alien but protective realm.

Aus Den Sieben Tagen
(Stockhausen Verlag 14 7CD)
Fais Voile Vers Le Soleil/Liaison (from “Aus Den Sieben Tagen”)
(Harmonia Mundi HMA 190795 CD)

The circumstance which triggered the creation of this titanic sequence – 15 works on seven CDs in the Verlag version – were exceptional, so were the results. In May 1968, Stockhausen’s wife Mary was due to return, with their children, from a holiday in America. Instead she sent a letter ending their relationship. Stockhausen pleaded by telegram and, when she did not reply, determined that he did not wish to go on living. He began a hunger strike, designed to bring Mary home, and starved himself for seven days. Toward the end of the second day, he wrote a text, verbal instructions for improvisation, except that he prefers the term Intuitive Music. After four days without food, he went to the piano and played a single note. “How this note shocked me…for days on end I had heard nothing but birdsong…I played another note (and heard) an inner life such as I had never heard before.” Finally he had let go, leaving the performers to interpret his words through the intermodulation of their own personalities and experiences. Yet the regime was punishing, “Goldstaub”, for example, calls on the players to fast for four days “in complete silence…sleep as little as possible…close your eyes/just listen.” From the distress of his personal situation came a catharsis which would shape his output for years to come.

The full, exhausting seven CD set of Sieben Tagen costs over £100. Neophytes might be better off (I more ways than one) going for the budget-priced Harmonia Mundi CD, which gives an excellent representative flavour of the whole work, and features Stockhausen and several of his regular collaborators.
[page break]
Trans
(Stockhausen Verlag 19 CD)

So many of Stockhausen’s compositions call for a degree of theatrical realisation that it should have been no surprise when, in 1977, he eventually announced that everything he wrote in future would be subsumed into the massive opera, Licht. Trans has, to the best of my knowledge, only once been performed in Britain in anything near its intended form, at a student concert at the Royal College of Music. The piece came, virtually whole, in a dream, Stockhausen saw vertical ranks of string players bathed in a reddish violet light. They moved stiffly, mechanically, abruptly changing the musical material as the sound of a loom shuttle, massively amplified, leapt over the heads of the audience. From some concealed place behind the strings, wind and brass, other instruments could be heard. Stockhausen hints at another world behind the everyday, and has alluded to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, believing that this music may help guide a newly dead soul on its journey.

This CD includes the world premiere concert performance, opening with a gasp from the audience as the eerily-lit strings appear, as well as a studio recording. Both versions are spell-binding.

Ylem
(Stockhausen Verlag 21 CD)

Developing from the technique – the gamble – pioneered in Sieben Tagen, Ylem's score comprises a short text, a skeletal blueprint for a piece that always surprises by the similarity of each realisation. Again, though Stockhausen is content to offer verbal recommendations rather than the strict instructions of his fully-notated scores, musicians have commented how strong and unavoidable they find the guidance. Ylem was inspired by the oscillation theory of the origin of the universe, The process used in the piece is a loose parallel to that of Kreuzspiel. The players, clustered in a group around the keyboard, are invited to lay a note from the centre of their instruments’ range. They then gradually move outwards, pitch-wise and physically, spreading out into the audience and towards the edges of the performance space until, at a shouted syllable, the expansion halts, and the contraction back into the point of genesis begins.

Stockhausen had now become a facilitator, an initiator, rather than a maker. The technique would be developed and varied in such pieces as Atmen Gibt Das Leben, but by the end of the decade the trend would be reversed and, with the complex projects making up Licht, the composer would become architect, ring-master, priest and court jester to a distinctive visual as well as aural universe.

Donnerstag
(Stockhausen Verlag 30 4CD)
Licht is planned as seven nights of music theatre. Donnerstag was the first day to be completed and staged. The composer’s personal mythology is complex, abstruse, mystical and, in many ways, naïve, redolent of the most optimistic and gentle elements of 60s hippy-shit. Thursday’s opera takes in a rainbow in dry-ice, a runaway toy lorry, a remarkable shadow-show reminiscent of Indonesian puppets, an entirely wordless Act comprising a trumpet concerto representing the Archangel Michael’s circumnavigation of the Earth, and a bag-lady who asks audience and performers; Why don’t you all go home?” In Licht”’s cosmology, Stockhausen himself can be identified with Michael, if not with the Almighty. Yet, in among all these miracles and wonders, the music itself was probably the most conventional that Stockhausen had ever written or inspired, and the echoes of Wagner, though distant and distorted, were not confined to the colossal scale or the cast of archetypes.

Music For Flute
(Stockhausen Verlag 28 2CD)

Like Chore Fur Doris and Choral, Music For Flute is ideal for playing to people who want to know if modern music composers can write ‘proper music’ before they will take their more experimental works seriously. The flute pieces are – not more personal, because Stockhausen’s music is nothing if not personal – but more intimate than the other compositions spotlighted in this survey. Several of them were written as gifts for friends and relations and most have, of course, ended up being incorporated in some part of Licht, whatever their original context. Their accessibility and classical elegance will surprise anyone who thinks Stockhausen is only capble of producing harsh, cerebral music.

The Stockhausen Verlag is Stockhausen’s own label, and is in the process of a mass reissue of the ‘official’ recordings of the composer’s music. The Verlag CDs recommended here, which come with lengthy liner notes and Stockhausen’s own artwork, are available by mail order only. Write for a catalogue to Stockhausen Verlag, Kettenberg 15. 51515 Kurten, Germany. Harmonia Mundi and Wergo CDs are distributed by Harmonia Mundi. Sony Classical goes through Sony.

© The Wire 2008