Karlheinz Stockhausen
» Published by szola on Dec 27, 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on the 22nd of August 1928 and died on the 5th of December 2007. He was widely acknowledged as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th century. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music and aleatory. Aleatory means “pertaining to luck”, and derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance or some primary element of a composed work’s realization is left to the determination of its performer.
In 1950 Stockhausen developed an interest in composition and was admitted to the class of composer Frank Martin. At the Darmstadt summer courses in 1951 he met the composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who had just completed studies with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud in Paris, and Stockhausen resolved to do likevise. In March 1953 he left Paris to take up a position as assistant to Herbert Eimert at the newly established Electronic Music Studio of NWDR, in Cologne. From 1954 to 1956 he studied phonetics, acoustics and information theory with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. Together with Eimert he edited the influential journal Die Reihe from 1955 to 1962. Stockhausen also gave lectures and concerts during these years.
Over the years Stockhausen wrote over 350 individual works. He often departs radically from musical tradition and his work is influenced by Messiaen, Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern, in addition to films and painters.
In August 1951, just after his Darmstadt visit, Stockhausen began working with a form of athematic serial composition that rejected the twelve tone technique of Schoenberg. Music without themes, or without recognizable, repeating, and developing themes is called athematic. Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. The technique was tremendously influential on composers in the mid-20th century.
Stockhausen characterizes many of these earliest compositions as punktuelle musik. Several works from these early years show him formulating his first ground-breaking contribution to the theory and practice of composition, that of group composition. In march 1953 he moved to the NWDR studio in Cologne and turned to electronic music with two “Electronic Studies” (1953 & 1954), and then introducing spatial placements of sound sources with his mixed contrète and electronic work “Gesang der Jünglinge” (1955-56). Experiences gained from the Studies made plain that it was an unacceptable oversimplification to regard timbres as stable entities. Reinforced by his studies with Meyer-Eppler, beginning in 1955 Stockhausen formulated new “statistical” criteria for composition, focussing attention on the aleatoric, directional tendencies of sound movement, “the change from one state to another, with or without returning motion, as opposed to a fixed state”.
Stockhausen described this period as: “The first revolution occurred from 1952/53 as musique concrète, electronic tape music, and space music, entailing composition with transformers, generators, modulators, magnetophones, etc; the integration of all concrete and abstract (synthetic) sound possibilities (also all noises), and the controlled projection of sound in space.”
His work with electronic music and its utter fixity led him to explore modes of instrumental and vocal music in which performers’ individual capabilities and the circumstances of a particular performance (e.g., hall acoustics) may determine certain aspects of a composition. He calls this “variable form”. In other cases, a work may be presented from a number of different perspectives. In “Zyklus” (1959), for example, he began using graphical notation for instrumental music. The score is written so that the performance can start on any page, and it may be read upside down, or from right to left, as the performer chooses. Still other works permit different routes through the constituent parts. Stockhausen calls both of these possibilities “polyvalent form”.
In his “Kontakte” for electronic sounds he achieved for the forst time an isomorphism of the four parameters of pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre. He pioneered live electronics in “Mixtur” (1964/67/2003) for orchestra and electronics, and he also composed two electronic works for tape, “Telemusik” (1966) and “Hymnen” (1966-67). At this time, Stockhausen also began to incorporate pre-existent music from world traditions into his compositions. “Telemusik” was the first overt example of this trend. Through the 60s, he explored the possibilities of ‘process composition’ in works for live performance such as “Prozession” (1967). Process music or systems music is music that arises from a process, and more specifically, music that makes that process audible. The term predates and is often used synonymously with minimalism. The specific term Process Music was coined by Minimalist composer Steve Reich in his 1968 manifesto entitled “Music as a Gradual Process”.
Beginning with “Mantra” (1970), Stockhausen turned to formula composition, a technique which involves the projection and multiplication of a single-, double, or triple melodic-line formula. Between 1977 and 2003 he composed a cycle of seven operas called “Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche”. The Licht cycle deals with the traits associated in various historical traditions with each weekday. Monday represented birth and fertility, Tuesday conflict and war, Wednesday reconciliation and cooperation and so forth.
After completing “Licht”, Stockhausen embarked on a new cycle of compositions, based on the hours of the day, entitled “Klang”. Twenty-one of these pieces were completed before the composer’s death. Stockhausen had dreams of flying throughout his life, and these dreams are reflected in the “Helikopter-Streichquartett” (the third scene of “Mittwoch aus Licht”), completed in 1993. In it, the four members of a string quartet perform in four helicopters flying independent flight-paths over the countryside near the concert hall. The sounds they play are mixed together with the sounds of the helicopters and played through speakers to the audience in the hall. Videos of the performers are also transmitted back to the concert hall.
Amongst the many modern musicians who have publicly acknowledge the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen are Frank Zappa, the Cologne based experimental band Can (Holger Czukay, one of the founding members actually studied with Stckhausen), electronic pioneers Kraftwerk, guitarexperimentalists Sonic Youth, singer Björk and british industrial group Coil, to name but a few.