Robin Maconie
OTHER PLANETS
The music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
579pp. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. $39.95.
0 8108 5356 6
In 1967, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s face appeared on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – between Lenny Bruce and W. C. Fields. In September 2001 he achieved a different kind of immortality when Die Zeit quoted (or, he claims, misquoted) him as saying that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the “greatest work of art there has been”. The remark convinced many that the once-famous composer had long since jumped off the deep end; it also seemed to signal the end of what might be termed da Vincian vangardism – the grandiose claim by a composer to be prophet, inventor, scientist, philosopher and spiritual guide. Other Planets, Robin Maconie’s latest book about Stockhausen, reads, appropriately enough, like a cross between conventional musical history and The Da Vinci Code. In addition to laying out the facts about every work in Stockhausen’s large oeuvre, Maconie promises to reveal how a “latent philosophical agenda” in the music addresses “the historic aspirations of German nationalism, and more specifically a defense of the role of post-Enlightenment European culture in the wider world” and, beyond that, to show how serialism is part of a “grander aesthetic and intellectual enterprise, beginning in the late eighteenth century, concerning the nature and evolution of language and its implications for post-revolutionary democracy”. In place of Dan Brown’s Last Supper, Maconie hinges his mad dash through cultural history on Jean-François Champollion’s decoding of the Rosetta Stone; Olivier Messiaen had once compared the young Stockhausen to the French decrypter. Where Brown pits the Catholic Church against the Knights of the Temple, Maconie fashions his catalogue raisonné around an esoteric battle between Saussurean “lettrists” and Goethean holists.
Perhaps it takes a nutty commentator to crack a nutty composer. Maconie points out from the start that the name Karlheinz Stockhausen contains the words Ein and Aus (in and out): “to the cabbalist, this is a profound and awe-inspiring mystery”. He warns us that, after spending many years conversing with the composer, he can no longer remember which ideas are Stockhausen’s and which are his own. That said, the book is often great fun to read, and full of provocative nuggets of information; it is stimulating to wallow in the mudbath of Maconie’s endless erudition. In a chapter called “Rhythmic Cells”, for instance, Maconie connects Messiaen, R. H. Stetson (author of Motor Phonetics), Alexander Graham Bell, Champollion, François Thureau-Dangin (the first translator of Sumerian into French), the Abbé Rousselot, William James, Hugo Münsterberg, Gertrude Stein, Philip Glass and John Adams in the space of three breathless paragraphs. We might call this grouping of far-flung figures Professor Maconie’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Maconie’s big idea is that serialism, the justification for which, he says, remains “inconclusive and unpersuasive”, was part of a larger movement in the understanding of language as code.
Given the size of the book and Maconie’s intimate knowledge of the man and his music, it is perhaps surprising that there is little musical analysis and few musical examples. Jonathan Harvey’s Music of Stockhausen remains a better source for nuts-and-bolts data; Maconie’s book of interviews with the composer, Stockhausen on Music, is a less cluttered guide to the composer’s sensibility. The extravagant, speculative nature of the new book is potentially valuable, however. Maconie begins with a challenge from Stockhausen to explain his music without recourse to biography: “My parents did not choose to make me what I am, nor did the country in which I was born. Rather, they are chosen – identified – in me: in that ‘me’ which is known in my works”. Stockhausen has a long history of biographical references in his music – he built his epic music theatre work LICHT around the talents of family members who enact a ritualized autobiographical pageant. His denial of biographical significance seems perverse, but Maconie complies, leaving the reader in the dark about, for instance, Stockhausen’s mentor, Professor Werner Meyer-Eppler, and his evolving ménage. Rather than simply accept the composer’s mystical idea that the essence of his music is like the hole in the middle of the wheel, however, Maconie fills that hole, and pumps up the tyres, with a history of ideas, placing Stockhausen at the center of the zeitgeist. Since so much contemporary art music seems peripheral today, Maconie’s attempt to justify Stockhausen’s music by neo-Hegelian means is admirably quixotic. But Stockhausen is a difficult case. Once the acknowledged leader of advanced music, he has spent the last thirty years, half of his creative life, in relative obscurity, composing LICHT, which has yet to be performed in its seven-day, twenty-nine-hour entirety. His public pronouncements, even before 9/11, have become increasingly bizarre, especially his claim to have come from a galaxy far away: hence Maconie’s title, with a bow to the “other planets” in the Stefan George poem that rocketed Schoenberg’s String Quartet No 2 beyond tonal gravity.
