An Interview With Karlheinz Stockhausen

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An Interview with Karlheinz StockhausenAuthor(s): David Felder and Karlheinz StockhausenSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn - Winter, 1977), pp. 85-101Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832850Accessed: 19/09/2010 17:21

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AN INTERVIEW WITHKARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

DAVID FELDER

The following interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen occurred followingthe world premiere of Sirius (July 15, 1976), which was written for theopening of the Spacearium in the newly dedicated Smithsonian Air andSpace Museum, Washington, D.C., and "commissioned by the Govern-

ment of the Federal Republic of West Germany on the occasion of theAmerican Bicentennial and dedicated to the American pioneers on Earthand in Space."

DF: In approaching the music of Stockhausen, one must be cognizantof your concept of the passing of time with respect to form. Mightyou elaborate upon this?

KS: Well, I have answered this area of questioning in great detail inthe interviews with Jonathan Cott in his book. The answer that I can

give concerns the expansion of duration in the micro-time, the in-dividual duration within the rhythm, and the macro-time, the durationof sections in a musical composition. As early as 1952-53 I realizedthat the concept of the duration of a piece seemed to be generallyfixed; a

piecehad to last between ten and

twentyminutes-Le Sacre

du Printemps was considered to be a long piece-look at all the worksof the Viennese school. Webern was considered to be an outsider be-cause he composed such short works; they didn't fit into this categoryof an average duration. It seems that our tradition has created supra-personal standards for musical time adapted to the performance con-ditions, rehearsal conditions [and] to traditions of musical listening inconcerts. You come, you go, and in between, several pieces are pre-



PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

sented; when you start from the origin of music, which happens veryrarely in history, then all of these conventions become relative. We donot

acceptthem so

easilyas

many generationshad

before.I found

outin particular that in participating in musical events which were rituals,as in Japan and India, that as soon as you step out of the concert con-vention, the concept of duration becomes totally different. In Bali Ihave assisted at rituals which include dance, orchestras playing, andthe like, which last much longer than ours. In Japan I assisted in aceremony which lasted three days and three nights-almost every ac-tion of the priests produced sound in a conscious way, which means

they made music. Now these are the aspects of the macro-time, theduration of the pieces. The micro-time is the same. You become awarethat the slowness of the production of sound, of the movement of thebody, of the polyphony of the different movements of parts of the bodyare conceptions completely unusual to a European. And what is con-sidered to be good timing changes from country to country. In par-ticular the media like radio and television have sped up the timing tosuch an extent that a composer is most appreciated if he can do some-thing within a very short time span. That's why the pop music, forexample, is imprinting musical timing into the people to a great extentby the short duration of the musical "numbers", or hits. Whenever apop composer tries to expand these durations from the customary two-to-three minutes, he is very unsuccessful, because he has no experiencewhatsover in building large art forms. They add sequences of shortevents of different characteristics, and they cannot build a processbecause that

requiresa

totallydifferent skill and

pointof

departure.In general it shows that history has, at different points in its course,expanded the micro-time and the micro-rhythm. More and more inthe history of European music, we think of Wagner and Mahler-people thought [their music] was even decadent because sometimesthey needed a lot of time. Schoenberg praised Webern to the heavenswhen he made these very short pieces, saying, "He can express in afew lines what others must write in thick novels." And then also we

have increased the density of events passing in the micro-time via theImpressionists, who tried to catch as many small timbre changes in aminimum of time [on] the pages, the pages [that] aggregated or ag-glomerated thousands of tiny little spots of color in order to give theimpression of watching in nature, outside where the lights reflect fromall the particles of an object. And musicians tried to do the same-Ravel, Debussy, early Webern, Schoenberg, even Bart6k. Afterwards

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AN INTERVIEW WITH STOCKHAUSEN

there was an even greater change which has not yet been completelydigested. Maybe I have been able to contribute a lot to this movement,what I call statistical

composition-totranscend

completelythe tra-

ditional notion that you have to compose detail so clearly that youcan hear everything. And I said in 1954 in a radio program in whichI analyzed the Jeux of Debussy from the perspective of statistical

composition, that if we voluntarily transcend this concept of hearingeverything, and we say we should not hear everything as particles ina context but create a dense texture which sometimes has thousands oflittle sounds in an agglomeration of sound, which appears then as a

unified vibrating sound complex, then we have reached a completelynew concept of music, a sound which lasts a half-an-hour, an hour, orwhatever you want, if the inner life of the sound, the inner changes ofthe sound are based on this micro-acoustical composition. It had a lotto do naturally with the expansion of consciousness toward atomic

physics, nuclear physics and also the expansion of the consciousness

through the new astronomical discoveries. We become more fully awareof aspects of the density of the universe; and it's still only known and

felt by very few people that statistical composition has been one of themost important expansions of musical composition during its wholecourse, because it also has led us to the use of totally new means whichallow us the condensation of sound and the micro-structuring of sound,through electronic means, because these surpass the physical means ofthe player and we can reach speeds of production of sounds, a heightto make vibrating complexes.

