Stockhausen ist tot!
by Jura Watchmaker, 8 December 2007
I know it’s customary to be charitable toward the recently deceased, but my reaction to the passing of Karlheinz Stockhausen is that another pompous, humourless arse has bitten the dust. I won’t miss him one little bit.
Richard Sanderson has posted on his blog an interesting obituary of Stockhausen, in which he refers to the English composer Cornelius Cardew’s book “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”. Cardew was a pupil of Stockhausen, and produced a volume of similarly unlistenable noise. Stockhausen was certainly bourgeois, but given that Cardew served totalitarianism, the critique of his mentor carries little weight.
I’ve had the misfortune to hear quite a bit of Stockhausen’s oeuvre over the years. Take Stimmung, for example. This overlong and extremely tedious piece for voices was experimental music for the cultural hell that was 1970s middle-class suburbia. It was the kind of music played by pseudo-intellectuals in box houses with wall-to-wall nylon carpets and all the latest kitchen gadgetry.
An absolutely fucking awful racket.
Miaow!
Saturday 8 December 2007 at 18:34
Great obituary - will you be arranging a trip to Germany to dance on his grave?
Another great German obit for you:
http://www.jamesbarlow.co.uk/speaking-ill-dead-count-gottfried-von-bismarck
Saturday 8 December 2007 at 18:59
James, I really couldn’t be arsed.
Saturday 8 December 2007 at 20:03
The fat man has also commented on Stockhausen’s death, quoting the conductor Thomas Beecham:
Saturday 8 December 2007 at 22:15
I bought some Kim Kashkashian because of my love of the mournful sound the douduk, and the advertized collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek.
Can’t be any worse.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 1:38
John Cage ist tot also.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 1:47
Big silence over that one, Hak.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 2:44
I know a woman who once played viola in an “orchestra”, the ‘Portsmouth Symphonia’, which was inspired by the political outlook of Cornelious Cardew: she says that it was hilarious: tghe orchestra was divided about 1/4 competent players who happened to agree with Cardew’s crazy (Maoist) political views; about 1/4 incompetent players who believed; about 1/4 incompetents who didn’t realise they were incompetent; and…1/4 people who were simply having a laugh…
eventually the outfit broke up (”musical differences”, inevitably), and a group of them (the non-ideological element) went on to form something like the “Outer Hebrides Orchestra”, that did, in fact tour the Outer Hebrides… and then broke up
Cardew, of course, died, the victim of a hit-and-run motor accident in December 1981. Conspiracy-theorists, naturally, have, ever since, put it down to state action; but, to be honest: why would the capitalist state need to worry about an ineffectual eccentric like Cardew?
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 2:57
I’ve never listened to any of wahthisface’s stuff before but I a can’t help thinking Beethoven is the Kant and/or Hegel of music — and that there is no Marx in music — none at all. Stockhausen and his like only marks the horizon of their own world, not of mine.
PS. Standardisation in music is its death (girl bands, boy bands, commodification etc). So all power to the experimenters.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 12:13
Bollocks my old son. Stockhausen wrote some of the most beautiful music of the last century.
Mind you, I wouldn’t recommend listing to any of it at home because it depends crucially on the sense of space and positioning you can only get in a live performance. No sound system can do that, whatever the equipment manufacturers and high fi buffs tell you to the contrary.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that Stockhausen wasn’t bourgeois, or marxist, or anything of that sort; he was his very own distinctive kind of religous nutter. Never mind; he seems to have been personally likeable despite it, which is more than can be said for some other great composers (Beethoven, Wagner, Schonberg).
I also like John Cage, and I think he was a nice guy, but I can’t stand Cornellius Cardew’s music and I think he was a pillock.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 18:33
I like music you can hum along to.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 19:05
At the peak of the soul-crushing, late 70s early 80s mania for medley singles, combining multiple thematically linked covers of hits with a lumpen backbeat, the RPO did one called “Hooked on Classics”, that spliced together the hummable bits of all the classical pieces ever used in a TV ad. I’m not a snob about that kind of thing, but it was rubbish.
Later, the Portsmouth Symphonia brought out their own, out-of-tune version. This was, in contrast, pant-wettingly funny, as well as being possibly the greatest piece of musical criticism ever created.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 21:20
I’ve never listened to any of wahthisface’s stuff before but I a can’t help thinking Beethoven is the Kant and/or Hegel of music — and that there is no Marx in music — none at all. Stockhausen and his like only marks the horizon of their own world, not of mine.
