I was really sad to learn of the passing of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
From 1972 to 1976, he was my hero. I wanted to go to Germany and study with this god of contemporary music. I studied his scores with a Talmudic fervor. I loved his constant ability to reinvent the way music could be made. I could never really understand what he did with pitches, and after a certain point, I decided that it didn’t really matter.
I bought every LP that Deutsche Gramophone ever put out of his music. I remember fondly opening the plastic cover, and carefully extracting the vinyl, smelling that wonderful plastic smell, and putting it on the turntable, holding my breath, waiting to hear the latest from my German hero.
And then, he seemed to get weird.
In the late 60s he put out some poem compositions called From the Seven Days, sounding positively biblical. These were little Yoko Ono style poems telling you what to do. “Play a note in the rhythm of your self, meld it with the rhythm of the universe…” or something like that. Wow. Far out. Deutsche Gramophone issued a multi-album set of the Stockhausen group “realizing” these scores, for the rest of the world to appreciate. What started happening is that colleges around the world started “performing” these pieces, not having the chops to perform his other pyrotechnical notated music. As Karlheinz toured the world to hear these realizations, he was in horror to hear what he heard. He immediately sent out an edict that no one was to perform his music without his permission. So there. Wow…
By 1978, I was starting to come out as a tonal composer and had less and less interest in following KS’s career. At Tanglewood that summer, Gunther told us that Stockhausen had been “propped up” by the German government to ensure German supremacy in contemporary music. Everything he ever excreted (to used Paul Reale’s term) was published by Universal and recorded on DG. Now, you can get all that stuff on Stockhausen’s website for lots of money.
You changed the world Karlheinz, and you changed me. And for that, I thank you and we will miss you. Farewell Brother Karlheinz!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Roger –
Those remarks by Schuller are totally off-base. If you trace Stockhausen’s successive falling-outs with Darmstadt, UE, DG, the Musikhochschule in Cologne (where political pressure essentially forced him to give up his professorship), the steady decline in support at the WDR studio, and a series of cancellations of planned performances that would have crushed most of us, then note how he had to replace each institutional setting with his own resources, essentially forming a cottage industry around his own music, teaching it, publishing it, recording it, performing it, and archiving all of the activities. The net costs to Stockhausen of buying back his score and recording catalogues surely offset any income he once may have derived from them.
There is a steady trope about how much better the Europeans (and the Germans in particular) have it with the assumption that publishing and commissioning were functioning more or less as they had in the 19th century. It’s far from the case, and at best only somewhat true even for composers who produce work in the most traditional formats (Henze, for example). The three chief sources of support for new music here have essentially dried up — the radio stations, GEMA, and the German Music Council. And Germany does not have several hundred professorships in composition to make up for this, as in the US, but perhaps only 40-50. And the teaching situations here are far from comparable with the States, rarely, for example, does a Musikhochschule have an auditorium as good as one found in a typical Jr. College in the US! When the institutions here function, they can do so superbly, for example the Tonmeister tradition of recording, but this comes at great cost and is ever rarer. So the next time someone puts on the poor mouth about US versus Europe (and the above, with Germany, illustrates only the best situation, with most countries performing at a far lower level of support), take it with some salt.
Thanks for the reality check Daniel. Might this have been true in the early 60s? That is, the support KS from UE and DG?
I sometimes feel guilty for commenting, as my aleatoric style seems to stop many a discussion, but I will risk it again here, but please take it with a grain of something…
Perhaps Gunther Schuller was projecting his own situation, after all, the CIA’s propping up of all sorts of modern artists and composers, with the desire to show off the USA’s artistic superiority,has been fairly well documented.
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