Karlheinz Stockhausen by David Paul

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Karlheinz Stockhausen By David [email protected]

Orginally published in SECONDS #44 1997

His father killed in combat, his institutionalized mother put to death by the authorities, he was a stretcher-bearer at sixteen treating casualties in a military hospital right behind the front lines. As the war wound down,the huge red cross painted on the roof of the hospital proved too tempting for Allied air raiders to resist. Withno time to bury the dead, his job became piling fresh corpses on top of old ones. Some bodies showed signsof life, but there was no time to check them out - they were buried under yet more bodies.

What doesn't kill us might make us stronger if we're strong or smart enough in the first place. Fortunately,KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN, an essential pioneer of Electronic Music, prevailed, although his wartimeexperiences would have withered a less hardy soul. The composer admits he learned not to fear death as aresult of the war.

Though he referred to God in one of his early poems as the "great spirit of torment," Stockhausen has alwayshad a religious fascination with living systems, from atoms and cells to stars and constellations. Using theexhaustive documenting techniques and rigorous methodology of a research scientist, he has worked foryears identifying the processes that keep these systems humming and attempting to create their musicalequivalents. Profoundly metaphysical and profoundly rational, his mind is generally focused on two things:organic processes and time.

In the 1950s, Stockhausen and other European composers, hoped to portray "in very honest terms what it waslike to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent" (Steve Reich interview, by Edward Strickland,Minimalism: Origins, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). They had one abiding imperative: to

kill Romanticism and find a replacement. They replaced it with Serialism, a rigorous method for structuringall musical elements in pre-determined sequences. Stockhausen believed Serialism was a principle derivedfrom Nature, allowing the emulation of life processes via incremental mutation. Composing first withsingular, isolated notes called "points" in a Messiaen-like style, he later devised laws for the notes to interactin "groups," creating what might be seen as the equivalent of molecules. Kontra-Punkte, a piece Stockhausenwrote in group form, came to the attention of Igor Stravinsky and influenced that composer's writing. Stilllater, Stockhausen merged masses of these groups into "moment form," paralleling the scenario of cellularlife with a higher level of organizational rules. Such a Gestalt concept is central to Stockhausen's musicalthought. Complex structures comprise more than the sum of their parts - emergent properties appear.

einz Stockhausen By David Paul - Orginally published in SECON... http://www.stockhausen.org/stockhausen _by_david_paul.html

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One of Stockhausen's most important contributions to Twentieth Century musical thought is contained in hisinfluential essay "How Time Passes," detailing his discovery of a "spectrum of time," a result of his workingwith sound on tape. The spectrum of time encompasses all sound as an aspect of one thing - vibration. If anote is recorded and played back very slowly, we hear a series of rhythmic pulses. If the tape is sped up, therhythm is perceived as pitch, and if played even faster, the pitch enters the extreme high end of what humanscan hear, as higher "partials" which create timbre in conjunction with lower tones. These "ranges of perception are ranges of time, and the time is subdivided by us, by the construction of our bodies and by our

organs of perception" (Robin Maconie, Stockhausen On Music, London: Marion Boyars, 1989, p. 95). Criticswho doubted the validity of Serialism's attempt to unify all properties of sound were confronted with a"unified field" theory in which duration, pitch and color were aspects of the same thing.

In 1954, aleatory and statistical processes began to appear in Stockhausen's "totally organized" music as aresult of studies with physicist Werner Meyer-Eppler, who had applied information theory to acoustics andlanguage. When studying random sonic phenomena using statistical procedures he had been the first todescribe them as "aleatory." One result of Stockhausen's studies was Song Of The Youths, probably thebest-known piece of Electronic Music during that era. The influence of information theory is apparent in itspermutations between comprehensible speech and fragments of incomprehensible speech drawn from thebiblical Book Of Daniel. Written for five groups of loudspeakers, Song Of The Youths stands out as the firstElectronic Music to incorporate spatial movement as a structural element (a pioneering move - commercialstereo recordings were not to appear until about five years later). Later the same year, Stockhausen met JohnCage, whose anarchic experiments with chance operations may have helped confirm for Stockhausen that hehad found something important in aleatoric procedures.

Stockhausen continued incorporating chance behavior into his music. Seeing entropy as a necessaryingredient in musical processes that would live and die, he found a way to incorporate it into his music withlive improvisation, or "process music." In 1964, he moved Electronic Music from the studio to the concerthall with his newly-founded Stockhausen Group, the members of which performed on volume knobs, ringmodulators, shortwave radios, and a few acoustic instruments. Instead of creating traditional scores,

Stockhausen drew symbolic charts with descriptions of the processes to be realized. The schematics hecreated evolved into more prosaic text pieces, more like aphorisms or poems - sets of instructions for theperformers - containing no musical notation. These pieces became known as "intuitive music." An interestingprecursor of these musical processes can be found in Herman Hesse's 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game,which describes a chess-like game played with symbols and hieroglyphs according to strict rules andintuition. Interestingly, Hesse and Stockhausen had corresponded shortly after the book's publication, andStockhausen must have been struck by the implications in Hesse's prophecy.