Interesting idea, but I wonder if certain American minimalists such as LaMonte Young, Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine, Pauline Oliveros, and a handful of others are to Beethoven as Marx is to Kant and Hegel. I think it’s especially clear with Conrad. I saw him lecture a little over a year ago (I wrote about it here, but since that’s basically a transcription of my notes, don’t ask me to explain what, for example, a syntonic comma is, because I don’t know) and he gave a fascinating talk that, in part, was about how Western music and musical notation largely conceals harmonic relationships. He talked a bit about creating entirely new scales–first having described the essential components of a scale–and “translating” Beethoven into them. Whether this is a work in progress or just an idea wasn’t made clear. A lot of Conrad’s work is in just intonation (a tuning system based on ratios between frequencies instead of the usual tempered scale) and the composers I mention above have all worked extensively with it. They have, in effect, created an alternative musical system and this makes them markedly different from the European avant-garde.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 21:33
there is no Marx in music, none at all
Great point. But maybe there are some proto-Marxes. What about Bela Bartok, who rejected much of the bourgeois and clerical elements of 19th century music, and tramped around most of East Europe looking for and collecting the music of the people. Besides which he was a great innovator, and was robustly anti-Fascist. Prokofiev could be another, and though he became a bit too Stalinist for my liking he never fell for the vulgar charlatanism of Stockhausen and his decadent shite.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 21:46
Whether this is a work in progress or just an idea wasn’t made clear. A lot of Conrad’s work is in just intonation (a tuning system based on ratios between frequencies instead of the usual tempered scale)
I’m not sure this is anything new - the equal tempered scale only became popular in the 19th century. Before that European musicians played around with different temperaments based on what they thought would fit their music best. And ‘just’ intonation grounded on harmonic ratios goes back to Pythagoras and continued to be popular in medieval times.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 22:04
Nah, it isn’t new. Baroque music in particular had a lot of weird instruments and temperaments. Indian music was/is a huge influence on the American minimalists also.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 22:13
Conrad’s work I find very interesting, but he has not created an alternative tuning system. As Mustafa says, there is nothing new in just intonation.
What is new, relatively speaking, is equal temperament. This is a hack to get fixed pitch instruments such as keyboards playable in any key. Or rather, be able to modulate between key signatures without it changing the mood of the sound.
One could say that just intonation is the most natural tuning, as just intervals sound in tune to human ears. When one tunes a guitar, say, the subconscious tendency of the player is to find chords that sound ‘right’. That is, no beating (vibrato-like sound) when two or more notes are sounded simultaneously.
A capella singers gravitate toward just intonation, and the acoustics of brass instruments are such that just intonation is the norm.
Pure just intonation with different types of acoustic instruments in ensemble is very difficult to achieve, so in practice we use tempered scales. Equal temperament is only one of those available, and to my ears it sounds the worst. The piano has a lot to answer for!
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 22:19
On the other hand, equal temperament has allowed for everything from Beethoven to Napalm Death so it isn’t all bad.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 22:26
I am not sure if you can make a strict analogy between political philosophy and music. However, one thing that is always true is that artistic conservatism is the province of totalitarianism (and the Daily Mail). So Will is spot on to instinctively side with the experimenters. The best defence of his position is in Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
However, I just don’t think that Stockhausen was any good. Early radical modernists like Charles Ives are braver and better. And, despite his Catholicism, the first time I heard Messiaen, I was carried away. It was his Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a Nazi prison camp. It struck me as a celebration of life amidst horror, a marvellous affirmation of humanity against totalitarianism. Still gets to me every time I listen.
Part of the modernist movement was intensely reactionary, in that it saw art as being something to be for an elite, deliberately inaccessible and therefore a badge of social superiority. Experimental artists wished to free art from the prison of form and structure but produce something that could reach anyone who was prepared to look, read and listen without preconception. I think the distinction between elitism and universalism is the key, and it is not one of style, but of talent.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 22:31
On the other hand, equal temperament has allowed for everything from Beethoven to Napalm Death so it isn’t all bad.
Beethoven and Napalm death could have existed without equal temperament.
JS Bach’s Well-tempered clavier was an experiment in using tempered tunings, but contrary to what many believe, it wasn’t all about equal temperament. There are a number of tempered tunings available that work with ensembles of fixed pitch instruments. Take Kirnberger and Werckmeister, for example. These are close enough to equal temperament for easy modulation between a reasonable number of keys, but the thirds sound much more in tune than in equal temperament. Thirds in equal temperament sound truly awful.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 23:27
“I am not sure if you can make a strict analogy between political philosophy and music.”
It’s fun to try tho but and that!
This thread has turned into pseud’s corner! Stop it now and stop it quick.
I like Sibelius who was born yesterday as it happens.
