Listening:

Reading from Stockhausen, Conversations with the composer, quoting directly from Part 1 (1971). A prelude:

I recall a meeting with a young girl after having played Hymnen in Mexico City in 1968. She was about twelve years old. … She said, “I have one question, Mr. Stockhausen. Do you think that we have to go through this degree of destruction before we’re reborn?” She said it in particular about the Fourth Region. And that young girl touched me in the inner of my being. I said, “I think so.” So she must must have felt something very important that the music woke up in her.

Towards the universal:

If I’m born in order to know only America, Japan, Bali, and India but not all the other things, then what are they made for? What are they for?

We are all transistors in the literal sense … If we’re too much involved with our personal ego, desires, interests, people, whatever it is, then these rays become focused on us as individuals with our tiny private problems. But when we more and more forget ourselves—I mean try to make ourselves pure in the state of reception and transmission—then this current passes through. And if you then ahve a special talent—that you have no merits for, it’s just given to you—to work in sound, light, or in gestures as a dancer, then you can use what you have in order to concretize what comes through you, and then that communication is possible. You become a focus. The current goes through you, and then it goes to the others through you.

They make music in small groups at night in the forest .. they are really trying to catch waves from distant stars.

Until 1960 I was a man who related to the cosmos and God through Catholicism, a very particular religion that I chose for myself almost as a way of opposing the post-war Sartrean nihilistic attitudes of the established intellectuals. Almost all my colleagues were, and still are, complete nihilists. And then I began to float because I got in touch with many other religions. In Japan I prayed many times to Buddhas just as I’ve prayed to the Christian god. And then to the gods of the Mayas and the Aztecs in Mexico. I lived for short periods in Bali, Ceylon, and India and felt that the religions were all part of the face of a multifaceted universal spirit, of the total spirit. In 1968, I came very close to death, to suicide, and giving myself up in that sense. But after that I found a suprareligious way for myself. I didn’t think of myself any longer as a member of a particular social group.

I think that very particular discoveries and events can only occur when a man is completely alone … on the other hand we’ve found this new meaning of the group. And there is feedback between the two. The group cannot develop if there isn’t an individual self-discovery developing, on the part of both the individual members and in particular of the one who draws the group together.

On periodicity, rhythm, repetition and uniqueness — the notion of a universal “fundamental” and “partials” of that universal is particularly mind-bending:

Periodicity is one aspect, of the very large and the very small. It should always be shown in a musical activity as being just one aspect of the universe. We have the large periodicities of the year, of the month or the moon, of the day, and also of the cosmic year. There is a fundamental periodicity of the whole cosmos when it explodes and contracts—it breathes, God breathes all the time, naturally, periodically, as far as we can think. This is the fundamental of the universe, and all the other things are partials of this fundamental—the galactic years and the years of the sun systems … going down to the atoms and even the particles of the atoms, there is always periodicity. … Actually, within this periodicity, no day is the same.

When the music has stopped, then we are modulated, and to some extent the old periodicities start to regain the rhythms that they had before, but they are never the same, no matter what comes through us. We are modulated once and forever.

On what is natural and artificial:

[The technology of the synthesizer] is an extension of man. It’s part of us. It is we. You cannot divide it from us. How can you divide an oyster from its shell? Or let’s say a violin player from his violin? Then he’s no longer a violin player.

He quoted Professor Suzuki (responding to “I make the sounds in a very artificial way. I use generators and mix synthetically by recording them on different channels of tapes and then mix them with a potentiometer until I get a sound, and then I cut it with a scissor and splice the tape.”):

It would only be artificial if it went against your inner conviction. You’re being completely natural in the way you to it.

On time, the moment, eternity:

The Japanese have a completely different time than we Europeans have. The Japanese have a far larger time scale at the bottom … at the very fast and the very slow regions they have more octaves, so to speak, than we do.

We can imagine eternity, an eternal duration. And that led me to the concept of the moment form, where a moment lasts not just an instant but it can last an eternity if it isn’t changing.

Discovering the “inner life” of a sound, in a moment:

Every sound has an inner life. You can enlarge this in the way you listen to it if the shape of a given sound doesn’t move too fast away from you; this then allows you the possibility to listen vertically and not to expect that only harmonic or rhythmic change will be significant.

Decoupling from the local, provincial:

Once you’ve achieved a certain independence from the natural forces and your heritage, you can become someone who discovers within himself the Balinese and the Japanese. That’s why it’s wrong to say, “He’s influenced by the Japanese.” What I’ve actually experienced is that I came to Japan and discovered the Japnese in me. I immediately wanted to become that “Japanese,” because it was new to me that I could live like that.

On the balance between new creation and what came before:

The great danger is that if you make a citation in music, literature, or in painting and you quote something which, because it’s old, is stronger, then there’s a natural tendency for it to wipe out the new things which you haven’t heard or seen before—they’re week, you’ve seen them only once so you can’t remember them. … You should give much less of what is known, in proportion to what is new, in a given context in order to create a balance between the two.

Identifying with a sound is meditation:

I think that identifying with a sound is meditation. A musical meditation is when you completely become the sound.

I’m using the mantra as a living being. I want to expand the traditional concept of the mantra which says you are in one state in order to reach a point where we can go through many, many different states with one mantra.

The greatest thing would be if I could discover the whole world within me and be one after another, from moment to moment, a different being, so that one being within me comes to the top and then another.

