introduce me to KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

He was one of the first dudes to mix electronic stuff with instruments, and plays the timbres of both off each other in exciting ways. Kraftwerk and Zappa loved him.

http://homepage.mac.com/bernardp/Stockhausen/
Discographical roundup, lots of nice information on the Licht opera cycle.

My favorite Karlheinz pieces:

Hymnen (musique concrete mash of national anthems, big sprawling 2LP piece, comes in tape-only and tape with full orchestra versions)

Stimmung (marvelous choral piece with some really imaginative voicings, very intimate)

Klavierstuck (piano pieces, very pointillistic plink-plunk-plink kind of stuff)

Mantra (two pianos with ring modulator, I forget which version on CD is the wackier one; a friend of mine insists that one is very 'lite' - I have the Wergo one which I think might be the harsher/superior recording)

Kontakte (two flavors: tape-only, and tape with piano (?) and percussion - the latter is the common CD as it's on Forced Exposure with William Winant)

Licht, cycle of seven operas (still haven't heard the whole thing but it's very bizarre in a Euro-SF, 'Metal Hurlant' kind of way, I like what I've heard so far)

The other pieces recommended above are great too.

The Klavierstucke have really grown on me and now I listen to them a lot.

I got introduced to Stockhausen at the SONAR festival where he was doing a live quad mix of "Hymnen". I talked to him about where he recorded his version of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" for the piece; he was quite friendly and approachable. So just be brave and go talk to him after one of his concerts.

Who gives a fuck?

Brakhage's recommendations are all good ones. But I'd also recommend:

Gesang der Junglinge - if you don't like this one then I'd give it up

Telemusik - his most accessible electronic piece, to modern ears

Refrain - another very accessible piece, piano/ celeste/ percussion

Mikrophonie I - this is recommended if your into purer "noise"

Aus den Sieben Tagen - various pieces to chose from (14 in all), so-called "intuitive" music if you're into improv and the like

Kurzwellen - a bit like the above but with added shortwave

... and, ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm, there's lots more: orchestral stuff (Gruppen/ Carre/ Punkte etc); kind of chamber stuff (Stop/ Ylem etc); choral works (Atmen gibt das leben) and lots of other unclassifiable stuff (Mixtur/ Mikrophonie II/ all of the Momentes); and percussion too (Zyklus!)

Pause for breath

Wow, well done Drew... ya bastard

Wow, well done Drew... ya lucky bastard!

The reason he's gotten the 'influential' tag in the last couple of decades is that he was an electronic music pioneer - the stuff collected on the Elektronische Musik LP is some of the most clever early musique concrete. Once Aphex started tossing his name around, there was a flurry of interest in Stockhausen, Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Schaeffer, Tod Dockstader, Bernard Parmegiani, Francois Bayle, Delia Derbyshire, all those people.

Stockhausen's modern composition-non-electronic stuff (even though a lot of his pieces contain electronic modifications/tapes) doesn't get touted as much as say Kontakte, because electronic music has caught on as popular music. Once Bjork interviewed him he got the 'cool' stamp.

In the 'real', non-music freak world, Stockhausen is kind of a byword for 'difficult', 'my five-year-old can do that' music. In the world of modern composers, he's very well respected, but people have trouble with him because he's so titanic (as well as megalomanical). Lately he got a lot of press for supposedly saying (like Damien Hirst did) that the WTC attack was a 'work of art' or some such. Cornelius Cardew wrote a famous piece called 'Stockhausen Serves Imperialism' back in the sixties.

The presentation of his pieces was always a big thing: either he would use four orchestras, or construct a massive speaker system so that the audience was suspended in a globe of speakers, or he would perform in a cave, or he'd put the members of a string quartet in four separate helicopters and record them while flying around (better in theory than in execution), or he would stage an opera and put one of the performers in an entirely different location, their part to be piped in via video.

Like Xenakis, he had some traumatic war experiences, and you can see that, like Xenakis, there's a kind of aggression that runs through his music. Personally I admire the guy very much, as he's just kept plugging away for his entire life. I think he's 80 now and he looks 60, so he'll no doubt keep going for quite a while.

