TLS: David Schiff: On planet Stockhausen
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http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25342-2109775,00.html
Times Online March 29, 2006
Robin Maconie
OTHER PLANETS
The music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
579pp. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. $39.95.
0 8108 5356 6
In 1967, Karlheinz Stockhausen's face appeared on the cover of Sgt
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - between Lenny Bruce and W. C.
Fields. In September 2001 he achieved a different kind of
immortality when Die Zeit quoted (or, he claims, misquoted) him as
saying that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the
"greatest work of art there has been". The remark convinced many
that the once-famous composer had long since jumped off the deep
end; it also seemed to signal the end of what might be termed da
Vincian vangardism - the grandiose claim by a composer to be
prophet, inventor, scientist, philosopher and spiritual guide.
Other Planets, Robin Maconie's latest book about Stockhausen,
reads, appropriately enough, like a cross between conventional
musical history and The Da Vinci Code. In addition to laying out
the facts about every work in Stockhausen's large oeuvre, Maconie
promises to reveal how a "latent philosophical agenda" in the music
addresses "the historic aspirations of German nationalism, and more
specifically a defense of the role of post-Enlightenment European
culture in the wider world" and, beyond that, to show how serialism
is part of a "grander aesthetic and intellectual enterprise,
beginning in the late eighteenth century, concerning the nature and
evolution of language and its implications for post-revolutionary
democracy". In place of Dan Brown's Last Supper, Maconie hinges his
mad dash through cultural history on Jean-François Champollion's
decoding of the Rosetta Stone; Olivier Messiaen had once compared
the young Stockhausen to the French decrypter. Where Brown pits the
Catholic Church against the Knights of the Temple, Maconie fashions
his catalogue raisonné around an esoteric battle between Saussurean
"lettrists" and Goethean holists.
Perhaps it takes a nutty commentator to crack a nutty composer.
Maconie points out from the start that the name Karlheinz
Stockhausen contains the words Ein and Aus (in and out): "to the
cabbalist, this is a profound and awe-inspiring mystery". He warns
us that, after spending many years conversing with the composer, he
can no longer remember which ideas are Stockhausen's and which are
his own. That said, the book is often great fun to read, and full
of provocative nuggets of information; it is stimulating to wallow
in the mudbath of Maconie's endless erudition. In a chapter called
"Rhythmic Cells", for instance, Maconie connects Messiaen, R. H.
Stetson (author of Motor Phonetics), Alexander Graham Bell,
Champollion, François Thureau-Dangin (the first translator of
Sumerian into French), the Abbé Rousselot, William James, Hugo
Münsterberg, Gertrude Stein, Philip Glass and John Adams in the
space of three breathless paragraphs. We might call this grouping
of far-flung figures Professor Maconie's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Maconie's big idea is that serialism, the justification for which,
he says, remains "inconclusive and unpersuasive", was part of a
larger movement in the understanding of language as code.
Given the size of the book and Maconie's intimate knowledge of the
man and his music, it is perhaps surprising that there is little
musical analysis and few musical examples. Jonathan Harvey's Music
of Stockhausen remains a better source for nuts-and-bolts data;
Maconie's book of interviews with the composer, Stockhausen on
Music, is a less cluttered guide to the composer's sensibility. The
extravagant, speculative nature of the new book is potentially
valuable, however. Maconie begins with a challenge from Stockhausen
to explain his music without recourse to biography: "My parents did
not choose to make me what I am, nor did the country in which I was
born. Rather, they are chosen - identified - in me: in that `me'
which is known in my works". Stockhausen has a long history of
biographical references in his music - he built his epic music
theatre work LICHT around the talents of family members who enact a
ritualized autobiographical pageant. His denial of biographical
significance seems perverse, but Maconie complies, leaving the
reader in the dark about, for instance, Stockhausen's mentor,
Professor Werner Meyer-Eppler, and his evolving ménage. Rather than
simply accept the composer's mystical idea that the essence of his
music is like the hole in the middle of the wheel, however, Maconie
fills that hole, and pumps up the tyres, with a history of ideas,
placing Stockhausen at the center of the zeitgeist. Since so much
contemporary art music seems peripheral today, Maconie's attempt to
justify Stockhausen's music by neo-Hegelian means is admirably
quixotic. But Stockhausen is a difficult case. Once the
acknowledged leader of advanced music, he has spent the last thirty
years, half of his creative life, in relative obscurity, composing
LICHT, which has yet to be performed in its seven-day,
twenty-nine-hour entirety. His public pronouncements, even before
9/11, have become increasingly bizarre, especially his claim to
have come from a galaxy far away: hence Maconie's title, with a bow
to the "other planets" in the Stefan George poem that rocketed
Schoenberg's String Quartet No 2 beyond tonal gravity.