Monday 10 December 2007 at 0:38
I think the distinction between elitism and universalism is the key, and it is not one of style, but of talent.
You can think that if you like.
Monday 10 December 2007 at 3:18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIPVc2Jvd0w
Karl Heinz Hitchens?
Monday 10 December 2007 at 3:56
I very much agree with Gadgie about the distinction between elitism and universalism; something very similar happened in jazz in about 1945; I also agree about Messiaen, despite his reactionary Catholicism: the ‘Tarantula’ is a fantastic piece, and there’s a moment when you just want to shout: “THE THING!”
Monday 10 December 2007 at 4:41
I feel an anecdote coming on, possibly pseudish…
There is something about Messiaen, although I find some of his music a little overpowering. That said, his art came from the heart, and extended well beyond the narrow confines of reactionary Roman Catholicism. Unlike many 20th century composers, there was an openness and yearning in Messiaen’s music with which many can identify, whether they be Christian or heathen.
I had the honour of briefly knowing one of Messiaen’s friends and contemporaries, the Swiss composer Claude Prior. I met this wonderful old man when he accompanied his two daughters, Pierrette and Aude, on a walking tour of the Farø Islands. The family stopped in Denmark en route, and I hosted the three of them in my tiny flat in Frederiksberg. I wished I could have travelled with them into the north Atlantic.
I was struck by the humility and creativity of Claude Prior, and it was partly through my brief acquaintance with him that I finally came to understand and appreciate the music of Olivier Messiaen. Our last meeting was at the family home in Dry, near Orléans, not long before his death in October 2002.
Monday 10 December 2007 at 20:26
Excuse me for butting in. I’m a newb here, but have been on nodding terms with Mr Watchmaker for a couple of years. When I read the ‘Stockhausen ist tot’ post in The Other Place, a red mist descended.
He suggested I repost that comment here, which I’m now doing.
ahem.
Jura knows that this is purely an artistic or “fucking awful racket” disagreement. Nothing personal.
It’s my firm belief that what I’m about to say is obvious, but in an age where ‘politicans’ exhort ‘celebrities’ to be ‘role models’ the obvious sometimes needs to be made explicit. Stockhausen the composer and Stockhausen the man are two different entities. From the little I know of the man (having read some of his own articles and interviews), I think he was a deeply unpleasant and tiresome human being. His music, on the other hand (at least before he became completely wrapped up in his own grandiosity - a failing of many composers who become famous during their lifetimes), was startling, original, and necessary. I see no contradiction.
Monday 10 December 2007 at 20:34
Oi, it’s “Dr Watchmaker”!
I still maintain that Stockhausen was both an unpleasant individual and an awful composer. Startling and original, yes, but listenable? As as for “necessary”, no art can be said to be necessary. It just is, or isn’t.
Monday 10 December 2007 at 20:43
PS. I like Messiaen, too. In small doses. I’m not sure who the Watchmaker is referring to, but i have to take issue with the clause “unlike many 20th century composers, there was an openness and yearning in Messiaen’s music”.
“Unlike many 20th-century composers” my arse. The fact that they’re not yearning for saccharine certainties doesn’t mean that the yearning isn’t there. Varese Boulez, and Nono, for instance, have megatons of yearning.
The godawful minimalists (”the theory of economics applied to music” as Frank Zappa once put it) like yearning so much they repeat it with bugger-all variation for 30-90 minutes at a time.
Stockhausen, actually, I rather always suspected of not having a human feeling in his body, so perhaps here at least I can agree.
Monday 10 December 2007 at 20:43
Sorry Doctor. :$
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 0:58
Anti-pseud link:
http://www.myspace.com/portsmouthsinfonia
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 11:24
Wayhaay! I like this. Drink Soaked Trotskyist Popinjays and their fellow travellers are properly into music. I still think Stockhausen was wonderful but I thought I ought to lighten this up by telling you what is on my MP3 player.
The point being that I think you are showing yourselves to be kindred spirits here as well as in some of the politics. Hurray for blog discussions.
John Adams - Chairman Dances
Jim Hendrix - Are You Experienced
Bela Bartok - 1st String Quartet
Some Captain Beefheart
Harrison Birtwhistle - Refrains and Choruses
Some Chuck Berry
Some Zappa
A Correli Concerto Grosso
Bach - The Art of Fugue
Jazz Jamaica - Double Barrel
Frederic Rzewiski
Handel - Italian Duets
Horses Brawl
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Lowell Percussion Ensemble
SISU - Nanawatai
Some Smith Quartet
Biber sonatas
A Strauss Horn Concerto
Stravinsky Piano Roll
Beethoven’s 1st Sypmphony
Thomas Hampson doing Walt Whitman settings
Varese - Inferno
Cream - Wheels of Fire
Corner Shop - When I was Born …
Steve Reich - Drumming
A bit of Berio
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 11:27
Fascinating playlist. Chris. I like a bit of fucking culture meself.
