KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

K. Stockhausen (b. 1928), a German composer and theorist, is regarded as the leader of electronic avant-garde. He has pioneered electronic music, new uses of physical space in music, open forms,* live-electronic performance, "intuitive music" and many other important developments in music after 1950. In his music and in his writings, he has evolved a uniquely coherent system of generalizations from the premises of total serialism, paying attention to aesthetic and philosophical conse­quences as well as matters of technique and music theory. Each of his discoveries is compellingly demonstrated in his music. He has also been widely active as a teacher, and has taken part - as either conductor or performer-in many perfor­mances of his own music, forming his own performing group in 1964.

Stockhausen was born near Cologne in 1928. His education was interrupted by World War II. From 1947 to 1951 he studied piano and theory at the Cologne Music-Hochschule. He then worked for a time with Frank Martin, before going to Paris, where Milhaud and, more significantly, Messiàen were his main teachers. His earliest sur­viving works, which date from this period, already show the influ­ence of Messiaen's music. But Stockhausen was already under the spell of Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrete,* and an authority of the as yet primitive techniques of electronic composition. Stockhausen undertook a close study of these techniques, and soon composed some of the earliest works using exclusively synthesised, or electronically generated sound.

In his music electronics proved to be of great importance. Not only did he pioneer the use of electronics in live performed music (Kontakte* 1959, Mikrophonie I and II, 1964-65) but he also intro­duced related techniques into music for conventional instruments, no­tably in "spatial works", such as Gruppen* for three orchestras (1957) and Carre for four orchestras (1960). In all these works sonority is of supreme importance. But in some other works of the 1950s, Stockhausen experimented with chance, or aleatoric, techniques (notably the Piano Piece No. 11, of 1956).

1957 was the year in which Stockhausen was first invited to teach composition at the Darmstadt summer courses, where he had been giving lectures since 1953. In the course of a few years he de­veloped highly individual teaching methods which resulted in an un­usual degree of collective work within the groups of composers who came to him. His renown as a teacher soon began to rival that of his own teacher Messiaen. In 1963 he founded the Cologne Courses

for New Music, later to become the Cologne Institute for New Music. And at the end of 1958 Stockhausen embarked on the first of his concert and lecture tours of the USA.

As part of his work for Darmstadt, Stockhausen composed a test piece for percussion players in 1959.

In the concept of the "moment" Stockhausen sought a resolution of listeners' difficulties in experiencing form in serial music. Each in­dividually characterized passage in a work is regarded as an experi­ential unit, a "moment", which can potentially engage the listener's full attention and can do so in exactly the same measure as its neighbours. No single "moment" claims priority, even as a beginning or ending; hence the nature of such a work is essentially "unending" (and, indeed, "unbeginning"). Significantly, each "moment" is, in Stockhausen's view, equally dispensable, rather than equally indispensable, to the listener: his unending forms are the outcome not only of his pursuit of equality among all constituents of a work, but also of his leanings towards indeterminacy, which he accurately enough attributes to the durations and intensities of his listeners' attentiveness. The listener's unpredictable ecstatic involvement with the "now" of one "moment" can be bought only at the risk of his equally unpredictable withdrawal from some other. Such "moments", grouped in succession to make up a "moment form", formed the structural constituents of Kontakte (1959-60), a work which appeared both as a purely electronic composition and as "Kontakte for electronic sounds, piano and percussion". Another example of "music in space", with four loudspeaker groups placed around the auditorium, Kontakte presents an encounter between electronic music and instrumental music with the emphasis on shared characteristics of timbre.

His major work using open form, on which he began work in 1961, is Momente for soprano solo, four choral groups and 13 in­strumentalists. The work is designed as a sequence of "moments" some of which may be omitted as occasion demands. The general structure is such that additional moments have been inserted freely in subsequent versions without necessitating any alteration to the ex­isting music. In this work, Stockhausen's imaginative range in com­bining words with music reaches perhaps its fullest expression; the texts are taken from many sources (the Song of Songs, Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages, passages from letters and personal names, onomatopoeic words* and samples of audience reaction), but the role of the chorus is not restricted to singing - it also makes clicking, stamping and clapping noises and performs on small percus­sion instruments.

From: The Dictionary of Composers; The New Grove Dictionary

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 812