In 1966, Stockhausen visited Japan on a commission from Japanese Radio (NHK). Jet-lag and culture shock cost him over a week's worth of sleep, resulting in recurring visions of sounds, notations, technical processesand concepts. It reminded him of an idea he'd once had - to create compositions made up of various ethnicmusics, "a music of the whole world, of all countries and races" (Texte Zur Musik 1963-1970, Vol. iii,Cologne: privately published, 1971, p. 75). Telemusik was the result, an electrifying, heavily-processed mixof Balinese, African, Japanese, Vietnamese and other world musics, separated into thirty-two sections, eachprecipitated by a percussive noise reminiscent of the temple-block and bell strokes used in Japanese ritual anddrama.

Encounters with Japanese culture greatly influenced Stockhausen's music, primarily with respect to how timeis used. The sudden transition between extremely slow and extremely fast time in Noh dramas, slow-motionGagaku ceremonial music, and days-long Buddhist rituals all made a deep impression. The tea ceremony


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with its lengthy preparations was key - drinking the tea was not really the object of the effort; it was theprocess of making the tea.

Stockhausen premiered a masterpiece in 1967 - the two-hour epic Hymnen, a tape montage composed mainlyof national anthems, a stage set for brilliant hallucination, a collision of the internal world of imaginationwith the external world of perception. Juxtaposing a range of taped and synthetic material with recordings of Stockhausen speaking with his collaborators in the studio, it creates an interesting contrast between recorded(frozen) time and real (continuous) time. The inclusion of Stockhausen's studio conversations within thepiece may have been a deliberate attempt to endow this musical "organism" with a kind of recursiveself-awareness, looking at itself in the process of its own creation. As Paul Griffiths says, "It is a meta-world,a window into other worlds. Hymnen is even a world into itself" (Modern Music And After, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995, p. 170). The piece ends with the sounds of Stockhausen breathing, bringing to mindscenes from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released the next year. Shortly beforecontacting Stockhausen to request his participation in a Beatles concert, John Lennon appears to have usedHymnen as a model for his infamous "Revolution 9." In retrospect, most Psychedelic Music loses its edgeafter one experiences Hymnen. It certainly foreshadowed a good deal of Industrial, Ambient and Techno inits use of droning, collage and distortion.

In the late Sixties Miles Davis took an interest in what Stockhausen was doing with improvisation and hisunending "moment form." In Davis' autobiography he says, "I had always written in a circular way andthrough Stockhausen I could see that I didn't want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because Inever end songs: they just keep going on. Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition" (Miles, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 329). Cosmological ideas enteredinto Stockhausen's work increasingly throughout the Sixties and Seventies, his concept of world music,characteristically enough, having jumped to the next-highest paradigm - that of the universe. Working with"Formula," an extension of his earlier Serial methods (later his "Super-Formula" would contain expandedmusical features like tempos, modulations and echoes), he completed Sirius, a piece about the star which heconsiders to be center of our local universe. He believes music is the language spoken on the planets around

Sirius and considers himself to be descended >from their inhabitants. He also believes music will be theuniversal tongue of Earth in the distant future.

Since 1977, Stockhausen has focused on a massive week-long opera cycle called Licht. Based on the days of the week, it is projected for completion around 2006. He's developed many ideas for Licht from a mysterioustome called The Urantia Book, published by The Urantia Foundation, an occult group in Chicago. Parts of Licht sound like Tibetan ritual music, others like Sun Ra meets Olivier Messiaen. Sometimes it's nothing butsheets of synthetic sound (Electronic Music from the opera Freitag [Friday], for instance, consists largely of sustained synthesizer drones), and at other times it's reminiscent of Wagnerian Sprechsingen.

Time occupies a central role in Stockhausen's theory and compositional craft. He has written a great deal of music about different manifestations of time - days, weeks, years, astronomical time - and has explored itacoustically, right down to the microsecond. He also has perceived time in unique and profoundly creativeways as the basic building block of his work. As he puts it, "I know that breaking through the routine of timemakes things reveal the mystery" (Breaking Through The Routine Of Time, Krten: Stockhausen Verlag,1996, p. 13).

Notorious for his non-stop six- and seven-hour lectures (one lasted nine-and-a-half hours), he once surprisedhis composition students by asking them to attend their 10 A.M. class before dawn for a few days, then late inthe afternoon, the idea being to demonstrate different exper-iences of time. "This is something that intriguesme: to get out of normal human cycles, bodily cycles, and discover other cycles" (Breaking Through The


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Routine Of Time, p. 13). Stockhausen tries to do the same thing with his music by expanding into perceptualregions we are not accustomed to using (microtones, aperiodic rhythms, complex harmony and timbre, etc.)and asking us to concentrate on the music's organization to the greatest possible degree. Having writtenTelemusik and a collection of intuitive pieces called Aus Den Sieben Tagen after week-long periods withoutsleep, Stockhausen knows whereof he speaks.