Though he can be critical, Maconie seems too close to the scene to
convey the oddity of avant-garde music. After the Second World War,
the victorious powers rebuilt European musical life. By the early
1950s, a group of composers in their twenties - Boulez, Nono,
Berio, Maderna, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Xenakis - appeared to give
music a fresh start. This had happened before. In the 1920s, a
similar strategy created a "new music" free of ties to the German
imperial past. Hindemith and Weill vaulted youthfully to stardom,
Hindemith speaking the holistic language of German humanism, and
Weill broadcasting Brechtian leftism. In Berlin, Busoni played the
role of technological guru, while in Vienna Schoenberg retooled his
pre-war Expressionism with the more objective twelve-tone
technique. The only really new element in this new music came from
America, with the seductive, disorienting arrival of jazz.
Thirty years later, "new music" was again brought forth from on
high. With an older generation of composers - Bartók, Hindemith,
Milhaud, Stravinsky, Varèse, Weill - in American absentia, and
another generation - Krasa, Ullmann, Haas - slaughtered, the future
was left to a group of very young composers mostly trained by
Olivier Messiaen, who had risen to prominence during the Occupation
and now played the Busoni role as inspirer of youth. His students
based their new music on Schoenberg's serialism, a technique and
composer reviled by the Nazi regime, but they quickly distanced
themselves from a music that itself was embedded in a pre-war
musical culture they hardly knew. Although the standard texts on
the period portray the new style as a logical extention of musical
Modernism, it owed its success (and the terms of its success) to
non-musical circumstances. Even more than after the First World
War, there was a political imperative to create a musical style
with no apparent link to the past; the particular form of new music
that triumphed was perfectly tailored to the emerging political
landscape. Based in state-supported music festivals and radio
stations, far from the concert world and its audience, the music of
what came to be known as the Darmstadt School mirrored the ideals
of the EEC: technology and technocracy would trump history,
European unity would take the place of poisonous nationalism.
Emphasizing its European identity, the new music not only cut ties
with a musical past tainted by Nazi associations, but also rejected
the influence of Soviet populism and American jazz. In the real
world, of course, concert music soon re-established itself, and on
either side of the Iron Curtain Soviet and American music filled
the airwaves, but the "new music" took shape as a utopian research
and development operation and succeeded not by gaining an audience,
or entering the concert repertory, but by appealing to the
intellectual elite. Even the appearance of value-free science was
deceptive, however, as Maconie reveals. Electronic technology had
been developed for purposes of military espionage during the war;
Europe was littered with primitive recording devices and
voice-detection and encryption hardware. Out of this technological
trash heap, electronic music was born, and Stockhausen's Gesang der
Jünglinge was hailed as the first masterpiece in the new genre when
it appeared in 1956.
Although he surfaced a few years after Boulez had made his mark,
Stockhausen was a more plausible emblem of a radically new Europe.
Born in 1928, he could be seen, as many Germans saw themselves, as
a victim of the Nazi regime. He lost both parents during the war;
his chronically depressed mother was killed along with other
psychiatric patients deemed unworthy of life, his father died on
the Eastern front. An early mastery of English allowed Stockhausen
two modes of escape that would shape his future: secretly listening
to American jazz on short-wave radio, and easy communication with
the post-war authorities, American soldiers and, later, with
American composers. Maconie amply documents the pervasive American
influence on Stockhausen's music of everyone from Glenn Miller to
John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley,
Henry Brant and Philip Glass - a breadth of influence quite alien
to Boulez.