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 16:03
Gee, thanks Jura.
There is a good quote from Ralph Vaughan Williams. I can’t find it but it is on the lines of: what I do (composition) is just a small wave on the top of a great ocean.
That is political sense to me - you can’t compose well, however complex or arcane the results, unless you are profoundly in touch with the sound world around you. In Vaughan William’s case that meant English ‘folk’ and church music. In Bartok’s case it was Hungarian ‘folk’, Charles Ives had marching bands and New England hymns, Stravinsky and Shostakovitch were soaked in Russian popular music and good modern composers have the sounds of the modern street inside them - for many of them that means jazz, rock-and-roll and rock, as well as all their classical training.
That also works the other way round. Techno and Drum and Bass owe a fundamental debt to Stockhausen and John Cage; both ambient and Rap are soaked in minimalism - there is no point going on. People who are elitist about music, including those who think ‘the people’ can’t understand complex music and, equally, those who imagine’the people’s music’ can’t come out of a Conservatory, have missed the point.
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 16:17
Go to pretty much any major traditional music pub session, and there you’ll find a mix of virtuoso musicians, many of whom are conservatory educated. These young people are in touch with the sound world around them.
My gripe is with music that exists on an abstract plane, so far removed from the natural environment that only the elite could possibly ‘understand’ it.
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 16:24
Having been out of the UK for so long, I’m a little bemused by this talk of pseuds. A pseud, as I see it, is someone who wants to be intellectual but can’t - it’s not a catch-all term for any and every intellectual endeavour that isn’t strictly related to the hard sciences.
I still remember with great pride the day some monkey of a PE teacher called me a “fucking intellectual”. He was right, but he thought it was an insult. Ignorance must be bliss.
Sorry, absolutely nothing to do with the topic.
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 16:27
Dr. Watchmaker, I believe you’re making a mistake in trying to understand it. I don’t understand it, and I don’t wish to understand it. I either like the racket or I don’t. I also like to think I can tell a good racket from a bad racket.
It’s a bit like literature. Do you need a degree in Eng Lit to enjoy it? I’d say that on the whole a degree in Eng Lit would spoil any possible enjoyment in literature for me.
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 16:38
I don’t try to ‘understand’ music, or any other art, on a purely intellectual level. I feel it, and react to it emotionally. And if I can’t then there is something wrong with either me or the art.
Wednesday 12 December 2007 at 6:13
That’s interesting. If asked, I would say that I generally approach music on an intellectual level. Thinking about that now, though, it’s clearly not true - I’m reacting on a vey emotional level to this discussion, for example.
Nevertheless I listen to music more as sound - it’s the sound that fascinates or bores, not the structure, and not the emotional content. This is where the minimalists lost the plot.
My all-time favourite comment about music goes as follows: “Sound is just a fantastic commodity; you can do anything you want with sound. Once you know how to use various processes, or processors, you can make it do what you want. Or you can let it speak for itself.”
Composers who restrict themselves to forms and sounds dating back centuries are missing the essence of that quotation. Stockhausen didn’t, that’s why I like some of his music. The serialists and post-serialists found what they thought was a new way of composing. They hadn’t, though, because they weren’t letting the sound speak for itself. So they abandoned that (for the most part) and let the form arise from the material rather being imposed on it.
That’s what I like.
Saturday 15 December 2007 at 14:55
I think that music deserves to be discussed with respect, as do the people who make it. Even if they are unpleasant or seem to us to be charlatans or subscribe to half-baked mystical or religious ideas or claim to come from outer space (and Stockhausen wasn’t the only one) or seem to be in it for the money or the acclaim, there is something that music does which is very hard to deal with in words.
In the context of this view, despite some ambivalence about Stockhausen, I feel it necessary to pay tribute to his achievements, and therefore to take issue with the sneering with which this thread started, some of which some contributors have supported. Talk of ‘unlistenable noise’ is the sort of trite stuff my 82-year old father might come out with, as a contribution to a pointless and frustrating discussion. As to calling Stimmung “the kind of music played by pseudo-intellectuals in box houses with wall-to-wall nylon carpets and all the latest kitchen gadgetry” in “1970s middle-class suburbia”, I wish I’d been living there!
Saturday 15 December 2007 at 15:04
By the same token we should all acknowledge and respect the musical achievements of the Spice Girls, and ridicule is for ever out of the question.
The cultural hell of which I write exists to this day, and you are most welcome to it.