Beam me up, Stocky
Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer who came from Sirius to save the human race, talks to Tom Service about his great masterwork
Thursday October 13, 2005
The Guardian
Father of universal music ... Stockhausen. Photograph: Soeren Stache/EPA
Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has turned himself into a musical myth. This is the man who has influenced everyone from Brian Eno to Bj?rk, and who appeared on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's album, sandwiched between Carl Jung and Mae West. On his website, he credits himself as the father of electronic music, spatial music and universal music. He spent 30 years composing seven operas called Licht ("Light"), one for each day of the week, and recently he embarked on Klang ("Sound"), a series of 24-hour-long pieces to be performed in a single day - a sort of musical version of 24, but without the threat of terrorism. As if that wasn't enough, this 77-year-old musical pioneer has claimed that he comes not from Burg M?drath, near Cologne (listed as his birthplace on his biography), but rather from a planet orbiting the star Sirius, and that he was put on earth to give voice to a cosmic music that will change the world. He is, to put it mildly, a one-off.
London will be granted a visit from this celestial being next week, when he comes to play a concert as part of the Frieze art fair. He performed in Edinburgh this April, but it's his first time in London since 2001. For Frieze, he'll be bringing two of his electronic pieces: Kontakte, a classic of the genre from 1960, and Oktophonie, part of Tuesday from Light, written in 1991.
I asked him, by e-mail - Stockhausen is too unearthly an entity to commit to many face-to-face interviews - why he chose these two pieces. "The combination makes it clear how much the space composition has evolved from the horizontal to the vertical music." Right. Er ...
It's hard to decode this Siriusian logic, but what it might mean is that "space music" - that is to say, electronic music that is projected from speakers that encircle the audience - can now be projected not just around the hall, but up and down the space as well, creating a three-dimensional experience. That makes sense, since Kontakte is written in four channels, whereas Oktophonie is in eight, giving Stockhausen greater opportunity to diffuse the sound in different ways.
The great man goes on: "New Space Music is for the ears, for the invisible world (I switch out the lights during the projections of my space music)." This visionary, new electronic music, like Oktophonie, requires absolute darkness for its performance. Apart, that is, from a sliver of "moonlight" that will illuminate its creator and master of the mixing desk: Stockhausen himself, who, we are promised, will be dressed in an all-white suit for this special occasion.
Charitably, you might say that this dramatisation mirrors the ritualistic power of the music. In its original context in Tuesday from Light, Oktophonie is played during the second of the opera's battles between Michael and Luzifer, essentially the goodie and baddie of the whole Light saga. More cynically, it looks like kitschy egomania, straight out of a bad production of Wagner's Parsifal.
Which might not be too far from the truth. Critics of Stockhausen's recent music have accused the Light operas of trumping Wagner in their self-centred cosmology. When he was last in London, for a festival of his music at the Barbican, Stockhausen - dressed resplendently in the orange cardigan that he seems to have worn for the past two decades - presided over a performance of Friday from Light. In costumes that looked like a parody of early Star Trek, the drama was played out: the evil Ludon, who looked like Zurg, the villain from Toy Story 2, convinced Eva (the earth-mother figure in the Light cycle) to have children by Caino, his black son. The resulting, mixed-race broods of children grow up in peace but then go to war with each other, and at the end of the opera, Eva repents her decision to procreate with Caino. It looked like nothing less than a warning against mixed-heritage marriages. Beneath the seductive electronic washes of sound in Light lie disturbing cultural politics. Stockhausen is the omnipotent creator and performer of Light, and the piece is formed in his image: it's impossible not to conclude that the drama must reflect his deepest beliefs.
I asked him about the logistics of putting on the complete cycle of the operas, because on paper, it looks ludicrously impractical, including a string quartet - which the Arditti Quartet have recorded - in which each player performs, airborne, from their own helicopter. Seriously.
