The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction

By Jonathan Harvey

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520334380

Jonathan Harvey

Jonathan Harvey comes from Liverpool and is the multi-award-winning writer of the play and film Beautiful Thing, the BAFTA-nominated sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, and Beautiful People (Best Comedy: Banff TV Festival). He is on the writing teams for both Coronation Street and The Tracey Ullman Show. His other TV work includes Rev (Best Sitcom: BAFTA), At Home With The Braithwaites, Lilies, The Catherine Tate Show and Murder Most Horrid. He has written twenty stage plays. The Years She Stole is his sixth novel.

Book preview

The music of Stockhausen

The music of

Stockhausen

an introduction by Jonathan Harvey

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles 1975

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

ISBN: 0-520-02311-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-85531

© Jonathan Harvey, 1975

Printed in Great Britain

Contents 1

Contents 1

1 Background

2 Kreuzspiel

3 Kontra-Punkte, Piano Pieces I-IV Electronic Studies

4 New Theories

5 Piano Pieces V-X

6 Zeitmasze

7 Gruppen

8 Piano Piece XI and Gesang der Jnglinge

9 The Early ‘Moment Form’ Works

10 The Later ‘Moment Form’ Works New Achievements in Electronic Music

11 Aus den sieben Tagen - ‘Intuitive’ Music

Appendix (1972)

Appendix (1974)

Bibliography

Discography

Works by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Index

1

Background

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in an extreme era of human history. His first years were influenced by economic depression and the nadir of the German morale, and at the age of four, in January 1933, perhaps at the time of his first dawning impressions of the outside world, he saw the birth of the Third Reich, the swing of the sick German spirit from depressive to manic. The background is worth sketching, not because I pretend to draw any conclusions about Stockhausen’s strange personality from it — such conclusions would almost certainly have to be depth- psychological to have any validity beyond the superficial — but because many of his statements, personal philosophies, and even the music, become more intelligible to us who have not gone through such extreme climates when they are placed in this perspective. For instance, he said recently: "I had no reason to trust any adult, because they would change with the change of the system and compromise with any new situation. I found that ideology was something I couldn’t rely on, and that I should attach myself to the divine. Of my own choice I first became a practising Catholic … I was 17 or 18.’1 Or, on the musical side, his dislike of regular rhythm, which reminds him of Nazi radio,| and consequent preference for rhythms in which the ‘players are floating freely’.

The extreme nature of the political climate of Germany dates back to the First World War, perhaps beyond. The democratic, moderate centre of the Weimar Republic was only occasionally able to form an adequate parlia- mentary majority out of its own strength without the help of the extremists. The Socialist-Communist Left on the one hand and the Nazi Right on the other were openly hostile to this weak-kneed fruit of defeat with its reparations and its glaring social in- equalities, and dreamed either of the militaristic splendour of the Hohenzollern Monarchy — the ‘new dictator’ Richard Strauss was always talking about — or something more on the lines of revolutionary Russia. (Stockhausen’s geographical area, incidentally, was, half a year before the collapse of the Weimar Republic and of all factions other than the Nazis, notably anti-Nazi; the polls of July 1932 show that Cologne-Aachen was stubbornest of all in its resistance to the Nazi advance.)

t Ibid., p. 39.

The Republic tottered through the miseries of inflation in 1923, a subsequent unreal five years of prosperity and savage profiteering based on some seven hundred and fifty million of foreign, largely American, loans, and finally the collapse of Wall Street in October 1929, which has been described as the most serious world economic crisis since the dawn of the industrial era. Millions were thrown out of a job and on the same impulse Hitler was thrown into business. He promised jobs and bread, the controlling of the tycoons (especially the Jewish ones), the end of corruption, the Versailles Treaty and reparations, the restoration of a national pride — as extreme as had been the preceding national humiliation — and a sense of purpose.