Though he can be critical, Maconie seems too close to the scene to convey the oddity of avant-garde music. After the Second World War, the victorious powers rebuilt European musical life. By the early 1950s, a group of composers in their twenties – Boulez, Nono, Berio, Maderna, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Xenakis – appeared to give music a fresh start. This had happened before. In the 1920s, a similar strategy created a “new music” free of ties to the German imperial past. Hindemith and Weill vaulted youthfully to stardom, Hindemith speaking the holistic language of German humanism, and Weill broadcasting Brechtian leftism. In Berlin, Busoni played the role of technological guru, while in Vienna Schoenberg retooled his pre-war Expressionism with the more objective twelve-tone technique. The only really new element in this new music came from America, with the seductive, disorienting arrival of jazz.
Thirty years later, “new music” was again brought forth from on high. With an older generation of composers – Bartók, Hindemith, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Varèse, Weill – in American absentia, and another generation – Krasa, Ullmann, Haas – slaughtered, the future was left to a group of very young composers mostly trained by Olivier Messiaen, who had risen to prominence during the Occupation and now played the Busoni role as inspirer of youth. His students based their new music on Schoenberg’s serialism, a technique and composer reviled by the Nazi regime, but they quickly distanced themselves from a music that itself was embedded in a pre-war musical culture they hardly knew. Although the standard texts on the period portray the new style as a logical extention of musical Modernism, it owed its success (and the terms of its success) to non-musical circumstances. Even more than after the First World War, there was a political imperative to create a musical style with no apparent link to the past; the particular form of new music that triumphed was perfectly tailored to the emerging political landscape. Based in state-supported music festivals and radio stations, far from the concert world and its audience, the music of what came to be known as the Darmstadt School mirrored the ideals of the EEC: technology and technocracy would trump history, European unity would take the place of poisonous nationalism. Emphasizing its European identity, the new music not only cut ties with a musical past tainted by Nazi associations, but also rejected the influence of Soviet populism and American jazz. In the real world, of course, concert music soon re-established itself, and on either side of the Iron Curtain Soviet and American music filled the airwaves, but the “new music” took shape as a utopian research and development operation and succeeded not by gaining an audience, or entering the concert repertory, but by appealing to the intellectual elite. Even the appearance of value-free science was deceptive, however, as Maconie reveals. Electronic technology had been developed for purposes of military espionage during the war; Europe was littered with primitive recording devices and voice-detection and encryption hardware. Out of this technological trash heap, electronic music was born, and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge was hailed as the first masterpiece in the new genre when it appeared in 1956.
Although he surfaced a few years after Boulez had made his mark, Stockhausen was a more plausible emblem of a radically new Europe. Born in 1928, he could be seen, as many Germans saw themselves, as a victim of the Nazi regime. He lost both parents during the war; his chronically depressed mother was killed along with other psychiatric patients deemed unworthy of life, his father died on the Eastern front. An early mastery of English allowed Stockhausen two modes of escape that would shape his future: secretly listening to American jazz on short-wave radio, and easy communication with the post-war authorities, American soldiers and, later, with American composers. Maconie amply documents the pervasive American influence on Stockhausen’s music of everyone from Glenn Miller to John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Henry Brant and Philip Glass – a breadth of influence quite alien to Boulez.
