Karlheinz Stockhausen Tribute
A TRIBUTE TO KARL-HEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
The sudden and unexpected death of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen seems to have taken us all by surprise. There were generous tributes by most of the obituary writers (or at lest the one I read!) and mentions in radio and television newscasts. BBC Radio 3 managed two tribute programmes last Saturday in which the more obvious things were said and the more obvious pieces (or extracts from them) were played. I, and I am sure many others, look forward to more comprehensive tributes to follow in the New Year both on radio and television and in national concert halls in London and up and down the country.
I don't think it is going too far to claim for Stockhausen that he is, in many ways, the ‘Wagner of the 20th century." By this I mean mainly that no musician can entirely escape his influence: one either acts positively or negatively; one cannot ignore him.
If I could give just a few examples of his (inescapable) influence:
- The socalled ‘Related Tempi'. These were used in Gruppen where, among other things, Stockhausen set out to demonstrate a correspondence between pitch relationships and temporal relationships. For example if a musical phrase in A with crotchet 60 is recorded and speeded up to sound in E (a 5th higher) the speed will increase to crotchet 90; conversely if it is slowed down to sound in D (a 5th lower) the speed will be slowed to crotchet 40. Stockhausen continued this round the cycle of 5ths to cover all 12 pitch classes, thus giving a corresponding tempo for each pitch class. These ‘related tempi' have been used by a number of composers, notably by Birtwistle in Pulse Sampler and Silbury Air.
- Stockhausen's use of graphic notation, beginning with that which he devised for the tape part of Kontakte and continuing through the Plus-minus scores, together with his use of verbal instruction either alone or in combination with musical notation. In this Stockhausen differs from Cage in that whereas Cage intended genuinely ‘chance' results, Stockhausen always remained in control of the composition.
- His pioneering work in electronic music.
- His use of ‘Moment Form' which Jonathan Harvey describes as the only truly ‘new' formal concept to arise in post-1945 music. Moment Form is basically serial, consisting of a series of sections each with its own characteristics (duration, tone colour, density, etc) which may be related to surrounding moments either by similarity or by contrast, or any stage in between. (Originally Stockhausen claimed that each moment should be heard as a separate entity unrelated to the surrounding moments, but he later retreated from this. In any case the human mind is such that it will seek relationships between successive events, so that a composition such as Kontacte or Mixtur will take on a ‘goal-direction', particularly after repeated hearings.
- His use of a ‘Mantra' - a particular musical shape (gestalt) - to unify and inform an entire composition.
- Stockhausen's music had a certain influence on Jazz and popular music. Here musicians were more interested in the actual sounds of his music than in his compositional methods.
Alan Parsons December 2007
