Stockhausen’s passing last week was well documented by the new (and not so) music community. I’ve yet to chime in, but here goes. Honestly, I was scared of Stockhausen. My fear wasn’t based on any personal experience with him—I never met him—but came from when I was learning his composition In Freundschaft.
All the reading I’d been doing to help me prepare for the piece, led me to believe that he was an overbearing control freak. I mean, there are 57 very specific instructions on how to perform most of the material in the piece, leaving little room for personal interpretation. There are even specific directions on how the performer should move while playing the work. What if I played that quarter note tied to the sixteenth note one sixteenth note too long or cheated the three whole notes tied to a half note by two sixteenth notes? I imagined what he would do upon learning of my irresponsibility—maybe seek me out, berate me publicly, and have me arrested by the German police if I ever had the audacity to perform his music again. Irrational and ridiculous, I know, but I once heard a story of him storming out of a student performance of Kontakte at the University of Michigan, cursing at the performers’ inaccuracy and inattention to detail.
But those very things that frightened me—his exactness, precision, and scrupulousness—were what made me admire his work so much. Take In Freundschaft, for example, which is one of his “process planning” pieces, meaning that everything—everything—in the piece is derived from a single formula. Intervals, pitches, duration, register. The idea of a piece controlled so rigidly sounds positively icy. Yet the end result, a work that is full of energy and emotion, belies the oppressive parameters. Perfectionism could be considered an affliction. And in musical composition, that type of control and detail orientation can often lead to negligible sonic results. But, in my mind at least, Stockhausen transcended that stigma, taking a small idea, and spinning it into a meaningful work. Isn’t that what great composers do?
Stockhausen also spoke one of my favorite quotes on developing a musical voice and the meaning of being a musician, which is what I’ll end with:
Musical training has nothing to do with musicality. You can train someone for years in a conservatoire of music and develop the ability to recognize pitch constructions, harmonies, chords, melodies, intervals—all intellectually. But what I call a musical person is someone who can imitate any sound that he hears, with his voice, directly, without thinking about hitting the right pitch, but just doing it. And not only imitating the pitch, but the timbre as well. Great musicians always start off as great imitators. Afterwards, building on the talent of imitation, comes the talent to transform what you hear. Many don’t reach that far, but those who attain the ability to transform, incorporate and identify sounds, they are the better musicians. Then comes the last stage of perfecting this ability so that it becomes almost automatic.
(From an informal conversation with an anonymous reviewer, London 1971. Contained in Stockhausen On Music, Robin Maconie, compiler.)