There is something Nietzschean about Stockhausen and his relentless efforts to push beyond the mundaneworld of being human. As he puts it, " ... this music trains a new kind of human being ... who has neverbefore existed on this planet" (Comes Awakening, Comes Time, Krten: Stockhausen Verlag, 1986, 3). And inhis essay "Music And The Centers Of Man," Stockhausen says, "Most music is just physical, and speaks tocenters in us that belong more to the animal than to the superhuman" (Music, Mysticism And Magic: ASourcebook, New York: Arkana/Routledge, 1986). Or as you hear in a studio conversation in Hymnen, "Wirknnen noch eine Dimension tiefer gehen ... (We could go yet one dimension deeper )."

SECONDS: You wanted to be a poet when you were young, and you corresponded with Herman Hesse.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. I wrote a lot of poems, in-between novels, and shorter stories.

SECONDS: And he urged you to continue writing?

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. I sent him poems and he answered very kindly, saying that I should continue, and Iwas sure that it made sense to write poetry.

SECONDS: Do you still write?

STOCKHAUSEN: I have written the texts of all my works, except the "Song Of Songs," which is part of Momente, and the text of Song Of The Youths is from the Book Of David from the Bible. I have alsocomposed Invisible Choirs, based on texts of the Apocalypse. It is partly sung in Hebrew.

SECONDS: But you decided instead to work with music.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. The moment I felt that the musical compositions I was writing were more what Iwanted, then I gave up writing poetry and I dedicated my whole life to composition.

SECONDS: You wrote your graduate thesis on Bartok's Sonata For Two Pianos And Percussion, and forawhile you seemed to be interested in Bartok.

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, for my state examination as a pianist, I played several works of Bartok. I liked hiswork very much, and I had heard several performances of the Sonata For Two Pianos And Percussion duringthe time of my studies, and I devoted an entire year to this work, analyzing every note.

SECONDS: It makes sense that you would be interested in Bartok, if you were focused on piano.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. He was obviously an excellent pianist, and performed together with his wife.

SECONDS: You then played piano with a magician, Adrion.

STOCKHAUSEN: Oh, that was a part-time job. From 1947 until 1951 I played almost every night in clubsand bars in the city of Cologne, or sometimes even in the afternoons in cafs to make a living. And towardsthe end of my studies, in 1950, a magician came to the student's dormitory and he asked me to improvise,because I was rather famous in the city of Cologne amongst the students and younger musicians for


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improvisation, and I improvised for him and then he accepted my collaboration. We travelled through all of Germany, and he performed his magic and I played the piano, improvising according to his different tricks.

SECONDS: You were following his movements?

STOCKHAUSEN: Oh yes. And very often covering his movements. So people didn't notice what washappening.

SECONDS: So you have a history with popular music, then?

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes, very much so. Even earlier, when I was nine or ten years old, although we were verypoor people we had a radio and an old upright piano. I was able to imitate on the piano what I heard on theradio. So I could play what we call Schlagers - very popular tunes. And on Sundays my father would take meinto a restaurant in Altenberg and say, "Now, go and play." I was ashamed in the beginning, but later on I hadmore courage. As a matter of fact, my piano teacher, a Mr. Kloth, a wonderful person, had married the ladywho owned this restaurant. And I played there, sometimes for an hour, and then I got some money. And allthe people enjoyed singing together with me.

SECONDS: Do you hear your influence in music today?

STOCKHAUSEN: It seems that recently many Pop Musicians admit that they have learned a lot from mywork because they are so interested now in Electronic Music and electronic sound synthesis. Most of themsample music, but they transform the samples. As a matter of fact, the most famous ones know my work quite well. Several of them have been my students. Even in America, the musicians of the Grateful Dead orJefferson Airplane were in my composition classes in Davis, California in 1966-67. Et cetera.

SECONDS: Do you draw a distinction between so-called "serious" and "popular" music?

STOCKHAUSEN: The word "serious" is perhaps no longer clear. I'm deadly serious, I must say, when I try

to invent and discover something that I don't know, and this is always the case whenever I start a new work.As a matter of fact, the music that is related to fashion, which means to what is in the air, and to what peoplebuy and to what a lot of producers can sell - this is one type of music, you see; it is adjusting itself to existingdemands, taste, advertising, et cetera. Whereas the music that I am aiming at since 1950 does not accept thiskind of relationship between me and the people. Because I do what I hear inwardly, and what I findfascinating, and what I very often don't know about myself. So there is an enormous difference betweenUtility Music or Commercial Music and Art Music. I call it Art Music, not so much "serious." It is very oftenvery humorous music; it's not only serious. Well, both. But I call it Art Music compared to CommercialMusic.