Stockhausen seemed like a model new German, too young to share Nazi guilt, but also disconnected from the complex cultural world of Weimar; he took an instant dislike to Adorno and to the exiled German intellectuals he encountered in America. Following the post-war canons of aesthetic correctness, Stockhausen’s music never referred explicitly to Nazi atrocities, though it could be read as some kind of abstract response. Stockhausen based Gesang der Jünglinge on a passage from the Book of Daniel – the three boys in the fiery furnace – but treated the source material (sung by Stockhausen’s son), abstractly, as if the words were merely so many syllables. A listener could interpret the statistical treatment of the source material either as a properly distanced memorial to the victims of the Nazi death camps or as an aestheticization of the unspeakable. Maconie tracks many instances of Stockhausen skating over this moral abyss throughout his career, though he usually finds grounds for exoneration. Gesang sprang from an analysis of phonemes inspired by Meyer-Eppler. A theoretical physicist before the war (but working on what, and where?), Meyer-Eppler reinvented himself afterwards as a professor of Phonetics. His work on speech analysis brought him into contact with the new technology of the tape recorder and in 1950 he co-founded the Electronic Music Studio at Radio Cologne along with the inventor Robert Beyer and the composer Herbert Eimert. Maconie claims that Meyer-Eppler’s death in 1959 caused a decisive turn in Stockhausen’s development, but reveals little about their personal relationship.
The music of what we might now term Stockhausen’s “classic period”, from Kontrapunkte of 1953 to Hymnen of 1967, brought together three distinct techniques: musique concrète, based on the the manipulation of recorded sounds; electronic music, based on the synthetic generation of sounds; and serialism. Connecting these concepts, Stockhausen completely transformed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone idea. In Schoenberg’s music, the series functioned to stabilize atonality so that it could sustain formal designs on the scale of the classical sonata. This allowed his music, and that of Berg and Webern, to re-establish a connection with the past while maintaining the decisive move away from tonality. Most of their twelve-tone compositions are part of the larger movement misnamed neo-classicism which, far from regressing to past practice, established a complex dialogue between past and present, as exemplified in works as different as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Berg’s Violin Concerto, Webern’s Symphony, Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. All these works counterpoint modernist dissonance and angularity with a classical model. For Stockhausen and his generation, serialism was not about the past and present but about the future. To prevent the return of old habits, serial technique became a systematic means of disordering all musical parameters. The technology of electronic sound analysis and synthesis facilitated this novel approach to composition. Following Meyer-Eppler, Stockhausen used the series to think of music in statistical terms, as a range of possibilities stemming from certain basic elements. Each piece would rigorously expose all the possible combinations of pitch, duration, dynamics, attack, range; even the sequence of events could be produced by statistical means. The technique sometimes induced the numbing fascination of a kaleidoscope; but in some works, notably Gesang der Jünglinge and Gruppen, Stockhausen tweaked the system to give the music a more conventionally dramatic shape. The huge brass climax in Gruppen, which sounds like Gabrieli rewritten by Stan Kenton, was a non-systematic insertion that guaranteed the works success with an audience – Stockhausen was more audience-conscious than you might expect.
If American jazz upset the neat system of musical revival after the First World War, American anarchism as preached by John Cage was the joker in the pack of the new music of the 1950s. Dumping the entire European musical tradition was already a done deed for Cage, who had written his Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios back in 1939. In the early 1950s, Cage took the next step and abandoned music – understood as notes shaped by a composer, realized by performers, perceived by listeners – altogether. If you really wanted to cut loose from the past, Cage taught, you had to move to a purely conceptual music, as demonstrated in his “silent” piece, 4’33”. Reading his correspondence with Boulez, we can see Cage reconstituting the dualism of his teacher, Schoenberg, playing a Zen-master Moses to Boulez’s vaudevillian, object-oriented Aron. Without the conceptual jump, Cage warned, the new serial and electronic music would just replay the aesthetics of expressionism and impressionism, as in fact, works like Nono’s Canto Sospeso and Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître would show.