"The real challenge," Stockhausen wrote to me, "is to find seven stage directors and stage designers, seven conductors, five orchestras, one children's orchestra, nine professional choirs, two children's choirs, one girls' choir, seven sound projectionists, seven sound technicians, many soloists. This is all possible if one can engage the ensembles and soloists who have already performed parts of Light quasi-scenically in concerts and rehearse in seven auditoriums daily for about six months."
Next to all of this, Wagner's decision to build his own theatre in Bayreuth looks like small fry: Stockhausen needs seven bespoke performance spaces for Light, one for each opera. He tells me that for one of the final parts of the opera, he rehearsed with his ensemble for 62 days, seven hours a day. Imagine that level of commitment and work, times about 30, and you get an idea of how much Light would cost a production company. Astonishingly, there are two complete performances of Light in the pipeline: in Dresden in 2008, and Essen in 2010. It remains to be seen if they come off.
But maybe I'm being too cynical. Whatever else he may be, Stockhausen is a visionary, who genuinely believes in the power of his own music - and his website, his publishing house, his record label - to spread his works across the world. And he says they're already doing good for humanity.
"My music has already reduced enormously the mundane problems of the world," he writes. "The incredible number of hours of all people listening to my works (thinking of all the CDs, films, concerts) is keeping the listeners away from the mundane problems. If someone wants to experience each [of my] compositions just once, he needs to have at least 130 free hours of listening quietly to the [circa] 130 CDs, and many have already bought all my CDs."
And what about his own interplanetary spiritual experiences? How are they communicated in his music? "Whenever my music or a moment in my music transports a listener into the beyond - transcending time and space - he experiences cosmic dimensions."
For the Frieze art fair concert, Billingsgate Market will be the scene of the transmission of cosmic dimensions to London, in service of Stockhausen's essential ethos: "My personality is a universal statement, as any stone, plant, animal, human being, angel. GOD is working!" And so is Stockhausen.
· Stockhausen plays the Frieze art fair on October 22. Details: 0870 890 0514.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer who came from Sirius to save the human race, talks to Tom Service about his great masterwork
Thursday October 13, 2005
The Guardian
Father of universal music ... Stockhausen. Photograph: Soeren Stache/EPA
Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has turned himself into a musical myth. This is the man who has influenced everyone from Brian Eno to Bj?rk, and who appeared on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's album, sandwiched between Carl Jung and Mae West. On his website, he credits himself as the father of electronic music, spatial music and universal music. He spent 30 years composing seven operas called Licht ("Light"), one for each day of the week, and recently he embarked on Klang ("Sound"), a series of 24-hour-long pieces to be performed in a single day - a sort of musical version of 24, but without the threat of terrorism. As if that wasn't enough, this 77-year-old musical pioneer has claimed that he comes not from Burg M?drath, near Cologne (listed as his birthplace on his biography), but rather from a planet orbiting the star Sirius, and that he was put on earth to give voice to a cosmic music that will change the world. He is, to put it mildly, a one-off.
London will be granted a visit from this celestial being next week, when he comes to play a concert as part of the Frieze art fair. He performed in Edinburgh this April, but it's his first time in London since 2001. For Frieze, he'll be bringing two of his electronic pieces: Kontakte, a classic of the genre from 1960, and Oktophonie, part of Tuesday from Light, written in 1991.
I asked him, by e-mail - Stockhausen is too unearthly an entity to commit to many face-to-face interviews - why he chose these two pieces. "The combination makes it clear how much the space composition has evolved from the horizontal to the vertical music." Right. Er ...
It's hard to decode this Siriusian logic, but what it might mean is that "space music" - that is to say, electronic music that is projected from speakers that encircle the audience - can now be projected not just around the hall, but up and down the space as well, creating a three-dimensional experience. That makes sense, since Kontakte is written in four channels, whereas Oktophonie is in eight, giving Stockhausen greater opportunity to diffuse the sound in different ways.