SECONDS: Looking back to acknowledged masters, Mozart is the most obvious instance of someone whomastered his art but was aware of commercial restrictions.

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, he was employed! [laughs] As long as he worked only for the Archbishop, he had tofollow the style of Church Music. And as soon as he got in touch with the aristocratic societies in differentcities, and in particular in Vienna where there was a lot of competition with famous Italians, then he adjustedto the style in vogue. This was the case even for Johann Sebastian Bach, who had to be careful. I mean,Corelli, Vivaldi and Rameau were for him fashionable composers. He studied them and to a great extent heimitated them. But then what made Bach become Bach is what was not like what the others did. And that'swhat today makes him much more important as a contributor to our spiritual development, and with Mozart itis the case also in a few works. The rest was stylish composition of his time. He adjusted naturally, as an


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employee, to what the style of the court was.

SECONDS: Right. So, the distinction between Art Music and Popular Music is not really one of style but oneof how one applies oneself, or where one gets one's ideas.

STOCKHAUSEN: Well fortunately, I am not an employee, you know, since I started to compose. So I don'tneed to listen to persons who pay me, what they want or what they do not like. And I have made a living withother work, for example as a conductor. I worked in radio for many, many years as a sound technician,realizing works of other composers in the Studio For Electronic Music, and I wrote a lot of texts for late-nightradio programs analyzing works of other composers. In the course of time I learned to conduct, and now I ama sound projectionist, so I can earn enough to live on in a few concerts per year and I don't depend on anyonewho criticizes the style of my music - you see what I mean?

SECONDS: You tend to work on a colossal scale. You're an idealist, you have exceptional endurance, andyou're metaphysical in the sense that you want to extend yourself beyond the mundane, the limits of beinghuman.

STOCKHAUSEN: Right.

SECONDS: Do you identify with, or were you instilled with the ideas of metaphysicians like Schopenhauer,Beethoven, Bruckner, Goethe?

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. All the spiritual artists - but also all the great scientists and philosophers who knewthat human thinking and human production and human creation is an extraordinarily small mirror of what wecan study in nature and in the universe or in the micro-world. I have only modestly tried to translate thegreater principles and laws of the world, of what we can discover and study, and in this sense I know that mycomposition is an extraordinarily small model of what I can see daily in astronomy or genetics or biology,physics and chemistry. The last thirty or forty years are so packed with new discoveries in the micro-worldand the macro-world that our artistic production is really very small. One has to be very humble, really.

SECONDS: The macro- and micro-world seem to be the essence of your work, going from the world of micro-sound to stretching that sound out to the macro.

STOCKHAUSEN: That is true. But also, hmm also works like the great isorhythmic motets have beenmirroring the relationship between the stars and the atoms - and it was not at all fashionable when JohannSebastian Bach, towards the end of his life, created these great works which certainly were not practical. Imean, not only The Art Of The Fugue, but also the Goldberg Variations, The Musical Offering.

SECONDS: The Mass In B Minor?

STOCKHAUSEN: Right! That was exceptional, because he was a Protestant - imagine what that meant!Unbelievable! I mean, that was so extraordinary, what he did as a Protestant to compose a big Catholic Mass.And it was certainly not readily accepted in the Protestant Church. These are insights into greaterrelationships and laws of spiritual creation, and in our time there are so many explosions of consciousnessthat we cannot even catch up with it because our technical means are so limited.

SECONDS: Do you think we will ever stop developing, because our intellect just can't take in moreinformation?

STOCKHAUSEN: [Laughs] No. I think that mankind is in a school. And it will continue being a school in


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our local galaxy. But I know that I have learned a lot before this life, and I want to develop much more afterthis life, because it's so short. I certainly want to continue, and not only on this planet because I think that theplanet is extraordinarily simple and limited. And it's limiting itself more and more because of the expansionof physical life. And physical life demands physical satisfactions. As a musician, as a composer, I see thatthis planet is certainly not inviting me to do my music, you know what I mean? It wants something else as anatural reaction to this explosion of population.

SECONDS: What do you mean it wants something else?

STOCKHAUSEN: Food! Food and shelter and energy, et cetera. I mean, a physical energy for survival. Somusic is for most of mankind just background entertainment. They don't even think about what music couldbe like as a spiritual food, because they have so many other problems.

SECONDS: One problem is just the time to listen to it all.

STOCKHAUSEN: True. There was an American visiting me about three weeks ago, Jerome Kohl fromSeattle, and he's a professor of music, a very bright person, and he said, "Stockhausen, are you aware that youhave now produced over eighty hours of music on CDs? Imagine how long it takes if one wants to listen just

once to each of your pieces. Well, then it takes more than ten days in a row, eight hours per day to listen tothem only once." And I became aware of this situation: that I have composed a lot, and there are all theseCDs, not to speak of live performances, that will never be heard by the majority of mankind. Because theyhave no access to the concerts, and they don't know where they take place, and they cannot travel to theperformances, of which there are very few.