The general exhilaration and sense of enthusiasm was very striking in the years after the Nazis’ ascendancy to power in 1933. Observers were astonished to see that, despite the sinister Gestapo, the concentration camps, the ruthless Blood Purge of 1934, the censorship and regimentation, the man in the street was happy with the new regime.2 The Jews, the communists, the pacifists and individualists, like ‘the past’, were reduced to inconspicuousness or eliminated. The university professors, amongst whom one might have expected considerable opposition to Nazism, were in Weimar days ‘anti-liberal, antidemocratic and anti-Semitic’ and, though before ’33 suspicious of the rowdy nature of the Nazis, were largely quite happy with the new dictatorship when it settled in. There were, of course, honourable exceptions who fled or suffered, as well as all the ordinary decent men and women who were understandably terrified to step publicly an inch out of line, and, of course, the Jews who had no choice, who just were out of line whatever their political views.

The exhilarating togetherness of the new Germans seemed much more important than old notions of individualistic thought; the new issues seemed too urgent. The universities began to teach German physics, German chemistry, and a journal started in 1937 called Deutsche Mathematik spoke about the dangers of not bringing racialism into mathematics — this carried ‘within itself the germs of the destruction of German science’. The highly respected Professor Philipp Lenard of Heidelberg University wrote: ‘German Physics? But, it will be replied, science is and remains international. It is false. In reality, science like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.’ The arts faculties seemed to be dominated by courses on Rassenkunde — racial science — history was rewritten and books were burnt.

The students too were aglow with the new ideals. And even more was the Hitler Youth, with its ordered stages like a nightmarish Boy Scout movement — looking after children from six to eighteen, at which age they had to serve in the Labour Service and the Army. By the end of 1938 the movement numbered nearly eight million. The four million who had evaded it, despite prison sentences for recalcitrant parents, were compulsorily conscripted in March 1939, though the new law did not manage to operate fully. These youths, whose ideological growth was carefully noted in their performance book, passed tests at the age of ten in athletics, camping and Nazified history, and took the following graduation oath: ‘In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuehrer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.’

With their poisoned minds and beautiful healthy bodies, these boys and girls radiated a joy that impressed and thrilled the world. As Count Harry Kessler wrote, ‘we (especially in Germany) have turned towards the Greeks in many ways but nowadays, in contrast to the classicists, quite unconsciously and naturally as part of real life. Nudity, light, sunshine, the adoration of living, bodily completeness and sensuousness without false shame or prudery. It is really astounding how the bodies, the physical vitality of young people have obeyed this drive, and how much more beautiful they are now [1930] than they were before the War. It is a blossoming of the whole body of the people since human beings lost their shame of being naked. Maillol [the Parisian artist] asked me to photograph two young people who were, as he said, beaux comme les dieux antiques.’3

As is well known, those who had ideas of their own, faiths of their own or who simply didn’t like crowds were not so happy. They were the outsiders who ceased to impinge on the consciousness of the average man: almost irrelevant to a true picture of German consciousness at that time, with its daily censorship of papers, radio, books, films and plays. In the case of religion, there was little overt protest over the arresting of several thousand pastors and priests. Rosenberg’s, Bormann’s and Himmler’s aim was to eradicate Christianity and resuscitate old Wotan and his fellows in Nordic deity. They had Hitler’s full backing. Rosenberg’s new thirty articles stipulated that the new National Church would have no priests, only National Reich orators; no Bibles, crucifixes or pictures of saints to be left in place; instead Mein Kampf (‘the greatest of all documents’, ‘to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book’), a sword, and in the crucifix’s place the swastika. Thus the buildings which had housed ‘the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800’ were to be converted. The extremism of a regime with these feelings in its blood is hard to exaggerate.

