Interview for the Guardian
(5. 10. 2005)
Music - works:
You're performing OKTOPHONIE, an excerpt from LICHT, as well as an earlier
piece, KONTAKTE, in London. Why programme these two pieces together?
Stockhausen: The organizer of FRIEZE, Matthew Slotover, came on April 27th to
The Tramway in Glasgow, where I performed my electronic works WEDNESDAY
GREETING and WEDNESDAY FAREWELL, which he seemed to like a lot. He
asked later in a letter if I could perform KONTAKTE and OKTOPHONIE which I
also performed during the TRIPTYCH festival on April 29th at Edinburgh. Perhaps he
had heard that the public liked these electronic compositions very much. The
combination of KONTAKTE (quadraphonic electronic music from 19581950) and
OKTOPHONIE (octophonic electronic music from 19901991) makes it clear how
much the space composition has evolved from the horizontal to the vertical music.
What attracted to you perform in this space in London, in a festival of contemporary
visual art?
Stockausen: Visual art is for the eyes, for the visible world; the New Space Music is
for the ears, for the invisible world (I switch out the lights during the projections of
my space music).
Licht has occupied your creative energies for nearly 30 years. With the cycle finally
completed, what are your feelings about what you have achieved?
Stockhausen: LICHT is giving a new musical meaning to the seven days of the week.
I composed 29 hours of music, approximately 4 hours for every week day.
OKTOPHONIE is from the second act of TUESDAY from LIGHT.
There are planned performances of the complete cycle in 2008. What are the practical
challenges of mounting the complete cycle?
Stockhausen: Two institutions have published their intention to perform the complete
cycle of LICHT: The city of Essen, representing a group of cities in North Rhine
Westfalia, trying to become the European City of Culture in 2010, and the European
Centre of Art in Hellerau (near Dresden) in 2008.
The real challenge is to find seven stage directors and stage designers, 7 conductors,
5 orchestras, 1 childrens orchestra, 9 professional choirs, 2 childrens choirs, 1 girls
choir (1 mixed choir for MONDAY, one childrens choir and one girls choir; 1
mixed choir for TUESDAY; 2 for WEDNESDAY; 1 for THURSDAY; 1 for
FRIDAY plus one childrens choir; 1 mens choir for SATURDAY; 2 mixed choirs
for SUNDAY); 7 sound projectionists, 7 sound technicians, many soloists.
This is all possible if one can engage the ensembles and soloists who have already
performed parts of LICHT quasi scenically in concerts and rehearse in 7 auditoriums
daily for about 6 months.
Do you worry that since Licht is so completely identified with your creative
personality, as composer and performer, that the seven works will not continue to
have a performance tradition without their creator?
Stockhausen: Many excellent performers have realized together with me parts of
LICHT since 1977. Several are teaching. The spirit which gave life to LICHT will not
die.
Having created a cosmic metaphor for creation and regeneration in the seven parts of
Licht, what other aspects of human and sonic experience remain to be explored by
you?
Stockhausen: After LICHT The Seven Days of the Week, I started KLANG
(SOUND) The 24 Hours of the Day. I have composed the first, third and fourth
hour up to now and will compose now the Second Hour.
Human: Please study the relations between the hours of the day and the organs of the
human body. Sonic: Concentrating on a certain hour of the day, I hear a specific
music (1st hour: organ with soprano and tenor; 2nd hour: two harps; 3rd hour: piano;
4th hour: one percussionist banging at the heavenly door, etc.).
Music aesthetics:
How do you see the relationship between electronic and acoustic sound today? Are
we closer to a union between these two previously opposed poles of sonic experience?
Stockhausen: Electronic and vocal / instrumental music belong both to our
possibilities to develop our soul and spirit through listening. I dont understand
previously opposed: I have composed since 1950 all kinds of music.
Is your music an extension of your personality or a universal statement?
Stockhausen: My personality is a universal statement, as any stone, plant, animal,
human being, angel. GOD is working!
Are sound and music for you moral or amoral phenomena?
Stockhausen: Music is moral for each listener who gives himself for listening: one can
become the music.
How is your cosmic experience communicated in your works?