For instance, the composition you heard lastnight,

Sirius, is based

entirely on a new concept of spatial movement. The sound moves sofast in rotations and slopes and all sorts of spatial movements that itseems to stand still, but it vibrates. It is [an] entirely different kind ofsound experience, because you are no longer aware of speakers, ofsources of sound-the sound is everywhere, it is within you. When youmove your head even the slightest bit, it changes color, because differ-ent distances occur between the sound sources. So musical time is

something completely different than it was even thirty years ago. I amtrying with every new work to expand the limits of what is composedin micro-durations and in macro-durations.

DF: You've mentioned timbre and space as primary compositionalparameters. Boulez alludes to what he terms "musical specialists",those composers who concentrate on certain parameters; and he states

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flatly that theirs is the wrong path. Do you consider yourself a spe-cialist composer?

KS: By no means He's quoting, actually, what I've said a milliontimes-I know what he means, that we now have in music as manyspecialists as [we] do medical doctors specializing in one limb of thebody, because of this extremely necessary research in detail. And inmusic we have the same.

It's clear who are specialists-people who have chosen a very smallfield of possibilities and who concentrate on that and repeat it over

and over again, like many painters. Many famous painters have paintedtime and time again similar things, and in music we have those com-posers who do that.

It is always the question: broad or deep? I think all these aspectsshould be discussed without polemics. If someone tries to go very deep,and this is all he wants to do and can see (people are very differentin their universality, not everybody is universally built), we need these

people who concentrate on one thing for a long time; otherwise wewould never get very deep. They contribute a great deal. However,it's true that the greatest masters in all fields, as rare as they are, havebeen universalists. They have seen the entire world and have tried topull it together. But most of the time, these geniuses have only beenpossible after long developments where many specialists have pre-pared their conclusions, their universalities. Goethe, as a poet, was auniversalist, but he has used a lot of details in technique and contentwhich were

prepared byother

poetswho were

specialistsinvolved in

a more narrow or concentrated field, and Beethoven is the same. EvenBach is the same. He could pull together styles, techniques, from Ital-ian, French, and German traditions and universalize them in a certainway. It seems that my role is the role of a very universal composer,insofar as I must have been-according to my own inner revelations-I must have lived, in Japan and India, also in Egypt, before. And myformation as a spirit has prepared me for a long time for synthesis;

but synthesis in a way in which differences are retained, and I mediatebetween them, and not a synthesis which leads to a new style. I rathertry to unify, harmonize a lot of aspects of music.

What Boulez says is significant because what you attack is what ismost dangerous within yourself. His real danger, obviously, is to be aspecialist, so he must attack specialists-this is how we all function.Nevertheless it is true, if he sees it in himself, he tries to overcome it;

88




and he sees that Xenakis and Ligeti have problems in overcomingit; the way they are built as mind and spirits shows that they will

have extreme difficulty in changing their personal style, which inthe case of Xenakis, for example, is determined by his education.He's a complete latecomer as a musician, and in a true sense heis no musician at all-I really doubt what he can hear, not onlywith the inner ear. Nevertheless, he is able to contribute somethingwe find in all the sciences and arts; by transposition from one fieldto another, you transpose something from architecture to music, youlearn the respective parameters, the limits of the instruments, and

translate points on the paper to sound. Certainly something inter-esting comes out of it. If the method is quite unusual in the field ofmusic you can be sure that something new, something that hasn'tbeen done the same way before, will occur. The same is true when youuse computers for combinatoric work; you can produce, with the ma-chine, combinations that you have not used before and you use themas the technique employed in environmental industry-to produce newpatterns which you can paste on the wall-and you have a kind ofnew tapestry. We work with these chance operations employing ma-chines in all fields to find new textures, new aspects of combinatoricwork. But it has nothing to do with the expansion of intuition. It is theproduction of new interesting materials.