Stockhausen seemed like a model new German, too young to share Nazi
guilt, but also disconnected from the complex cultural world of
Weimar; he took an instant dislike to Adorno and to the exiled
German intellectuals he encountered in America. Following the
post-war canons of aesthetic correctness, Stockhausen's music never
referred explicitly to Nazi atrocities, though it could be read as
some kind of abstract response. Stockhausen based Gesang der
Jünglinge on a passage from the Book of Daniel - the three boys in
the fiery furnace - but treated the source material (sung by
Stockhausen's son), abstractly, as if the words were merely so many
syllables. A listener could interpret the statistical treatment of
the source material either as a properly distanced memorial to the
victims of the Nazi death camps or as an aestheticization of the
unspeakable. Maconie tracks many instances of Stockhausen skating
over this moral abyss throughout his career, though he usually
finds grounds for exoneration. Gesang sprang from an analysis of
phonemes inspired by Meyer-Eppler. A theoretical physicist before
the war (but working on what, and where?), Meyer-Eppler reinvented
himself afterwards as a professor of Phonetics. His work on speech
analysis brought him into contact with the new technology of the
tape recorder and in 1950 he co-founded the Electronic Music Studio
at Radio Cologne along with the inventor Robert Beyer and the
composer Herbert Eimert. Maconie claims that Meyer-Eppler's death
in 1959 caused a decisive turn in Stockhausen's development, but
reveals little about their personal relationship.
The music of what we might now term Stockhausen's "classic period",
from Kontrapunkte of 1953 to Hymnen of 1967, brought together three
distinct techniques: musique concrète, based on the the
manipulation of recorded sounds; electronic music, based on the
synthetic generation of sounds; and serialism. Connecting these
concepts, Stockhausen completely transformed Schoenberg's
twelve-tone idea. In Schoenberg's music, the series functioned to
stabilize atonality so that it could sustain formal designs on the
scale of the classical sonata. This allowed his music, and that of
Berg and Webern, to re-establish a connection with the past while
maintaining the decisive move away from tonality. Most of their
twelve-tone compositions are part of the larger movement misnamed
neo-classicism which, far from regressing to past practice,
established a complex dialogue between past and present, as
exemplified in works as different as Stravinsky's Symphony of
Psalms, Berg's Violin Concerto, Webern's Symphony, Schoenberg's
Fourth Quartet and Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and
Celesta. All these works counterpoint modernist dissonance and
angularity with a classical model. For Stockhausen and his
generation, serialism was not about the past and present but about
the future. To prevent the return of old habits, serial technique
became a systematic means of disordering all musical parameters.
The technology of electronic sound analysis and synthesis
facilitated this novel approach to composition. Following
Meyer-Eppler, Stockhausen used the series to think of music in
statistical terms, as a range of possibilities stemming from
certain basic elements. Each piece would rigorously expose all the
possible combinations of pitch, duration, dynamics, attack, range;
even the sequence of events could be produced by statistical means.
The technique sometimes induced the numbing fascination of a
kaleidoscope; but in some works, notably Gesang der Jünglinge and
Gruppen, Stockhausen tweaked the system to give the music a more
conventionally dramatic shape. The huge brass climax in Gruppen,
which sounds like Gabrieli rewritten by Stan Kenton, was a
non-systematic insertion that guaranteed the works success with an
audience - Stockhausen was more audience-conscious than you might
expect.
If American jazz upset the neat system of musical revival after the
First World War, American anarchism as preached by John Cage was
the joker in the pack of the new music of the 1950s. Dumping the
entire European musical tradition was already a done deed for Cage,
who had written his Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios back in
1939. In the early 1950s, Cage took the next step and abandoned
music - understood as notes shaped by a composer, realized by
performers, perceived by listeners - altogether. If you really
wanted to cut loose from the past, Cage taught, you had to move to
a purely conceptual music, as demonstrated in his "silent" piece,
4'33". Reading his correspondence with Boulez, we can see Cage
reconstituting the dualism of his teacher, Schoenberg, playing a
Zen-master Moses to Boulez's vaudevillian, object-oriented Aron.
Without the conceptual jump, Cage warned, the new serial and
electronic music would just replay the aesthetics of expressionism
and impressionism, as in fact, works like Nono's Canto Sospeso and
Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître would show.