SECONDS: You once said music in the post-war period was not an expression of human feeling, but are-creation of cosmic order. There was an orientation away from mankind.

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, it is true. When I discover something that is mysterious for me, new for me, andwhen I very carefully try to formulate it in sound, then it is certainly not the human side of myself which istouched. It is very strange to me. And I feel there is something that I don't know; I don't even know how toformulate it and to translate it into the instrumental world, whether in the electronic studio or with traditionalinstruments is secondary. The music which is composed by me and rehearsed many times and perfected in alot of rehearsals very slowly creates feelings that I haven't had before. But it is not the expression of myfeelings. So then I have new feelings. New music creates new feelings. It gives us completely differentexperiences that we haven't had before. That's why it is so important - it expands us.

SECONDS: It expands us?

STOCKHAUSEN: It expands our range of feelings, yes. Thoughts and feelings.

SECONDS: So is music always an expansion -

STOCKHAUSEN: No, no, no [laughs]. Most of the music just touches us, because there exists already afeeling, due to the fact that we have heard it before in a similar way. But only new music which expands ourconsciousness has that quality that leaves us in a state of surprise, and we are astonished. That is very rarelythe case.

SECONDS: In the late Forties and Fifties, did you feel that you were creating music from scratch? That therewas really no tradition, and it had to be re-invented?


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STOCKHAUSEN: There was a lot of tradition, because I studied traditional music in all styles and as part of my training at the State conservatory I had to write pieces in all styles of the past. It is true that as a student Ihad heard Stravinsky's work for the first time on the late night radio programs in the student dormitory inCologne, and also perform-ances of Bartok which I had never heard before. Hindemith I played myself as astudent only at the end of my studies in 1950 and '51, the Hindemith sonatas, et cetera. It's true that I had notyet heard this music, and it sounded very different from what I had heard before and what I'd played before asa piano player and what I sang in the conservatory choir. But then at the end of my studies in 1951, I felt that

all the music that I had played and sung before belonged to another era. That era was completely finished.After my first work, Kreuzspiel - which sounded very strange to me when I conducted it for the first time - Ifelt that a new era was beginning, with completely different methods of composition. The music was my stateof the soul at the time. I composed it as if I were an astronomer >from the outer world reorganizing planetsand sounds and circuits and time proportions. So I was not so much identifying with sounds, but creating newsound worlds. And since then I know that a new music began about 1951.

SECONDS: Are all musical parameters of equal importance?

STOCKHAUSEN: They are certainly not, if you think of our technical means. The oldest ones began in theNinth and Tenth Centuries when a few monks invented the lines of the staff for pitches, and now within thehalf-tone we have micro-tones which I have composed with for the last forty-three years. Even for traditionalinstruments, not to speak of the forty-two different micro-scales which I used in Kontakte - or in Song Of TheYouths, I used about thirty different micro-scales which are not chromatic scales. So naturally the parameterof pitch is the most developed technically. It's terribly primitive, what we still notate for traditionalinstruments in dynamics. So the dynamic is a parameter which was developed rather late. And when Icompose in electronic timbres, then I have my own timbre-scales, and actually I have a hundred degrees of dynamics in the studio when I work with ProTools. But people don't know that, and they still haven't learnedto differentiate so many degrees of dynamics or the scales of timbres that I use, and the same is true formoving sound in space. I mean, I now use a series of constellations of sounds moving in space or standing ina certain constellation. I work with series of space constellations. But the notation is still relatively poor

compared to the pitch notation, though in Electronic Music I do not use the traditional pitch notation becauseof all these intervals which do not correspond to chromatic scales.

So it is true that historically we have a hierarchy from pitch to space - positions or movement in space. But asfor perception - it is different. We can't consciously perceive as many degrees of dynamics as we can perceivedegrees of pitch. And the same is true for rhythm, in particular. We can perceive fantastically many differentrhythmic values, but we are very limited up to now to rationalize this in notation. With synthesizers it's easier.I have worked the last two years with metronome scales that go down really in micro-intervals of metronomicspeeds. And it works. It works very well, if one superimposes different layers of different periodicities so thatone can hear the beats between different periodicities of tempi. But nevertheless, the notation is a historicalresult. And we move rather fast now in developing notation which establishes more and more an equality of rights for the different parameters of perception. Perception depends on what we know, and what we know isonly what we can write. But development of all parameters is speeding up now.

SECONDS: Levels of duration are probably the most abstract parameters to differentiate.

STOCKHAUSEN: Maybe. Hmmm ... you think more than pitches? When I listen to the Pop Music now, itgoes back to medieval modal music, which is amazing, that it gives up the wonderful possibilities of using alot of intervals.