Three basic qualities of musical formation — lyrical, dramatic, epic:

There are three basic qualities of musical formation: the lyrical, which is the instant, the here and now, the dramatic, which is development, with precise beginning and ending, climaxes, high points and low points; and epic, which is the juxtaposition of different moments, as in a variation form or the traditional form of the suite—that’s an epic form, you can always add a new section, a new chapter so to speak. There’s no strong directionalism as in a dramatic form, but it’s also not static; within a given moment it goes somewhere, it describes some event. And I want all the three.

Beethoven’s last quartets are the best example of the epic quality in music:

Like a person who, very dramatic at a given moment, then becomes completely quiet, meditative, and then outgoing. … In Beethoven’s [last quartets], composition becomes the subject, it’s no longer a theme or a motive used in a materialistic way. He says: This can happen, and then he doesn’t follow it up for long. There’s a long bridge which lasts much longer than the head of a fugue, which he just exposes, finishes, and then he goes somewhere else. That’s like flying, flying around the globe, or going through all the different aspects of our soul. And from the most quiet to the most excited, from the most abstract to the most concrete, from quotes to newly invented moments—yes, that is the best example.

On creating new sounds:

What I’m interested in is to see how form and material become completely one. Like architecture, its form will change with completely new material. There’s feedback between the material that you create and the way you form this material in larger forms.

You can use timbre in a completely hedonistic way, just to enjoy, more or less a given sound, as in rock music. You can listen to timbre and hear the “new sounds.” But after two years they’re out of fashion because you’ve gotten used to them. And you’ve never been able to understand these new sounds as making something clear to you, within a given composition. … It’s just old wine in new bottles. What changes the whole situation is if this timbre has its illuminating force. And that’s why I always say a given timbre, or a given combination of instruments, should never be repeated.

On being one with music:

When I start playing I have learned to forget about myself. It hardly ever happens nowadays that while I’m working I’m thinking of something else for even a fraction of time. The moment I start playing I’m gone, and I am the sounds and I am the process, and you can’t ask me—I can’t give you any answer—what has happened. When it’s over, then I fall back, like from a session of laughing gas, into thinking and become aware of my environment.

In a conversation with the musican Kontarsky, who was among those who did not understand Stockhausen’s notion of “intuitive music”:

Play the vibration of the rhythm of your limbs. … And the other extreme concerns that of the rhythms of the universe. … Kontarsky, for example said, “I can’t do anything with that instruction. What shall I do with it, the rhythm of the universe?” … I said “Well, at least you have one possibility, because you’re a very visual person, you read a lot, your education is visual, and your thinking is visual. What about the constellations of the stars?” He said, “oh, wonderful!” I said, “Think of the interval constellations of Webern’s music. And then combine them with the constellations of the stars. Let’s say you think of Cassiopeia or the Big Dipper.” And from that moment on that player became the most precise member of our group for performances of such intuitive music. Kontarsky really played the bones—transforming the visual proportions into rhythmic and pitch proportions. And then as these were very prices geometrical figures in our performance, the others were playing the smallest vibrations, that they could produce with their fingers on the chords.

And that’s what I call intuitive music, when a player, through a certain meditative concentration, becomes a wonderful instrument and starts resonation. Because I think the music is always there. The more open you are, the more you open yourself to this new music by throwing out all the images, all the automatic brain processes—it always wants to manifest itself.

On sound conducted by “natural forces”:

Years ago in Paris I was present at an event at which the French sculptor Schoeffer, together with Pierre henry, made a construction of light and sound on the Eiffel Tower, where the humidity of the air, the speed of the wind, and the temperature all were analyzed, turned into sound information, and were heard through large speakers: the different parameters of the sound were conducted by the natural forces. Well, this is then simply a translation of what you experience anyway if you’re attentive. … It was just like wind chimes, somehow nice.

Reminds of Schoenberg’s quote about harmony as “equilibrium of the most intense energies” (see previous post):

So many composers think that you can take any sound and use it. That’s true insofar as you really can take it and integrate it and ultimately create some kind of harmony and balance. Otherwise it atomizes … us and then we’re depressed when we go home. You can include many different forces in a piece, but when they start destroying each other and there’s no harmony established between the different forces, then you’ve failed. You must be capable of really integrating the elements and not just expose them and see what happens. … And then when people listen to this music, they will become what the music is.

On Cubism, multiple perspectives:

I don’t see any paintings yet which really follow [Paul Klee’s] great discovery of showing in one painting one object which is seen from five, six, or seven different perspectives at the same time—the multiple perspectives within one composition.

And finally, something that reminds of Heinz von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics:

First you must make the music, and then the music changes you. That’s the feedback. That’s a spiral. But it always changes. Having an idea of something—there the idea comes in. And doing something that you are not yet. … I do new compositions, and I am not yet what the music is. Then one day, all of a sudden, I can make it. I find the means, something with me works it out. And then when I listen to it (whistles like a bird flying) I become the way the music is. I become a multiple being, a being which changes perspective, I become more flexible, I no longer have that one standpoint, I change my standpoint all the time. And then by changing, being changed by what I’ve done, what I do changes more—I demand more. I can’t tell you any longer what is music and me in such a process. I change the music, the music changes me. You cannot separate the music from me any longer, and you cannot separate the music from the listener any longer. The listener becomes the music. And by that the music is influenced by the listener because he changes the music. What is the music? I don’t know.