Karlheinz Stockhausen R.I.P.

[clifford_thornton]

Right, and Cardew's famous book is "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism."

Even seemingly "free" composers like Kagel are known to push the sounds around quite a bit...

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Karlheinz Stockhausen Memorial

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN DEPARTED THIS WORLD ON DECEMBER 5, 2007. HE WAS THE GREATEST COMPOSER OF OUR ERA. HIS MUSIC TOUCHED US ALL IN DIFFERENT WAYS. IN THIS TIME OF GREAT LOSS, WE INVITE THE LOVERS OF HIS MUSIC TO SHARE THEIR THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES ON THIS MODERATED SITE.

Edited December 17, 2007 by 7/4

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Kuerten, December 13th 2007

Edited December 17, 2007 by 7/4

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David Liebman on...

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Inadvertently when discussing the history of classical music, I and probably others will often state as a sort of overall generalizing statement something to the effect of "from Bach to Stockhausen" meaning the beginning and the end. In the past months by coincidence, Stockhausen received a lot of media attention as a supposed listening influence on the direction Miles Davis took in the 70's during my time with him as we hear on the recent "Complete On the Corner" sessions box set release (see past Intervals on the subject). As an aside, to be honest I never directly witnessed or discussed that aspect with Miles. However, in any case the German composer had a tremendous influence on several generations of classical and jazz players. His "Gruppen" and "Licht" cycle to name two works certainly turned me around when I heard them. In a way, Stockhausen along with Cage, Boulez and several others were responsible for the unofficial announcement that the element of "color" had arrived, meaning that a texture, sound, color, whatever one might call it, could stand on its own merit as a valid musical gesture, not necessarily co-dependent with harmony, rhythm or melody per se. This is a mid 20th century innovation for sure and jazz has definitely taken that aspect to the limits as have many contemporary composers in the classical field. Stockhausen represented a different way to think about music.

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Perfect Sound Forever tributes

Edited March 1, 2008 by 7/4

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Artforum: Music of the Spheres.

Edited March 1, 2008 by 7/4

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ANABlog about Stockhausen.

Edited March 10, 2008 by 7/4

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Karlheinz Stockhausen

Helicopter String Quartet

as interpreted by the Digital Music Ensemble, University of Michigandirected by Virgil Moorefield (2008)

[7/4]

Incredible Isn’t Even Close…

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[7/4]

May 3, 2008

Composer’s Work to Play Where Words Stirred Ire

By DANIEL J. WAKIN, NYT

In his life, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen often stirred strong feelings with his avant-garde works. After 9/11, he stirred outrage by calling the attack on the World Trade Center “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” Now one of his pieces is being performed near the very scene of that event.

The new-music group Bang on a Can has programmed his “Stimmung” as the culminating piece of a 12-hour marathon ending early on the morning of June 1 at the World Financial Center Winter Garden.

Bang on a Can is one of the most prestigious and innovative new-music organizations around. Some of the leading composers on the contemporary music scene are associated with it, and a founder, David Lang, recently won a Pulitzer Prize for music.

Mr. Lang pointed out that the program also includes Steve Reich’s “Daniel Variations,” dedicated to the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by Islamic extremists. The programming choices were made only because of the music, he said, and not for political reasons. Having both works on the program was a coincidence, Mr. Lang said.

“Just by choosing the music that we love, without making this a foreground issue, we did end up choosing music that’s on both sides of this really complicated issue,” Mr. Lang said. “Maybe that’s the way it should be — the messy parts of human experience should get covered.”

A program announcement is not the kind of thing that makes big headlines, and Bang on a Can said it had not received one comment about putting Stockhausen in its lineup. The composer, who died in December at age 79, was widely excoriated for the remarks, which he made several weeks after the terror attacks. He said that he was speaking allegorically and that his words had been misunderstood.

The group’s executive director, Kenny Savelson, was taken aback when asked on Thursday about the programming choice. He acknowledged that the Stockhausen comments had come up in conversations about programming, but that “it wasn’t really critical to the decision-making.” Carnegie Hall officials also took the comments into consideration while planning a concert dedicated to Stockhausen shortly before he died. The event did not take place for unrelated reasons, Carnegie said.

Mr. Savelson seemed to wrestle with the question out loud. Bang on a Can is not political, he said. He said he felt uncomfortable “reducing someone like Stockhausen’s entire life and career to a single misguided moment.”

Plenty of other important thinkers, artists and leaders have been called “misguided and misinformed at times,” he added. (In fact, he could have started the list with the anti-Semitic Wagner and the Nazi-associated Richard Strauss.)

Why the choice of “Stimmung,” an hourlong, microtonal piece for voices? Mr. Savelson called it a beautiful, meditative work with a transcendent feel just right for dawn. And Stockhausen did recently die, Mr. Savelson said, adding, “Not to say that all is forgiven or should be forgiven.”