With durations it's similar. The fact is that all the music of the past is based on our muscle rhythms. What we


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can tap on the table, or what we can dance to, what we can do with running, walking, slowly moving thehands, the eyes, et cetera - this is the basis of rhythm in music. Everything is related to a basic periodicity,like the heart, the breathing, the tapping, the dancing. But since 1951 I have slowly but steadily left the bodyrhythm of my own body. I like dancing - I love it. And I play dance music and there's a lot of electricity in theair. Nevertheless, I purposely leave the rhythms of the body, of my body and the body of others - my body'snot so different from other bodies. I allow myself rhythms that are much more complicated and very oftencannot be related to periodic rhythms of the body anymore, and that is very interesting. I have written more

and more irregular rhythms, like eleven-tuplets, thirteen-tuplets, et cetera. If they're based on basic unitieswhich can be still felt with our bodies but subdivided irregularly in a more complicated way, then we canenormously expand our ability to make distinctions between different durations. This is true for the relativelyshort rhythmic values. What is a problem and will be true for the relatively short rhythmic values. What is aproblem and will be [Image] a problem for a long time from now on are the durations of works. I composeonly unified works, not works in movements. I had a lot of discussions with friends at the beginning of theFifties, saying, "Why do you still write movements? It's ridiculous. You must write like you're building acathedral, one evolution, one big arch of a piece." Anyway, they said, "Well, I need that," and that is a sort of French-Italian tradition to write a lot of small movements. Ligeti still does it today. I call this "cookie music"- they write small cookies. What is necessary is to build one musical composition which has anever-expanding arch, because that expands our sense of evolution, of development. And that is very, veryimportant. So my works have grown in length since Gruppen, twenty-five minutes, which was one unifiedduration. And then Carr was thirty-six minutes, Hymnen was more than two hours, then Stimmung, seventyminutes, Sirius, ninety-six minutes, Fresco, five hours, and now Licht is twenty-seven hours. So one by one,the length of a so-called musical composition has grown in duration. And this goes far beyond what we canremember or what we can identify. It is important not to think that we have a fixed sense of duration, which isaround one quarter of an hour, and then we need to pause, need something else - and that a musical work,basically, should not be longer than an hour. The thinking that man needs a certain duration for a musicalwork is no longer what I am following. It has become completely relative. And it's very good to learnproportions in time which extend our sense of memory, which are much longer than our memory. And not inone generation, but in the long run, in two or three centuries, one will have a completely different perceptionwhich will be the result of music which extends the duration more and more. And which also goes ever moreinto the differentiation of aperiodic rhythms and small proportions. Do you understand that?

SECONDS: Oh, yes. With respect to rhythms of the body and perception, what about mental rhythms - therhythms of thought?

STOCKHAUSEN: Aha! It is true that certain parts in my own work approach nine, ten, eleven, twelve pulsesper second, around the alpha wave region, which is very important for telepathy and telekinesis - a veryinteresting zone where we lose our ability to make distinctions between rhythm and pitch. It starts already atsix or seven per second, and then after sixteen per second we are in a new realm of perception where we talk

about pitch, a "low sound." But the zone that I have just mentioned is related to our brain vibrations, and Ihave composed quite a lot of music where I like to stay in this zone. It's a sort of gray zone between realms of perception, between rhythm and pitch. And the same applies, by the way, to a zone between pitch and timbre.So if it goes beyond about thirty-two hundred per second, then there is a zone where pitch is steadilybecoming what we call timbre, the high partials. And the same is true also for eight seconds: when thedurations from one-sixteenth of a second become longer and longer, there is that gray zone, and then wecome into rhythm. We are dealing with longer and longer durations for slow movements, slow rhythms andmetres; and when we go beyond eight seconds, then we lose memory, we cannot remember well enough if itis eleven seconds or twelve seconds. We have no developed sense for that. The memory is then weak. Andthat's very good, very interesting. Because then we begin to perceive formal subdivisions, longer durations.


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What's inside we consider as being the texture of a longer formal duration. So we have new music, switchingsometimes in transitions from one realm of perception to another one, and that really is something new.

SECONDS: What does it mean: time is in things, and things are not in time?

STOCKHAUSEN: Viktor von Weizscker is a very important biologist who has mentioned that in a book called Gestalt Und Zeit. It means that in modern times we have become aware that on each planet in theuniverse there is a different time. And that we have a local, universal time, we have a solar time and then -now I generalize - that human beings have their own time compared with bees, or with one-day flies, or withan oak tree. All beings have their own timing and their own time. Therefore, time manifests in beings, inwhat exists. And in music this has become tremendously important. In traditional music, time is perceived inthe music of instruments, of vocal sounds. Their natural limits function as if you have the calendar, days,hours, minutes and seconds. We usually think there is time existing. You look at the clock or at the sun or atthe moon, and you see that things move according to cycles that are given by other beings.

