A guide to Karlheinz Stockhausen's music
Our contemporary composers series ends with the most divisive figure of them all: Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen has arguably done more to transform 20th- and 21st-century music than any other single composer: from serialism to electronic music, from consciousness-expanding musical happenings to cycles of pieces for every day of the week and every hour of the day, from a musical mantra to some hallucinogenic Cosmic Pulses.
But with Stockhausen – as Wagner or possibly Beethoven – you're dealing immediately as much with myth as with reality. Firstly, there's the caricature of his music, from those who either haven't heard it or who are ideologically opposed to it (Thomas Beecham is alleged to have quipped when asked if he had heard any Stockhausen: "No, but I believe I may have trodden in some."). Then there's the apparent eccentricity of the man: those orange jumpers; his life with his two muses/life partners; his apparently obsessive control of his publishing, performing and recording rights; and not forgetting the small matter of his claims to come not from Earth but from the star Sirius – a statement that made many see him as a kind of musical-mystical crank.
No comments:
Post a Comment