Play a Vibration in the Rhythm of the Universe

by Eutychus55

Play a vibration in the rhythm of your body.
Play a vibration in the rhythm of your heart.

In 1968, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen returned to his home in Kürten, Germany expecting to meet his wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister and their children who were returning home from a tour of America. Instead, he found a letter informing him that Mary had decided to leave him. It hardly could have come as a surprise since he and Bauermeister had been having problems anyway as a result of their being apart quite a bit because of Stockhausen's rigorous work ethic and concert schedule. But the news devastated him, and Stockhausen went into a profound depression, refusing contact with anyone and beginning a seven day hunger strike to win Mary's heart back.

On the evening of the second day he began writing and by the time the seventh day was over he had written fifteen short texts which were to change his music forever.

The music of Stockhausen has never been easy to listen to, even by experienced musicologists and has always been the subject of intense criticism. I think Stockhausen prefers it that way. Besides being musically difficult to approach, his music has an intense philosophical underpinning which requires much of the listener. It is music that makes demands of the listener. And more than any other music that I've ever heard, for that reason his music speaks to me.

You may not be familiar with the name, but his influence is everywhere. Frank Zappa named him as one of his major influences. (It can be heard distinctly in Zappa's pieces Nasal Retentive Calliope Music and Dwarf Nebula.) If you look at the cover of the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" album, he's there as well (top row, fifth from the left.) John Lennon credited him with inspiring Revolution #9.

Stockhausen's early music did owe quite a bit to the musique concrete school of the late 50's, which Revolution #9 sought to be a part of. This school of thought claimed that everything was music including any sounds and noises found in nature or life. Composers went about creating music using these "found sounds." (John Cage took this idea one step further. He claimed that the most important part of the music was the silence between the notes even going so far as to "compose a piece called 4:33 for Piano which consisted of a pianist sitting at the piano and not playing a note for four minutes and thirty three seconds.)

Stockhausen's finest work in this area was what many consider his best workin this area; Hymnen which was premiered in 1968.Combining themes of national anthems, shortwave radio broadcasts, and other "found sounds" it forced listeners to hear sounds in who new ways. The piece is sectioned into four "Regions." There is a short section at the beginning of the second region where a high hissing sound which has floated over the music during almost the whole first region suddenly collapses and we hear it drop in frequency until we hear the quacking of swamp ducks; then lower where we can hear it as the murmur of voices at perhaps, a dinner party; and then finally slowing to become a single sixty cycle tone which serves as an 8 minute presentation of the French national anthem, the Marseillaise. But aside from being what some people refer to erroneously as a "musical collage", it also contains one of the most beautiful and rich uses of tonal modulations and harmonies in it's rendition of the Russian national anthem at the end of Region 2.

Play a vibration in the rhythm of your breathing.
Play a vibration in the rhythm of your thinking.

As I stated earlier, it was the seven days in 1968 which changed his music. Stockhausen had had success in many other forms and modalities of music. He was a great proponent of the twelve-tone row. As a longtime friend of fellow composer John Cage, he had also attempted works using Cage's theories of indeterminacy. (His work Klavierstuck XI consisted on nineteen groups of notes, each of which were randomly distributed on a sheet of paper and played as the player saw them at the first random glance.) He had also been instrumental in the beginnings of the electronic music studio in Cologne, Germany.

But Aus Den Sieben Tagen was to transform his thinking about the underlying forms themselves. It was described by one person I spoke to as a form of "classical jazz", being largely based on improvisation. But it goes much deeper than just variations and improvisations on specific themes. What Stockhausen was creating was what he called "Intuitive Music." Giving each musician simply a text as a direction, he was free to compose based on the direction of the text. It sounds random, but randomness was the farthest thing from Stockhausen's mind. He said once that he was not looking for indeterminancy, but an "intuitive determinancy" which would create the music.

It's a difficult concept, to be sure. But what Stockhausen was trying to create was a music free from the constrictions of form and style, and in effect create a truly universal music. Some of the texts were not easy to follow. The final one, entitled Golddust reads as follows :

"Live completely for four days
without food in complete silence, without much movement
Sleep as little as necessary
Think as little as possible

After four days, late at night,
without conversation beforehand

play single sounds

WITHOUT THINKING
which you are playing

Close your eyes
Just listen."

And, in fact, this is exactly how Stockhausen had returned to music after his self-imposed exile. When he played his first note "I still think that was like the first note of my whole life ... after the first note had died away, I played another one ... and so I heard notes of a length, a beauty, an inner life such as I had never heard before."

Play a vibration in the rhythm of your intuition.
Play a vibration in the rhythm of your enlightenment

Stockhausen is still with us at at the age of 73 is still composing and shows no signs of slowing down. His current project is what he and many others consider his magnum opus : an opera cycle comprised of seven different operas, one for each day of the week. Entitled Licht, it is no less than the sum total of the composers musical imagination and spirituality. As of this writing, six of the operas have been completed. It's a wonder to imagine where Stockhausen's restless imagination will take him once this project is completed.

Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe.

The original album cover of Stockhausen's work Sirius (released on Deutsch Gramophone records in 1978 shows the composer lying nude, sunbathing on a beach. However, the picture is printed upside down, as if he is on another planet, or taking off for the stars. One is left to imagine that those are the only places where his music may be truly appreciated.