About Me
This is a tribute to Karl Heinz Stockhausen and I hope it inspires people to investigate his work.
Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged as one of the most important and also controversial composers of the 20th century.
He is known for his ground-breaking work in
electronic music and aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition. Another critic calls him
"one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"Here are some of his interesting quotes:Already very early I thought of a microphone as a musical instrument, like a bow or like a percussion instrument, whatever you use.And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me.And I'm always interested when other musicians are trying to discover new worlds of sound.And now even composers are proud of asking people to experience silent moments up to two or three minutes in a given piece of music.And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.And with every work I have tried to expand my experience, moving sound and space, and finding new ways of superimposing different tempos and rhythms.As a matter of fact, what we can see through the eyes is very limited, much more limited than what we can hear.As I say, this is a new secret science, to master the emptiness and turn it into something that is filled with sound and visual images.But also I learned that in all sciences, and in acoustics in particular, statistical behavior became very important.But being quiet and meditating on sound is something completely different and will be discovered very soon by a lot of people who feel that the visual world doesn't reach their soul anymore.But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.I have composed several pieces which are performedI knew that the synthesis of sound and space music would be the most important aspect of the music of our time and of the future, since '53.I no longer limit myself.I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.I think it's more interesting to create music which transforms, shapes figures, so that one can follow a process.In particular what is most important to me is the transformation of a sound by slowing it down, sometimes extremely, so that the inner of sound becomes a conceivable rhythm.It is true that the eyes dominate the ears in our time.Many works I have composed are only for multiple channel tapes, or for traditional instruments, solo instruments, or groups of musicians.No, what is important is neither linearity or non-linearity, but the change, the degree of change from something that doesn't move to other events with different tempos in particular.One experiments and has to choose always the best results.Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public.Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.Schaeffer gave me permission to work in the studio with a technician, but I've never worked with him.Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.Since then I have not had access to a spherical auditorium, because the one from Osaka was destroyed after the World's Fair.So there is a personal sense of style for a given work - I don't like a general style, but every work has its own style, and I want to create a style for every work.So, for example, I produced a layer of sounds with the syllables sung by a young boy and elements from an impulse generator with filtered noises.The more people use modern means of communication, all kinds, they call this the media, the more they are interested in the possibilities.Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.