In the case of the arts, the suppression of modernism, foreign influence, the Jews and everything else inimical to what was essentially a popular anti-intellectual movement had its usual by now drearily familiar results. The speeches of Dr. Goebbels, the propaganda minister, were full of ‘inspired’ nationalism, of gathering together ‘the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organisation under the leadership of the Reich’, as his Reich Chamber of Culture articles put it. As in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, the results were dismal. Hitler took a personal interest in the purification of the visual arts and removed some 6,500 ‘modern’ paintings by Kokoschka, Grosz, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso from the art galleries; he selected personally nine hundred paintings for an exhibition of Nazi art, put his jack boot through others and delivered a lengthy speech of which the following is an excerpt: "Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent nonsense will no longer openly reach the German nation.⁹ Schirer reports that in Munich at least, where Goebbels organised an exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ (impressionist and expressionist works mainly) to show the people from what they were being saved, the people were not so overjoyed with the new way, and much to Goebbels’ fury and embarrassment flocked to the exhibition in such numbers that he hastily closed it.

Third Reich theatre was a complete writeoff, overtly Nazi with its ‘blood and soil’ dramas of the good earth and peasant life, and its historical dramas extolling German heroes of one sort or another. This is not to say that masterpieces of the past were not performed, they were, as they were in music.

The opulence of music in the era was as striking as was the stifling of the new. Schoenberg left, Hindemith’s works were forbidden, Berg and Webern were for the most part ignored (Berg only lived to see two years of the Third Reich; his international reputation was achieved before it became a relevant factor). But Strauss became president of Goebbels’s Reich Music Chamber, and together with Wagner and the great German tradition received excellent and abundant Chapter One

performances from the many gifted musicians who flourished under the regime.

Joel Sachs has shown4 that aggressive nationalism and conservatism as a major force in German music dates from well before 1933, if not from Wagner’s notorious explosion Judaism in Music’ of 1850. Music such as Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 (1909) was just the last straw in the load of ‘International Jewry, Bolshevism, Nigger- ising" (Verniggerung) Anglo-French conspiracies to destroy German culture’ which broke the back of the paranoiac bourgeois musician. Vitriolic articles proliferated, and in 1933 all those years of campaigning and denigration paid off, and the heads rolled.

What effect the war itself might have had on a youth aged eleven to seventeen, the shock in Cologne of experiencing the first British one- thousand-plane bombing in 1942, the trauma of defeat, guilt and confusion which the German spirit must have felt at the end of the war, the rumours of what Hitler’s New Order had been doing to the conquered Slavs and Jews, is beyond imagination. We who were not a part of it find it beyond the powers of human imagination and comprehension, so how much deeper below the powers of conscious comprehension must it have struck in those who lived through it. No wonder the German youth of today is often cut off from the past and buried in ‘the relevant’ in a way others can hardly credit. They too reach for their revolver when they hear the word Kultur.

Background

For a barometer as sensitive as Stockhausen, these years of historic extremism cannot have been without fundamental impact, though his creative life, as opposed to his formative life, has been lived in a time of reconstruction, a time of starting anew with a clean slate.

For those who like history in neat packages, 1950 is a fairly accurate landmark. The dust of the war had settled, the first fruits of Messiaen’s post-war teaching were beginning to ripen in Europe, and modern music festivals or courses such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage and the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik were starting or resuming operations. A whole new surface was applied to music. It was described and analysed in terms borrowed from physics, acoustics and mathematics. Even the ‘unscientific’ aleatoric element in Stockhausen’s music he claims to have derived directly from studies of statistics, random structures, the aleatory behaviour of noise structures and other scientific disciplines in Professor Werner Meyer-Eppler’s seminars. This gentleman, with whom Stockhausen studied communication theory and phonetics at Bonn University from 1954 to 1956, and who was a trained physicist and phoneticist, gave the movement one sort of extra-musical stimulus and terminology; the electronic studio technician gave it another. Both influences can be clearly seen in the inaugural number of Die Reihe (1955) on Electronic Music. It is the international mouthpiece of the movement, and is edited by Herbert Eimert, who was the founder of the new Cologne Electronic Studio, and Stockhausen himself.

Perhaps the war finally dashed, for this generation, any lingering hope that musical structure could continue to play second fiddle to fine emotions in the making of a piece. Schoenberg had already paved the way by writing music more structure-conscious than any since Bach and the Viennese classics, Berg had used rhythmic systems and extramusical