Watch the incredible
Hlicopter String Quartet
When Karlheinz Stockhausen died in December last year, at 79, he was
celebrated as a rare being within the usually hermetically sealed world of
contemporary music, an unapologetically gnarly composer who had sidestepped
into mainstream consciousness.
Now a tribute festival, the weeklong Klang event at the Southbank Centre in
London, will be a rare opportunity to hear a wide range of the German
composer’s music. But as celebrity supporters such as Björk settle into
their seats alongside electronic music buffs, new music fans and listeners
steered to his music by the Beatles and Frank Zappa, uncomfortable issues
may overshadow the celebrations.
Four decades after celebrity endorsements, and an era when Stockhausen was new
music to Joe Public in the way that Louis Armstrong personified jazz, he
died with his reputation in tatters, the brilliance of his early career
compromised by an unhinged rock-star ego, and a catalogue of late works that
ranged from ho-hum ordinary to troublingly banal.
Rumours about peculiarities in his personal life, numerous estranged children
and disillusioned supporters, and an insensitive remark about the September
11 attacks meant that Stockhausen the man had become more of a story than
Stockhausen the composer.
But in 1966, Stockhausen mattered. He was included on the pop-art montage
cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Zappa cited
him in the liner notes to Freak Out!. Behind him was a decade of discovery
and innovation that had indelibly altered modern composition.
Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) and Kontakte (1958-60)
essentially created the aesthetic milieu of electronic music that has
sustained it since; in Gruppen (1955-57) he divided an orchestra into
three groups to explore how sound might be boomed spatially around a hall;
and his Klavierstücke (1952-54) invented a fresh syntax for
piano writing that nudged harmony into a persistently evolving flow of
sound.
The first inklings of his damaging ego date back to 1961: “He excommunicated
himself from the Catholic Church when he left his first wife for another
woman because, as an adulterer, he could no longer accept Holy Communion,”
Suzanne Stephens, a clarinettist, and one of two concurrent “wives” who
survived Stockhausen, explains from Stockhausen HQ in the town of Kürten,
near Cologne. “That opened him up to other philosophies and religions, and
he found that all religions have in common the idea of a family of man, one
with God.”
It isn’t usually in the gift of Roman Catholics to excommunicate themselves
and this was an early signal of Stockhausen placing himself above doctrine,
and of his capacity for self-justification. After that, he began to speak
about being born on the planet Sirius; he adopted a close circle of “yes”
people who bolstered his ego farther; and took two companions, Stephens and
the flautist Kathinka Pasveer, causing many raised eyebrows.
With Stephens there is a line that must not be crossed. She will talk about
the music, quoting chunks of Stockhausen at length, but adroitly dodges
questions about the personal side of their relationship. “When you’ve been
with someone for 33 years, it’s tough to lose them,” she reflects. “With the
20-year age difference, he knew this would happen some day, and he prepared
us — Kathinka and I — for many years, as far the Stockhausen Foundation
goes.” And that’s where the discussion ends, with an implication that there
was no distinction between the personal and the musical.
Stephens and Pasveer were his constant companions, and when I interviewed
Stockhausen in 2000 they semi-benevolently, semi-intimidatingly watched me
throughout. Stockhausen was, of course, powerfully articulate about his
work, but shot back a Captain Mainwaring-style “stupid boy” look when I
mentioned Charles Ives’s concepts of simultaneously overlaid musics in
relation to Gruppen. The tension was palpable.
For all his fierce intelligence, belief needed to be suspended before entry
into his Willy Wonka world for an interview was permitted, and when
Stockhausen attempted to deal with real life, he floundered embarrassingly.
Two days after September 11, 2001, he remarked at a press conference that
the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre were “Lucifer’s greatest
work of art”. His comments were actually a more subtle metaphor than anyone
realised at the time: he was speaking about the aesthetics of horrible
beauty and the archetypal figure of Lucifer — also a character in his opera Licht
— turning the word upside down.
However his assumption that anyone would care what he thought in the midst of
the biggest terrorist attack of modern times, let alone refracted through
Licht, shows how cavalier Stockhausen had become about a world outside his
own. “Karlheinz made his statement at the wrong time,” Stephens says now.
“No one wanted to be consoled, they wanted to find bin Laden and couldn’t,
so pounced on Karlheinz to make him a scapegoat.”
Did Stockhausen hold political affiliations, or was he simply being naive?
Stephens says that Stockhausen was “apolitical”, but the official
Stockhausen website is maintained by Jim Stonebraker, a man who flips every
stereotype about new music fans on its head.
A member of the Republican Party in America and of the National Rifle
Association, Stonebraker began a correspondence with Stockhausen in 1975 and
became close to him after issuing statements defending his 9/11 comments.
His own website includes photographs of Stonebraker with Stockhausen, but
also one in which he has his arm around Ronald Reagan above a swaggering
caption: “Two rightwingers”.
“Stockhausen was accused early in his career of being in the service of the
bourgeois,” Stonebraker tells me from his home in St Louis. “There was a lot
of negative stuff by British and Italian composers in particular, countries
that promoted egalitarianism and socialism. Stockhausen was an
individualist, and he told me how distraught he was about Germany’s
socialist orientation.” Did the two men talk about Stonebraker’s own
political credo? “I told him about Reagan, and my admiration for Margaret
Thatcher. He didn’t contradict me. I know he wrote a letter to Angela Merkel
to express his support.”
The personal and the political would be meaningless tittle-tattle if
Stockhausen’s increasing megalomania and lack of self-critical awareness
hadn’t coloured his music. Licht took him 30 years, and is
chronically uneven, scarred by overbearing self-indulgence. From a composer
who, at one time, seemed perpetually ahead of the curve, and of the next one
again, it marks a tragic comedown. At the Southbank festival the rule of
thumb must be: the earlier the piece, the better. Let’s put the ego aside,
and celebrate the Stockhausen works that count.
Taking Stock: five uneasy pieces
Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)
Routinely described as the moment electronic music properly arrived.
Stockhausen mixes the human voice and electronic sounds in a meditation
about the fiery furnace from the Book of Daniel.
Kontakte (1958-60)
An essay for piano, percussion and electronics in which musical parameters
are deconstructed, meshed together and put in dialectic opposition.
Gruppen (1955-57)
Musical material passes around three orchestras in a concert hall and is
transformed by the spacial interaction.
Trans (1971)
The orchestra sits behind a violet gauze. The string section changes harmony
according to the thump of a weaving loom.
Helicopter String Quartet (1992-93)
Each member of the Arditti Quartet was in a helicopter beaming back their
parts to Earth, where they were mixed with the sounds of the helicopter
blades.
— Klang: A Tribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen begins on Nov 1 at the
Southbank Centre, London SE1 (0871 6632500)
