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08 December 2007

n e body got some nice Xmas Musik? / Karlheinz Stockhausen dies at 79

Click, sure.

e-mail to the Glenn Gould f_minor list:
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Uhhh ... it's that time of year again ... anybody have any recommendations for beautiful Christmas music? I'm getting a little tired of listening to John Denver and The Muppets.

And of course also: Happiest of Holidays to All!

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I own some Stockhausen LPs. I can't exactly sing his praises as I can for GG or Mozart, but he always gave me my money's worth. I never thought of him as a musical humbug or a charlatan. (I'll be happy to supply a few names of those, and a couple of old avant-garde jokes.)

I'd be authentically appreciative if anyone had something more profound or factual to say about Stockhausen's achievements, his place in the music of our era. And of course, is there an Intersection Set of GG and Stockhausen?

Some futures are easier to navigate to than others. Computers, for example, seem to have offered us a very wide, smooth (if unpredictable and surprising) boulevard from their primitive origins to the present, and promise to keep getting better, friendlier, cheaper, faster, more powerful.

Music -- a much more difficult path to the future, strewn with ghastly and laughable dead ends and failures calling for prompt forgetting. My 20th Century avant-garde and electronic collection -- and it's not a tiny collection, I've always been very curious about Future Music, and I've always wanted to get there first if there was something interesting or perhaps even beautiful to get to -- this has turned out to be a much more disappointing body of music. Much of which questions whether it even earned the right to be called music.

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Reuters
Friday 7 December 2007

Pioneering German composer
Stockhausen dies


BERLIN (Reuters) -- German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the world's most influential 20th century composers and a pioneer of electronic music, has died aged 79.

German broadcaster WDR, with whom Stockhausen worked closely for more than two decades, said in a statement he had died on Wednesday after a short illness at his home near Cologne in western Germany.

Best known for experiments with electronic music in the 1960s and 70s, Stockhausen, who composed more than 300 individual works, also had a significant impact on avant-garde and classical music.

The Beatles paid tribute to Stockhausen by putting him along with other icons on the cover of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Miles Davis and more recently Bjork have cited him as a musical influence.

"Any sound can become music if it is related to other sounds ... every sound is precious and can become beautiful if I put it at the right place, at the right moment," he once said in an interview. He also said he loved silence.

Stockhausen came under fire for comments about the September 11 attacks on the United States. He was quoted as saying the strikes were "the greatest work of art imaginable."

"Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert and then dying, just imagine what happened there," he was quoted as saying. He later said he meant that only the devil could have orchestrated the attacks.

EXPERIMENTS

Early in his career, Stockhausen dabbled in "musique concrete," recording everyday sounds, distorting them electronically and joining them together to form a composition.

From works for solo instruments to large-scale events mixing opera, dance and mime, Stockhausen said he aimed to awaken "a completely new consciousness" in listener and performer.

Born on August 22, 1928, in Burg Modrath, a village near Cologne, Stockhausen said he was badly scarred by his experience of World War Two, in which he was a stretcher-bearer.

His father, a schoolmaster, died serving in the German army.

In his 20s Stockhausen flirted with jazz, playing the piano to support himself through the Cologne Music School, where he gained a teaching certificate in 1951.

He had already begun to compose, and moved to Paris to study under composers Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.

His experiments with electronic music took off at the newly-founded West German Radio (WDR) Studio for New Music in Cologne, where he worked from 1953, later becoming its artistic director.

"With Karlheinz Stockhausen we have lost an extraordinary artist and avant-garde musician of international status," said Monika Piel, artistic director of WDR.

"Many composing principles which Stockhausen developed were ground-breaking and moulded a style for future generations."

Daniel Barenboim, after conducting a performance of Wagner in Milan on Friday, called Stockhausen "one of those composers that will I think always have an important place in the history of music."

He added: "He is someone who will have influence on the future evolution of music."

Stockhausen found his own ways of assembling sounds to form a composition, developing the ideas of an earlier generation of European composers, like Schoenberg, who composed around a series of sounds instead of developing and repeating a theme.

In early works Stockhausen explored not melody, but the quality and relation of one sound to another.

In a mix of solo and ensemble music, electronic and concrete techniques together with mime, a key work "Licht" was premiered at Milan's La Scala opera house in 1981, marking Stockhausen's increasing stature in conventional classical circles.

The composer was married twice and had six children. He will be buried in a forest cemetery in the town of Kuerten, near Cologne, said German media, quoting the Stockhausen Foundation.

- 30 -

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers; editing by Andrew Roche)

© Reuters 2007All rights reserved

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahh Stockhausen. See this is what happens when ppl start to think about music with their huge intellects instead of their hearts and feelings. One of the strangest things I EVER heard was a live performance of a Stockhausen compositiion by a string quartett....and a bloody helicopter. Beat Steve Reichs early experiment and that I Am Sitting In A Room thing by far. After that Hindemith sounded almost commercial to me and the Ramones were an ode to joy and life. sometimes even an idea can influence people, Paul McCartney, Kraftwerk and a lot of techno musicians claim to have been influenced by Stockhausen, not by the music, but by his ideas. one of the funnier things i ever heard in the Stockhausen universe was a band that called itself Stock, Hausen and Walkman. anyway, he was influential, maybe a bit vergeistigt as we say in german and he made me listen to a helicopter. So long and thamks for that experience

Vleeptron Dude said...

I thought his earlier piece, Quartet for Autogyro and Dirigible, was more charming.

I guess this is what happened. Everybody was waltzing and everything was in lovely harmony until World War One, the machine guns and the high explosives and the submarines and torpedos.

Then suddenly talented, original young European composers could no longer look backwards, their musical origins were shattered, their Reality simply could not be reflected by waltzing and the familiar, soothing old harmonies. (Kurt Weill had studied under Humperdinck of "Hansel und Gretel.")

But going Forward, ripped from continuity with the Past -- this is a real Crap Shoot, you don't know what the results will sound like and you don't know how the ears and hearts of the audience will respond. You would not want to make music boxes out of many tunes composed after 1918.

I guess you know here in the USA I am a freakazoid for the composer Charles Ives. Strange, strange noises -- but he succeeds, he touched my heart and shook my soul instantly. And Ives travels across the pond, I heard the Amsterdam Concertgebow play one of his symphonies, and they seemed very enthused and excited. Ives has a much more complicated relationship between the present (fl. 1920) and the American past -- the Civil War, the lost American hunting wilderness of his fathers and grandfathers.

But after catastrophic huge high-explosive wars, composers can't return to the old cliches anymore. Only hacks can keep waltzing as if nothing had changed. Original talents have no choice but to completely Invent a New Musical Future.

Anonymous said...

Well, me and xp are back inna house. and in order to support your theory here is a quote from a wiki article on the legendary band Kraftwerk
After the war, German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We cannot deny we are from Germany.“ (Ralf Hütter, Interview mit Lester Bangs, 1975)

("Nach dem Krieg war die deutsche Unterhaltungskultur zerstört. Die deutsche Bevölkerung wurde ihrer Kultur beraubt indem ihr ein amerikanischer Kopf aufgesetzt wurde. Ich denke, wir sind die erste Nachkriegsgeneration, die dies überwinden kann und weiß, wann wir amerikanische Musik genießen können und wann unsere eigene. Wir können nicht leugnen, aus Deutschland