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The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose Helicopter String Quartet is the subject of a film just released on DVD.

Fulfilling a Dream With Strings and Rotors

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, NYT

Published: July 13, 2008

IT started with a dream he had, in which a string quartet performed with its members flying separately in four helicopters. “It was so strange, I thought that if I suggested it, people would think I was round the bend,” Karlheinz Stockhausen, the visionary avant-garde German composer who died last year at 79, says in a film just released on DVD by Medici Arts.

Yet that dream actually came to fruition. And the film, intelligently directed by Frank Scheffer, documents the rehearsals and logistical preparations for the premiere of Stockhausen’s wacky, egomaniacal Helicopter String Quartet (also the name of the film) at the Holland Festival on the outskirts of Amsterdam in 1995.

“I don’t have any philosophy, but all my life I’ve dreamt that I can fly and that I know what it means to fly,” Stockhausen says with mischievous wide-eyed solemnity.

A pivotal figure in the evolution of electronic music, Stockhausen rejected traditional forms and refused commissions for concertos, symphonies and string quartets. He disparages quartets in the film as a “prototype from the 18th century, just as the symphony and the solo concerto are the stamp of a very particular era in composition.” But his vivid helicopter dream persuaded him to accept a commission for a string quartet from the Salzburg Festival in 1991.

The work was conceived as part of “Licht” (“Light”), a cycle of seven operas. When the premiere performance of the quartet, scheduled for 1994, was canceled after protests by Austrian environmentalists, the work was programmed by the Holland Festival.

As an experienced champion of contemporary music, the Arditti String Quartet — then comprising the violinists Irvine Arditti and Graeme Jennings, the violist Garth Knox and the cellist Rohan de Saram — was ideally equipped to handle the challenges of the work. The documentary, shot from May 5 to June 26, 1995, shows the musicians good-naturedly humoring the composer’s demands during rehearsals, which included having them shout German numbers in screechy high timbres with elongated vowels while playing, to coordinate their droning crescendos.

According to the DVD booklet, Mr. Arditti, who was initially baffled by the score, suggested that Stockhausen substitute a tape of helicopter sounds for the real thing, and Stockhausen reacted “quite crossly.” A few of his cranky outbursts aside, the dialogue in the film is amiable.

Stockhausen, who had explored spatial parameters in works like “Gruppen” (where three ensembles, each with its own conductor, play in different tempos), color-coded the helicopter score and connected the notes with lines, so it resembles a fantastical rainbow heart monitor. For the premiere each musician wore a shirt matching his designated color.

The film reveals the complex logistics involved in staging this piece of musical performance art, with the musicians and sound engineers crammed into red helicopters flown by members of the Grasshoppers, a Dutch Air Force stunt team. During one scene shot on the field, Stockhausen muses on the numerical importance of the number plates on the helicopters before instructing the bewildered pilots.

Microphones were attached to the musicians and to the outsides of the helicopters, to capture the whirring sound of the rotor blades. Audio cues helped the players coordinate the performance, which Stockhausen stipulated should last 18 minutes 36 seconds. At one point their frenzied, tremulous glissandos wail and drone like frantic sirens over the rumbling din of the helicopter blades.

The music and images were transmitted by video and speakers to the audience in an auditorium. Stockhausen is shown in a ruffled white shirt with red and green suspenders, sitting at the master console like the proud pilot of a compositional spaceship, narrating the proceedings to the audience and mixing the string sounds with the helicopter noise. The critic Alex Ross described the affair in The New York Times as “a grandiose absurdist entertainment.”

When asked how the realization of the project compared with his dream, Stockhausen, looking rather despondent, said that dealing with the mundane logistics and technical apparatus rendered everything “very down to earth.” In his dream, he said, “I was freer.”

“I floated through the air,” he added. “I was a creature without a body.”

Stockhausen, who was widely criticized for remarks (taken out of context, he said) that the 9/11 attacks were “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos,” imagined that the whole world could become music. But it’s probably just as well that he didn’t try to realize all his dreams.

One, he explains in the film, involved a swarm of bees and a violinist. “The buzzing made by lots of bees is a magic sound to me,” he says.

[AllenLowe]

weird thing about Stockhausen is that I always thought he worked for the phone company -

[7/4]

Day job.

No one makes a living off that shit until they're too old to work.

Edited July 15, 2008 by 7/4

[stuartjewkes]

The BBC Proms is doing a Stockhausen day on 02 August which looks pretty good, should be able to stream it from the website after the fact.

[Alexander Hawkins]

Went to the Stockhausen day - wrote some thoughts here - I'm certainly planning to listen again - a very interesting programme of music (even if I can't claim to have 'enjoyed' it all!)

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Supersonic

Stockhausen’s “Gruppen,” at Tempelhof Airport, in Berlin.

by Alex Ross

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