Of all the composers of his generation, Stockhausen negotiated most successfully the gap between conceptualism and the creation of artistic objects. Cage might have the big ideas, but with Stockhausen, as Maconie in his occasional role as true believer says, “there is always a reason, a process, a genuine argument, and an outcome: always a reality to set alongside the myth. However it happens the musical result is invariably gripping, intense, and disciplined”. Pieces like Kontrapunkte, Zeitmaße and Gruppen had strong identities but demanded a new, more speculative kind of listening. Even compared with daring works of the time such as Xenakis’s Pithoprakta or Boulez’s Marteau sans maître, none of these pieces sounds like music; the notes don’t coalesce into an expressive whole – but they do raise all sorts of interesting questions about how music is perceived and notated. Stockhausen was particularly fearless in pursuing the mathematical possibilities of traditional notation beyond the breaking point of literal realization.
Stockhausen, more than his contemporaries, also sustained the myth of musical progress that gave the musical avant-garde its quasi-scientific respectability. A commonplace of post-war musical wisdom was the idea that Schoenberg, like Moses, had been unable to bring his great idea to the promised land. The advent of a serial utopia, however, soon proved to be a mirage. Boulez’s Structures seemed to be stuck in the desert, while his later works, like the Mallarméan extravaganza Pli selon Pli retreated to the fleshpots of aestheticism. Stockhausen, however, promoted each new work as a dialectical step forward and convinced many composers and critics that his own evolution set the pace for all the music of his time. Pointillism, the result of serial micro-management of pitch, duration, articulation and dynamics, gave way to “group” composition in which the statistical jumble of these elements was prolonged into phrases. These phrases then grew into serially determined “moments” that floated freely in an indeterminate ocean of time. Determinacy now morphed into indeterminacy, and serial calculation gave way to intuitive music-making.
By the 1960s Stockhausen had become the Euro-Cage. Scores like Plus Minus did away with traditional notation altogether, depending instead on the improvisational skills of players steeped in Stockhausen’s earlier music. With the highly improvisatory Stimmung and Aus dem sieben Tage, Stockhausen, who had visited San Francisco during the 1967 summer of love, metamorphosed from technocrat to guru – and was rewarded with his place of honour on Peter Blake’s Beatles album cover. But like Boulez before him, Stockhausen finally could not give up the traditional prerogatives of a European composer. When his players improvised he would ride the volume control, shaping their efforts to match his vision. With Mantra (1970) he returned to a fully notated music and, after seeing Einstein on the Beach in New York, he began planning the Meisterwerk to top them all in scale and in self-indulgence – a week-long opera based on his own life and starring members of his own family.
It will be interesting to see how posterity judges LICHT in relationship to, say, Glass’s Einstein/Akhnaten/Satyagraha trilogy or the three big John Adams operas, or Meredith Monk’s larger works. In comparison to them, Stockhausen’s epic today seems forbiddingly private in its action, symbolism and musical idiom. The American minimalists are not burdened with the legacy of serialism (American serialism is based on assumptions that are quite different to those underpinning the European variety, though just as questionable) and have rediscovered the simple pleasures of melody, harmonic motion, pulse and, of course, repetition. As far as Stockhausen has travelled, his idiom remains rooted in the “statistical” approach of the 1950s. In retrospect, serialism turned into an albatross. It ceased to have a provocative, vanguard function, and just became a predictable annoyance. Minimalists such as Terry Riley were able to claim vanguard status while writing in C. “Das Kann man einfacher!” as Schoenberg’s tortured genius puts it in Die glückliche Hand, and as Philip Glass may have thought when he wrote Einstein on the Beach. Maconie, however, expects history to reverse this judgement: “Perhaps LICHT is not meant for our times after all, but, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, for the archaeologists of the future coming from another planet, who in trying to decipher human script ‘would soon discover that a whole category of books – music – did not fit the usual patterns’”. These extraterrestrials will find Robin Maconie’s book a useful guide.
