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Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen

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For some time now there's been little published in English on Stockhausen, Maconie's work here makes up for lost time, You can however study with Stockhausen himself if you rather not simply read a book,that real-life, real-time reality fixes seems to be the "buzz" now. You can be a "Survivor" yourself after spending time with Stockhausen and his incredible approach to making music/art/time/space/timbre/mists/clouds/lines/texts; he offers courses each August in Kurten a suburb of Cologne.

Maconie studied with everyone in the European avant-garde,and has been there for premiere performances and knows both sides of the fence, the theoretical/conceptual and performative,and has wonderful insights into not only where certain works are situated within Stockhausen's creative evolution, but the performance problems, and responses to current or latter day reality.
The work here is organized situated around concepts,"polarities","revolution", "aleatory", "Contacts" "Uncertainty" or more functional items as "rhythmic cells",(dealing with early Boulez and Messiaen's concepts) of organizing musical moments(Stockhausen came to abandon this way of thinking in the early Fifties with the first four :klavierstuck: wirtten in Paris),or "Temperaments", as the use in electronic music as "Studie" :Gesange der Juenglinge:.

Chapters come to be like galaxies,"mists" where Stockhausen's music circles revolves around,like layers/swirls of functions,working premises. Maconie traces the breaking off points as well as realms of innovation,which can take odd turns as his ongoing disinterest in strings for example,(violins, cellos)culminated as the subverted "Helikopter Quartet".Strings, here the Arditti Quartet in motion flying away from each other.I wonder if $100,000 instruments were used for this journey?

Also surveyed herein was Stockhausen's early interest in Meyer-Eppler,"how time passes" and communication theory, his concepts of Zeit,densities of Time, and Cycles in music of "particles" of tones,points,"Punkt" "groups", "clusters",each work is given explanation,as for example the coordinated utilization of timbre in the early works, how instrumental color became associated with electronic tones as the sine wave(flute), sawtooth(brass), as in the early "Kontra-Punkte", and later "Kontakte", there was a set of problematics in the interface of electronic sounds with instrumental timbre which was not really resolved interestingly, each realm became unto itself, influence by the other but seldom inhabiting the same conceptual space, "Gruppen for three orchestras" for example was largely influenced by thinking of tones electronically, the complexity of timbral/textural modulations,but the work functions with pure instrumental timbre.
Not until the introduction of LIVE electronics as in the process pieces, as "Plus-Minus", or "Telemusik", "Kurzwellen", the use of short-wave radios", did this get resolved. Improvisation was also the "buzz"in the late Sixties, Seventies that Stockhausen adopted as in these works and "Aus dem Sieben tagen", a set of word pieces as a stimulant for improvisation."Take another's sound and follow it"
Stockhausen was always unrelenting in his search for the next thread of innovation be it any realm even transformations of timbre itself as in his various "klavierstuck", the overwhelming complexity of timbre in the :Tenth klavierstuck: for example, situates a subterranean realm in the extended uses of silences, as like a subverted mirror where the music can only be remembered,the discourse is transgressed; but the piano timbre then is like independent to itself not responsive to anything outside the moment when it occurs and then it is fairly continuous as an organ with the forcefulness,and the directedness of the acoustic piano capabilities,as large size cluster chords,brutal forearm and the cluster glissandi.

Maconie goes straight through the lifeworlds here with talks on the the various pieces from LICHT, all of it, and we get to know the various forms this opera has takened, with "franchises" of works from each of the operas that can be performed as an independently as an excerpt. Maconie writes well with metaphors created from popular culture, Buster Keaton,films to situate Stockhausen's rather austere,cold work at times within a larger context of the here and now. We learn however that deep down Karlheinz is a bit of a conservative,having his own fixed points of "comfort zones" throughout his massive oeuvre yet harboring an aesthetic still for innovation,for the unknown not ever succombing(arguably) to the vagaries of the marketplace with repeatable works and gestures, or throw-away art. He has takened issue for example with American Pop Art as a means of escaping the issues of contemporary expression, and Stockhausen always replaces escape into entertainment(popular forms, tunes, nefarious corrupted minimalism, improvisation copy-cats) with hard-work, the Protestant ethic as Weber has said.
But the operas under LICHT are in fact reponses to the current scene, of feminism,myth and cosmology of the moment "Montag",then childhood somewhat autobiographical in "Donnerstag", or war and violence in "Dienstag",Tuesday, the god of Mars,and the first opera on evil and corruption-darknesses, Lucifer's Dreams as in "Samstag". Each opera is given wonderful discussion,with verbal descriptions of what occurs on stage. Still this is an incredible book. . .