Stockhausen: Whenever my music or a moment in my music transports a listener into
the beyond transcending time and space he experiences cosmic dimensions.
What are your compositional projects for the future?
Stockhausen: After SIRIUS (the Year with the 12 months), LICHT (the Week of the 7
Days), KLANG (the Day with the 24 Hours), I want to compose the HOUR.
Music and the world:
How do you view the current geo-political climate?
Stockhausen: Bad! Yesterday I read that 1969 a tremendous killer-cyclone killed
several million people: also bad. Or not? And the Deluge, the Flood? The atom
bombs?
Can music - your music in particular - offer metaphorical solutions for the mundane
problems of the world today?
Stockhausen: My music has already reduced enormously the mundane problems of
the world. The incredible number of hours of all people listening to my works
(thinking of all the CDs, films, concerts) is keeping the listeners away from the
mundane problems. If someone wants to experience each composition just once, he
needs to have a least 130 free hours of listening quietly to the ca. 130 CDs, and many
have already bought all my CDs.
What is the relationship between the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of political
acts of insurgence, oppression, even terrorism?
Stockhausen: Political acts are aiming for possession. Listening to Art Music is
self-forgetting.
What is the future for music and listening in an age of fear and paranoia, of terroristobsessed media and warmongering politicians?
Stockhausen: The future of music lies in the individuals who are listening to and
studying the scores of good compositions. We are not living in a era of musically
cultured media and politicians.
You called, half a century ago - a cry repeated on your visit to London in 2000 for
performances of Gruppen - for the establishment of genuinely flexible concert halls,
able to deal with and respond to the diversity of spatial realisation required in
contemporary music. Is progress being made?
Stockhausen: I do not see any progress in space architecture for music.
Where do you detect the greatest potential for the realisation of contemporary
musical creativity: in electronics and studio-based work (including popular
musicians) or the continuing development of acoustic musical culture?
Stockhausen: As the tremendous historical transitions from ensembles producing
sounds, to individuals working in studios and a few soloists rehearsing as much as
necessary, is still in the process of changing, we must wait a long time. For my last
work of 41 minutes LICHT-BILDER (LIGHT-PICTURES) for basset-horn, flute with
ring modulation, tenor, trumpet with ringmodulation, synthesizer, sound projectionist
we rehearsed 62 days, seven hours per day.
Life, routine, history:
How do you compose? What is your daily routine?
Stockhausen: composing can be only a part of the days. Producing CDs, scores,
books, answering the mail, interviews, supervising the work in the garden or
participating myself are also necessary (last night our heating system fell out!).
Routine: I sleep if possible 89 hours per day. The rest goes as it goes.
How do your domestic surroundings in Germany affect your work?
Stockhausen: Our Gemeinderat (local community) gives us about two weeks every
year already 8 years the school for concerts and courses of the Stockhausen-Courses
for music (in which about 140 composers, interpreters, musicologists, music lovers
from 24 countries participate each year).
What is your relationship with the performers closest to you? Is there a school of
Stockhausen performance, and one that you would like to control?
Stockhausen: The best interpreters of my music teach during these courses, but also a
lot during the year. Perhaps you can help to find good trumpeters who follow the
courses of our trumpeter Marco Blaauw, because we need more trumpeters
performing my works. Relationship: I write for them.
How do you see the future of your music? How important is it to you that you have
control over the publishing and recording of your works?
Stockhausen: My works will continue after I die. We have a Stockhausen Foundation
for Music.
Do you see your output as a continuum: are pieces like the KLAVIERSTCKE of the
50s really part of the same creative world as LICHT and the works you write in the
future?
Stockhausen: A continuum, yes, because I have added work after work adding what I
did not know and had not learned before. The continuum is evolution.
Do you see yourself in a musical tradition?
Stockhausen: I cannot help it being the grand child of great composers.
You have been written about probably more than any other twentieth century
composer: how do you relate to the 'Stockhausen' phenomenon constructed in
biographies, articles, and films - do you recognise yourself?
Stockhausen: Sometimes I recognize the truth about my life and works, sometimes not
at all writers are mainly writing about themselves. But there is always hope!
K. Stockhausen, October 2005
www.stockhausen.org)