Of all the composers of his generation, Stockhausen negotiated most
successfully the gap between conceptualism and the creation of
artistic objects. Cage might have the big ideas, but with
Stockhausen, as Maconie in his occasional role as true believer
says, "there is always a reason, a process, a genuine argument, and
an outcome: always a reality to set alongside the myth. However it
happens the musical result is invariably gripping, intense, and
disciplined". Pieces like Kontrapunkte, Zeitmaße and Gruppen had
strong identities but demanded a new, more speculative kind of
listening. Even compared with daring works of the time such as
Xenakis's Pithoprakta or Boulez's Marteau sans maître, none of
these pieces sounds like music; the notes don't coalesce into an
expressive whole - but they do raise all sorts of interesting
questions about how music is perceived and notated. Stockhausen was
particularly fearless in pursuing the mathematical possibilities of
traditional notation beyond the breaking point of literal
realization.
Stockhausen, more than his contemporaries, also sustained the myth
of musical progress that gave the musical avant-garde its
quasi-scientific respectability. A commonplace of post-war musical
wisdom was the idea that Schoenberg, like Moses, had been unable to
bring his great idea to the promised land. The advent of a serial
utopia, however, soon proved to be a mirage. Boulez's Structures
seemed to be stuck in the desert, while his later works, like the
Mallarméan extravaganza Pli selon Pli retreated to the fleshpots of
aestheticism. Stockhausen, however, promoted each new work as a
dialectical step forward and convinced many composers and critics
that his own evolution set the pace for all the music of his time.
Pointillism, the result of serial micro-management of pitch,
duration, articulation and dynamics, gave way to "group"
composition in which the statistical jumble of these elements was
prolonged into phrases. These phrases then grew into serially
determined "moments" that floated freely in an indeterminate ocean
of time. Determinacy now morphed into indeterminacy, and serial
calculation gave way to intuitive music-making.
By the 1960s Stockhausen had become the Euro-Cage. Scores like Plus
Minus did away with traditional notation altogether, depending
instead on the improvisational skills of players steeped in
Stockhausen's earlier music. With the highly improvisatory Stimmung
and Aus dem sieben Tage, Stockhausen, who had visited San Francisco
during the 1967 summer of love, metamorphosed from technocrat to
guru - and was rewarded with his place of honour on Peter Blake's
Beatles album cover. But like Boulez before him, Stockhausen
finally could not give up the traditional prerogatives of a
European composer. When his players improvised he would ride the
volume control, shaping their efforts to match his vision. With
Mantra (1970) he returned to a fully notated music and, after
seeing Einstein on the Beach in New York, he began planning the
Meisterwerk to top them all in scale and in self-indulgence - a
week-long opera based on his own life and starring members of his
own family.
It will be interesting to see how posterity judges LICHT in
relationship to, say, Glass's Einstein/Akhnaten/Satyagraha trilogy
or the three big John Adams operas, or Meredith Monk's larger
works. In comparison to them, Stockhausen's epic today seems
forbiddingly private in its action, symbolism and musical idiom.
The American minimalists are not burdened with the legacy of
serialism (American serialism is based on assumptions that are
quite different to those underpinning the European variety, though
just as questionable) and have rediscovered the simple pleasures of
melody, harmonic motion, pulse and, of course, repetition. As far
as Stockhausen has travelled, his idiom remains rooted in the
"statistical" approach of the 1950s. In retrospect, serialism
turned into an albatross. It ceased to have a provocative, vanguard
function, and just became a predictable annoyance. Minimalists such
as Terry Riley were able to claim vanguard status while writing in
C. "Das Kann man einfacher!" as Schoenberg's tortured genius puts
it in Die glückliche Hand, and as Philip Glass may have thought
when he wrote Einstein on the Beach. Maconie, however, expects
history to reverse this judgement: "Perhaps LICHT is not meant for
our times after all, but, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, for
the archaeologists of the future coming from another planet, who in
trying to decipher human script `would soon discover that a whole
category of books - music - did not fit the usual patterns'". These
extraterrestrials will find Robin Maconie's book a useful guide.