Yet since the beginning of Electronic Music I have discovered a lot of sounds for which I made a scheme forrhythms, and then I had to change my schemes and metronomic tempi and my chronometric timing, becausethe sounds demanded their own time. In particular, when you use sounds which have a certain development,

inside a body, as we say, and a head and a tail, you destroy the sound when you cut it too early or if yousuperimpose another duration - you see what I mean?

SECONDS: I think so. It sounds like you're talking about the envelope.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes, also. So certain sounds have their own time. One has to listen to them in order to putthem in the right place in a composition. And increasingly, in particular with percussion instruments, thereare a lot of new sounds which have, as you say, their own envelope, and their own development inside of thenote, and then one has to listen more carefully, depending also on the intensity of the attack which you use, togive certain sounds their own time. So to generalize now, uniform time is only an abstract thing that can existfor traffic, for trains and airplanes and God knows what else. But in music it's no longer important. The timehas become completely relative depending on the material that you use, and on the overall time concept oneuses for a given composition.

SECONDS: When realizing Kontakte in '58, you spliced it all by hand - and you worked on the last sectionfor three months?

STOCKHAUSEN: Oh yes, at least. Because I had to do it twice.

SECONDS: You played it back and realized it was too fast.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. Terrible. I remember. It's rather complicated. There are hundreds of splices.

SECONDS: Again we're talking about time, the tempo. I guess you cut the pieces too short?

STOCKHAUSEN: Right. In the studio at that time - but it's still the case now - one cannot do more than acertain number of splices during a week or so, and if one has a construction planned, and if it is based onrelationships between the individual durations - and in my music that has always been the case - then you goon and trust that it will sound organic. But then when you splice all the parts together in the end, all thedifferent sections, then you hear for the first time how it sounds in a run, in continuity. And every now andthen you have a terrible shock. You see, every time I rehearse, after all these years, with an ensemble or withcertain instruments, I have to change the timing considerably in certain places. Often I'm too fast.


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SECONDS: If you had had digital technology in the case of Kontakte, would that have solved the problem?

STOCKHAUSEN: No. I would never have composed Kontakte, I would have composed what I composenow. Kontakte would never exist. Kontakte can only be what it is, depending on the tools which I have hadforty years ago. I mean, all the musicians whom I meet who are now working on Electronic Music, they envyme because Kontakte sounds so fresh and original. And they say, "My God, we cannot make these soundsany more." I said, "I can very well understand that, because it depends on the tools."

SECONDS: Did you revise your thinking of musical time while flying over the U.S. in 1967?

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes, I did. I know what you are referring to. It's Carr. Naturally. Because I made my firstvisit to the United States in 1958, and I lectured for six weeks. I was invited to thirty-two universities to givelectures on Electronic Music. And I did, with my tapes and drawings. And I had to fly almost every day fromone city to another city. So as a matter of fact, on certain days I spent more hours on the plane than meetingpeople, when you exclude the time of sleeping. For the first time in my life I experienced time in a totallynew way. It was different from my dreams; it was different from everything I had experienced in slowmotion. It was much slower than any slow motion I had experienced before. Sometimes only for two or threehours - a white bed and a blue sky, and nothing else. And then this motor. There were still propeller-driven

planes. And I put my left ear - I like to have seats at the left, because my left ear is better than my right ear - Iput my left ear against the wall of the airplane. And then I could hear all the overtone spectrums, justhumming up and down the spectrum. Fantastically interesting. I mean, I had never heard that before. So Imade sketches during all these flights, during six weeks, for the next work I was commissioned to write -Carr, for four orchestras and four choirs. And when you hear this music nowadays, you become aware thatthere is a timing from beginning to end which no longer has anything to do with what I wrote before, or whatanybody else wrote before, because it is the result of this slow-motion experience.

SECONDS: When you switched from point form to group form and then to moment form, how did thattransition occur?

STOCKHAUSEN: Just applying the same principle that I applied to individual notes to groups of noteswhich had the same characteristics. Let's say if you have three notes that are different in three parameters, butthey have in common that they are all fortissimo, then you build a group. So I wanted to have a betterrelationship to organic forms which I studied in books on biology and statistics. At the same time I studied atthe University of Bonn with Meyer-Eppler, who was professor of information theory and communicationscience. He did the same, so I probably learned a lot from him, too. We made text analyses in the seminar,and we had, for example, to take a text from a newspaper and then take scissors, and everyone had to cut thetext into words with one syllable, words with two syllables, words with three syllables, and then finally intotwo words, three words, five words, eight words, et cetera. Then we shuffled these syllables, or groups of syllables and words, like in a chance operation, and we found out that the redundance of text depended on thegrouping. I mean if we had only individual syllables, there was an extremely high degree of nonsense. Andthe more the syllables and words were grouped in groups, the more they made sense. And I worked from thatmoment on, from the end of '53, with degrees of predictability and redundancy. That was the naturaltransition from points to group forms. And so statistics led me immediately to mass structures. We studied atthe same time mass structures in statistics - basic principles of information theory concerning the relationshipbetween points and groups and masses. I applied to masses the same principles that I applied to groups andindividual notes. And so a whole scale was developed - degrees of predictability, of aleatoric behavior and allthat. It was in the air at that time, by the way.