And totally loathed, despised and excoriated by many others

For myself, though, the performer-as-asshole thing is a slippery slope; I love, love, love Miles Davis, but I know the guy was a prick. Doesn't stop me from worshipping him at all as the music is genius. So I don't really think of musicians in this are-they-decent-human-beings way, but I know that has a lot to do with Stockhausen's mystique, so I thought I'd mention it in this context. I'm not sure how helpful it is to ponder how annoying certain musicians are to talk to or have a beer with.

my favorites:
Kontakte, Gesang der Jungliche, Mixtur, Microphonie I, Telemusik, Stimmung (I don't think I'd be able to take this if I understood German though), Mantra

(Mantra - the precise Wergo CD > the pretty New Albion CD)

also lots of these:
Gruppen & Carre, Hymnen, Kurzwellen, Prozession, Aus den Sieben Tagen, Klavierstück (either the Alois Kontarsky or the David Tudor), Zyklus (Max Neuhaus version)

later works are trainwrecks, but in a kind of fascinating way. a return to gloopy 'pretty' melodies and absurd narrative conceits. orators saying things like "I Am... The Woman! I Shall... Consume You!" Okay, Stocky.

Having said all that I prefer 'Kontakte' in its purely electronic form, rather than the wergo disc where perc and piano are added - i think it gets in the way of the electronics and the gaps signalling the 'moment' change i find it kinda vital to the piece. 'Kontakte' (chronologically et al) ws, by far and away, the best of his electronic pieces from the 50s - I'm bored of 'gesang...' but his first 'etude' has that same spirit of punkoid destruction that drives 'prozession'.

(look on UBU web and you'll find an mp3 of max neuhaus perf 'zyklus' -not that great a piece but if you wanted to listen to something right now, you can)

his CDs, they are expensive, I have way too many of them. If I ever buy another, it'll be that Aus den Sieben Tagen 7 CD set (I have the single disc Harmonia Mundi, it's great)

I've got "Kommunion/Intensitat", in fact it's the only Stockhausen on vinyl I've managed to buy in five years in London. On "Intensitat" (I think), Stockhausen hammers different lengths of nails into a plank of wood for 20 minutes - doesn't sound all that great to be frank!

there's a little more going on than you're making out, but... yeah. the discipline of those pieces are more important than the sounds being used, those pieces aren't really about entertainment, I'm more interested in that box as a participating improvising musician than as a listener

“INTENSITÄT”

Play a single sound
with such dedication
until you feel the warmth
that radiates from you

Play on and sustain it
as long as you can

oops a mistake there I ws talking abt globokar performing stockhausen's 'solo' where he cuts a segment from 'Hymnen' and plays thrombone on top of it. that rec has performances of a berio sequanza and globokar's own compositons for thrombone/tape.

still 'prozession' is a big fave of mine though its prob considered to be a minor piece.

There was an LP copy of Hymnen (no orchestra) at the store I work at that went for $50. To some british dood.

xpost to tom west: # of performers is unfixed

I will admit that I wasn't terribly into a lot of Stockhausen's music at first -- half the fun with his pieces are reading his program notes, the conceits behind the pieces are just as interesting as the music (in some cases, more).

Each of his pieces claims to be a breakthrough pioneering first, and he talks engagingly about why even in the cases when he's dead wrong (he most certainly was not always first), but his thinking was lucid -- the text that accompanied his pieces were what often forced the lightbulb moment for an audience that had been hearing electronic music but not 'getting it'

I recommend Robin Maconie's 'Stockhausen on Music' for a great starter book, epiphany-per-page, and Karl Heinrich Wörner's 'Stockhausen Life and Music' has a great piece-by-piece breakdown, and a record guide.

Maconie has a new Stockhausen book out that looks good, I'm waiting for the paperback.

Don't have it, dammit!

Or else assiduously scoured the second hand record and book shops of Glasgow throughout the 80s and 90s, before the Aphex Twin starting mentioning him in interviews...

hm. well. just hearing Hymnen for the first time. i'm only into region II, but... damn.