The great man goes on: "New Space Music is for the ears, for the invisible world (I switch out the lights during the projections of my space music)." This visionary, new electronic music, like Oktophonie, requires absolute darkness for its performance. Apart, that is, from a sliver of "moonlight" that will illuminate its creator and master of the mixing desk: Stockhausen himself, who, we are promised, will be dressed in an all-white suit for this special occasion.
Charitably, you might say that this dramatisation mirrors the ritualistic power of the music. In its original context in Tuesday from Light, Oktophonie is played during the second of the opera's battles between Michael and Luzifer, essentially the goodie and baddie of the whole Light saga. More cynically, it looks like kitschy egomania, straight out of a bad production of Wagner's Parsifal.
Which might not be too far from the truth. Critics of Stockhausen's recent music have accused the Light operas of trumping Wagner in their self-centred cosmology. When he was last in London, for a festival of his music at the Barbican, Stockhausen - dressed resplendently in the orange cardigan that he seems to have worn for the past two decades - presided over a performance of Friday from Light. In costumes that looked like a parody of early Star Trek, the drama was played out: the evil Ludon, who looked like Zurg, the villain from Toy Story 2, convinced Eva (the earth-mother figure in the Light cycle) to have children by Caino, his black son. The resulting, mixed-race broods of children grow up in peace but then go to war with each other, and at the end of the opera, Eva repents her decision to procreate with Caino. It looked like nothing less than a warning against mixed-heritage marriages. Beneath the seductive electronic washes of sound in Light lie disturbing cultural politics. Stockhausen is the omnipotent creator and performer of Light, and the piece is formed in his image: it's impossible not to conclude that the drama must reflect his deepest beliefs.
I asked him about the logistics of putting on the complete cycle of the operas, because on paper, it looks ludicrously impractical, including a string quartet - which the Arditti Quartet have recorded - in which each player performs, airborne, from their own helicopter. Seriously.
"The real challenge," Stockhausen wrote to me, "is to find seven stage directors and stage designers, seven conductors, five orchestras, one children's orchestra, nine professional choirs, two children's choirs, one girls' choir, seven sound projectionists, seven sound technicians, many soloists. This is all possible if one can engage the ensembles and soloists who have already performed parts of Light quasi-scenically in concerts and rehearse in seven auditoriums daily for about six months."
Next to all of this, Wagner's decision to build his own theatre in Bayreuth looks like small fry: Stockhausen needs seven bespoke performance spaces for Light, one for each opera. He tells me that for one of the final parts of the opera, he rehearsed with his ensemble for 62 days, seven hours a day. Imagine that level of commitment and work, times about 30, and you get an idea of how much Light would cost a production company. Astonishingly, there are two complete performances of Light in the pipeline: in Dresden in 2008, and Essen in 2010. It remains to be seen if they come off.
But maybe I'm being too cynical. Whatever else he may be, Stockhausen is a visionary, who genuinely believes in the power of his own music - and his website, his publishing house, his record label - to spread his works across the world. And he says they're already doing good for humanity.
"My music has already reduced enormously the mundane problems of the world," he writes. "The incredible number of hours of all people listening to my works (thinking of all the CDs, films, concerts) is keeping the listeners away from the mundane problems. If someone wants to experience each [of my] compositions just once, he needs to have at least 130 free hours of listening quietly to the [circa] 130 CDs, and many have already bought all my CDs."
And what about his own interplanetary spiritual experiences? How are they communicated in his music? "Whenever my music or a moment in my music transports a listener into the beyond - transcending time and space - he experiences cosmic dimensions."
For the Frieze art fair concert, Billingsgate Market will be the scene of the transmission of cosmic dimensions to London, in service of Stockhausen's essential ethos: "My personality is a universal statement, as any stone, plant, animal, human being, angel. GOD is working!" And so is Stockhausen.
· Stockhausen plays the Frieze art fair on October 22. Details: 0870 890 0514.