SECONDS: Were you in touch with Xenakis at the time?


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STOCKHAUSEN: No. He was not on the scene yet. I have never been in touch with him, by the way. I knowthat later on I heard and read that he used the word "stochastic" because that also has similar principles of aleatoric behavior in mass structuring. He must have heard of it during his education as an architect.

SECONDS: In the program notes to Momente you say you rejected dualistic thinking in favor of polyvalentthinking.

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, that started very slowly during the late Fifties. It is basically the result of what wecall even today "serial thinking." That means that if you have any kind of opposition - black and white forexample - at the moment you begin to think in degrees of grays, then you already think like a serialcomposer, which means there must be equidistant differences between the different degrees of gray. And thenyou make a scale, and you interpolate, permutate the steps of the scale, and you have serial composition. Sodualistic thinking, like sound and pause, or like noise and sound, high and low, or music and not-music, etcetera, is a traditional kind of thinking. But since the Fifties relativity has come into our way of thinking onall levels. And now I can transform a mouse into a glass - you see what I mean?

SECONDS: So you could set up a series between blue and yellow and you could theoretically say that yellowis blue.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. It is the extreme kind of blue if there are mediating degrees between the two,naturally.

SECONDS: So if you set up a series between the future and the past ...

STOCKHAUSEN: These are illusions. Future and past are illusions of our human brain. I don't want toremember everything that has happened to me in earlier lives - I couldn't move anymore. It's a goodlimitation for this life, you see? Nevertheless, that is an illusion. Because I am absolutely sure that themoment I give away this brain that is talking to you at this moment I will have my full memory.

SECONDS: When you were at the University Of California in '66 and '67, what were your impressions of theHippies?

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, I participated in it! I went to The Fillmore West many times, naturally. And I metGinsberg. I was very excited at that time. I must say also that the Pop Music that came up during that timewas extraordinarily different from the Pop Music I had heard before. I heard this new music, and the wholespirit I experienced on Ashbury Street was well, literally freedom. Freedom to such an extent that manykilled themselves and drugged themselves to death with this new freedom. But it was an enormous explosion.It was a wonderful liberation with all the dangers. I had a lot of students who flipped out, really.

SECONDS: Could you talk about what you call "formula"?

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, formula is an extension of the series, which means it is not only a series with thefour basic parameters of notes that you use for creating a whole musical composition, but it also has othercharacteristics like a small improvisation on the previous figure, as part of the formula, or a scale from onepresent note to the next. And the scale can be very different, so I use different types of scales. Or to have adouble or triple or quadruple echo of two notes or three notes which have occurred before. Or to have aso-called modulation, which means you have a note but the note is followed by the same note with differentkinds of modulation - amplitude or frequency modulation, rhythmic modulation of all kinds, et cetera. So in aformula, there are, if it's a simple formula, different aspects of Gestalt composition which traditionally did notoccur in a theme. Johann Sebastian Bach used a series when he made a fugue. But he had no idea about


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formula composition in the sense that a formula has many more organic aspects of shapes, of musical figures,groups, et cetera. In 1952 I composed the first formula of that type - for the work entitled Formula fororchestra. Later I was ashamed of this work. I thought it was too traditional because shapes occurred andfigures occurred that I had excluded in my previous work. But in 1970 I tried to integrate into a series all thedifferent aspects that I needed to add when I was composing with a series previously. This has developedthrough a lot of works until '77, and in '77 I made a triple formula, which means three formulas superimposedso that all the harmonic relationships between the three formulas vertically were growing or decaying within

the triple formula as organic procedures. Now this triple formula is the formula I've used since almost twentyyears now - this year will be the twentieth year of making one big work. And I still could go on for anunlimited time inventing new organisms with this super-formula.

SECONDS: You often refer to your work as an organism.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes, I think so. It should be like my body. With a heart and a brain and limbs. I use theword "limbs" very often for the subdivisions of a formula. Like the limbs of a body.

SECONDS: Does the word "organism" imply consciousness?

STOCKHAUSEN: Oh yes. It must be spiritual. [laughs] As a matter of fact, there are a lot of organismswhich seem to be very simple compared to a human being, but I'm sure there are organisms that are farbeyond the complexity and - how can I say this - the transcendent quality of a human organism. Also, thewhole planet is an organism. And the solar system is another entity, et cetera. Yes. But the difference between"organic" and "un-organic" is naturally artificial. You know that from normal matter, distinctions of matter,states of matter. Nevertheless, "organic" must be somehow related to us as human beings. So the more it isrelated to the human being, the more we understand "organic" as being harmonious. It can be disordered, butin the best sense it should correspond to the organism of the human being - certainly!


Karlheinz Stockhausen by David Paul

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