Transitional Karl

http://www.stockhausen-verlag.com/CD_Translations/Text-CD_22_I_become_the_tones.pdf

The early stuff pre-Kreuzspiel is really weird — sounds like Bartók or Hindemith.

... not so surprising

maybe, but what is so weird is how the stylistic shift seemed to happen so quickly — a matter of a year between Chöre für Doris and Formel.

maybe it's not so weird as remarkable

Think it was much the same for most of those guys, tho I'm not sure what Nono, for instance, was doing before serialism

Gruppen on tonight

Be there or be square. Saw "Kontakte" last night and an old lady behind me said, "That piece was a bit long", and this guy sitting a couple of seats along from me swivelled round and said, "Yes I agree, it was a bit long", and she replied, "Yes, what do you think made it long? and I really wanted to say, "The length", but stopped myself because I thought it might seem a bit presumptuous and rude... but, thinking about it, it is ca. 35 minutes and that's longer than most people are used to in Western music...

not in art music shortly to god?

surely to god, even

I suppose not but even then they used to have to fit that stuff onto 20-25 mins of a side of vinyl album

shortly to god?

LOL, sounds like a book you'd see the religious/new age section of a bookstore

I suppose they aren't used to classical music?

Such a joyride of a piece, such a clever yet simple idea of a three-way game of ping-pong. The separation and then coming together of activity, tempos, sheer energies on display was breathtaking, although I think the textures weren't as strikng, because of that separation. Its a risk but Stockhausen pulls it off.

Nono's Canti was a good counterpart to that. Mini-groups, with the high note distributed among each of the 13 instruments. When these come together in 3/4 groups toward the end its such a rush. Its a real shame that Nono isn't as talked about as Stockhausen or Boulez or Cage.

I hope I get to hear Gruppen live someday.

youtube finally gave me a chance to hear Sternklang. It's Stimmung + filters! It's great! It was always one of those 'later' pieces I was slightly afraid of, but I would have absolutely sprung for a Verlag copy of that during that window when Amoeba had them in stock.

This is my 2nd Gruppen but the first I've actually got the full effect, as it were. Bit of electric guitar in it of course!

Nono's Canti was a good counterpart

Yeah, this was great as was the other Nono piece. Also saw a couple of Xenakis percussion pieces (Okho + Psappha) (for free!), which were almost upstaged by a couple of toddlers who were in danger of joining the performers at several points.

Also good to see Helmut Lachenmann wandering round at a few concerts - not exactly getting mobbed by screaming fans but having his hand shaken vigorously by several young and not so young fans

Bit of electric guitar in it of course!

:)

This was actually a good bit of correction to his later reputation as a megalomaniac. The instruments here were sparingly used, not every passage was going for the shock and awe, you can really see his specific interest in the concert space, and how Kontakte was just as dramatic an use of that idea of surround space (at least on record, I didn't go to Saturday's but it should be easier to catch a perf of that).

I have only 2 memories of doing music o'level back in 1981: one of them was being played Kontakte by my music teacher. The other was her playing us the pistols followed by some romantic gloop and giving us aggression tests after each (the music was supposed to have the opposite effect to its intent, i.e. hearing rotten's snarl makes you feel LESS aggressive. The theory didn't work on us.) I wonder what the impact of Stockhausen would have been if she'd tried the test then.

'stimmung' really underrecommended as an introduction

it would be a good record to give to kindergarten teachers

Huh, I would think Stimmung would be THE go-to recommendation for anyone hesitant about Stockhausen.

Anyone else go to Stimmung/Cosmic Pulses at the Barbican on Monday? The singers were all seated around a table with a huge glowing orb at the centre of it, Cosmic Pulses was like being in a washing machine with lasers flying all around you. I can't imagine it working at all without centrifugal sound but in that context, wow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eDgIaJtCk4

That's

Stockhausen: "Montag aus Licht" ("Monday of Light") documentary (1988) (English)

A half-hour documentary about the music and staging of Montag