Comments on: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pioneering Composer, Dies

By: Oshin Saginian

Oshin Saginian — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:16:43 +0000

All Karlheinz Stockhausen fans can listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen – “Hymnen” (Electronic & Concrete Music) (1966 – 67) on this web site

http://www.stockhausenmusic.com

By: BABEX_QUEEN

BABEX_QUEEN — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:44:11 +0000

WHEN I WAS CHILD KARLEINZ LOL

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:17:02 +0000

In the late 70s, I was the afternoon classical DJ at a midwest college’s public radio station. Mostly I played music from Mozart to early Prokofiev, although the PD encouraged me to play more adventurous stuff. Very seldom did I get any visitors in the afternoon.

Without having heard Stockhausen before, one afternoon I slipped “Anthems” onto the turntable, introduced it and pressed play. After about 5 minutes, the engineer wandered in from across the hall to express amused concern about what I was trying to do to his transmitter. After about 5 more minutes, the portly station manager puffed up the stairs to opine that the music would probably not appeal to many of the station’s listeners, and wondering how much longer it would last.

Many of us have probably “moved” our listeners in similar ways with our worthy experiments. Time brings familiarity, erases old prejudices. Even then, influence is undoubtedly a better testament than mere fame. Some trails blazed by hatchet-wielding pioneers eventually became highways.

By: Vanceg

Vanceg — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:13:53 +0000

My high school music teacher quickly realized I wasn’t really getting excited by the classical cannon. One day in music history class I complained that Beethoven really didn’t speak to me like Hendrix did. I wondered out loud if there wasn’t some ‘real composer’ who created sounds as out there as those in rock music, but with the care and attention that ‘real composers’ used. (c’mon, I was in high school!)

After class, he handed me two records: Gesang and Mikrophone.

That night, the skies opened up and the universe became a much, much larger place to me.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:07:42 +0000

You mention “flying”. The Helicopter String Quartet was instrumental in paving the way for a piece Rev. Dwight Frizzell did out in Kansas City called Sonic Force. He collaborated with the people at Whiteman Air Force base (the one that hosts the B2 Bomber) and recorded the A-10 Warthog in all its polytimbral glory. The concept being that all our military hardware can sound pretty musical after all and should be used that way.
It’s now performed live and includes Air Force marching band and other ensemble players.

Back in ‘78, we dug into Hymnen and Stimmung, and Sternklang and a bunch of others. Karlheinz was, along with Cage, Xenakis, and Ligeti, one seriously badass composer. We are changed because of him.

By: Amanda

Amanda — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:56:32 +0000

Thanks for the well-written obit Peter and the links :)

By: D. Frohman

D. Frohman — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 07:18:18 +0000

Stockhausen was a musical visionary who forsaw the digital era we live in today. Many of his pieces were structured events rather than musical expositions. That means rules, parameters, even scenarios were scripted in order to produce a sound experience unlike anything else and that’s exactly what transpired.

As an artist, it isn’t easy to produce work people basically aren’t going to like. For Stockhausen, who wanted to supercede what had been done to date, writing another concerto in the classical format - even using 12 tones or other atonal systems wasn’t going to cut it.

His contribution was to introduce and incorporate electonic sound into the classical instrument format and then sculpt compositional elements that followed systems, decisional parameters, event scenarios rather than the harmonic & melodic formats that had come before.

As such, his compositions will always sound abstract, futuristic and ground-breaking.

By: trudeau

trudeau — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:43:43 +0000

In the late 60’s I explored musique concrete and other avant garde work via the record collection in the Earl Long Memorial Library, Univ of New Orleans. Stockhausen’s Song of the Youths was one of the stunning pieces of the era. Wish I had a copy of it today.

By: scottl

scottl — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:34:19 +0000

wow - lots of stockhausen memories, myself. highly influential. i
remember studying robin maconies 1970’s era book on him while an
undergrad and listening to mostly electronic works and things like
gruppen, punkte, carre, etc. the thing i was really struck with was
how he would come up with a method for organizing a piece of music, and that method could be used to write dozens of pieces, all different and fresh. yet, each time he’d come up with a different form to organize the next work, which would go in a completely different
direction from the one before. it’s like each one of his pieces would
be a style of its own. eventually after the 70s and the beginning of
the Licht cycle he settled down somewhat into a recognizable style but still produced amazing and interesting music, the content and true depth of which will likely remain unsurpassed for generations to come.

like cage he believed that music had a purpose that was divine and
holy, yet explored it in a different way. the results can be profound,
amazing enlightening, but also ponderous and overly long (esp the
opera stuff) but to me, i feel strongly the fault isn’t with him -
it’s me. it seems a bit of hero worship, but i feel he’s always had
the human race’s interest at heart, even though i might not be getting the message at this point in my life. i get the feeling he was
creating art mainly for the humans of the future, not neccessarily the
present, and i get a glimpse of it every so often.

of course i love when he’s interviewed about the IDM musicians and
tells them they should be listening to certain pieces of his music. i
mean, this is coming from the guy who basically INVENTED electronic
music based on electronic tones using magnetic tape, a pioneer of
musique concrete, and ran filters and ring modulators on live
instruments in the early 1960s. interestingly enough i love their
response - basically ‘you should listen to more groove based, simple
harmonic structured music’, which is what Stockhausen was mainly
complaining about.

a recent listening of hymnen with a multichannel setiup convinced me how amazingly fresh and timeless that 45 year old music still is - the sounds that he created using tape machines and oscillators rival and even surpass anything you could reproduce digitally using max/msp or reaktor.

anyway - a great composer, an egomaniac with the work and ideas to
back it up, a singular voice of modern music - he will be missed.

scott

By: Another Soundscape

Another Soundscape — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:32:25 +0000

I don’t usually comment here but I felt I wanted to know. Stockhausen was a genius, I hope he rests in peace and that he enjoys watching how generation after generation will be influenced by him and his music.