DF: You've mentioned the terms universality, expansion of conscious-ness. Are you pursuing a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, a trueworld-music?

KS: The Gesamtkunstwerk is a German term, obviously, associatedprimarily with Wagner. It was the result of the splitting process in a veryshort time of European development of music, ballet, and theater. I saya very short time because still in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuriesthe church plays, the Passions, originating from the churches in thecourtyards, or inside the church, did not have this splitting betweentheater, ballet, and music. Even within the realm of oratorio, opera,and concert music the specialization of the late Renaissance and theincreasing of the splitting of all the different aspects of music is a signof atomization, actually, which has affected all aspects of Europeanculture, because it represents the splitting of the human mind itself.

There is no longer a unified world. People don't believe the samethings anymore, they are not unified through religion anymore; wehave the most extreme atheists and extreme theists living next to each

89




other, trying not to kill each other and this is true for all other aspects.The arts reflect this. So what Wagner was doing, and others, say, inthe Bauhaus

atmosphere,was

nothingbut the revitalization of some-

thing that has remained unsplit in the other important cultures, likethe Japanese culture, Indian culture, Indonesian culture-I mean, in

particular, the Balinese theater-and he did it by going back to thevisits of the gods, or the period on this planet when gods were livingamong us. It was a kind of deification of an art work, the art ritual-which means the theme was lofty enough to use dance, lighting, music,design, sculpture, painting, etc. for a unifying cause which was meta-

physical, which was transcendental. In that sense my whole work istrying to very clearly aim at events in which the splitting of the differ-ent aspects of the sensual perception, and also of the intellectual per-ception, is overcome, and in which I will reach events which are totallyintegrated and serve a cause to reveal and clarify man's necessity tomake contact again with the center of the universe, with the divine cre-ator and the many different hierarchical levels of spiritual life withinthe universe. Music, as I see it, must constantly try in different waysto recreate, to vitalize this contact, to make contact again through thesound and, through the events occurring in producing the sound, makecontact with the central force in the universe.

DF: You have worked, of course, a great deal with electronic music,attempting, it seems, to integrate musique concrete with electronicallygenerated sounds. Berio feels that those works in the electronic idiomwhich make a connection, via natural sound sources, with musical

tradition are those which are most successful. How would you respondto that premise?

KS: I respond to it by my works, such as Gesang der Jiinglinge, whichis a composition with the voice of a human child singing with itself inchorus, duos, trios, what have you; then in Kontakte, which is a purelyelectronic work but which has three categories (metal, wooden, andskin-instrument sounds) which refer to natural instruments, and each

category further subdivided into three subcategories of noise (likethe consonants in language), noise-pitched sounds (like the half-consonants), and pitch-determined sounds. This occurs in all threecategories in metal, wood, and skin including what I call the purelyconsonantal sounds-s,f,p,t,g,k-in percussion instruments which canproduce these plosives and their continuous consonant sounds. In theversion with instruments I relate the "natural" sounds of percussion

90




and piano to the electronically-produced categories. The same is truein Telemusik which includes, I think, about twenty-five more or less

short segments from different traditions of folklore music of this planet,[which] tries to integrate them into a sound world where all the stylisticaspects are mediated and intermodulated. I found a new process of in-termodulation through certain technical means, so that the idea of thecollage, which was an early twentieth-century concept, could be tran-scended. They didn't know how to mediate between things; they threwthings together trying to see what happened in a kind of melting pot.Now we can go one step further and can make mutations, like the

biologist, and transformations, from one species into another.Then Hymnen was all the anthems which were considered as being

found-objects of melody, which many people can hum. They can,therefore, realize what is done with these melodies, [and their atten-tion] more and more is [concentrated on] the skill of composition andthe resulting treatment of these melodies, because people can acknowl-

edge them. And then all the works since Mantra, Inori in particular,where I have created my own found-objects. This has nothing to dowith tradition anymore, and I find Berio's remarks rather limitinginsofar as he thinks it's a question of traditional and modern. What itreally is, as I have always said, is the question of utilizing somethingthat is known, that people are familiar with, and something that isunknown, something new. Which means that if I could make withina given composition a melody of such a sharpness of its contours, ofsuch clarity, and in a way also built of simplicity so that it can be whis-tled after

hearingit but a few times or almost

memorized, then wehave the same phenomenon as if we would use a traditional thing likea percussion instrument, which would be only the material aspect, ora tune for variations as all the romantic and classical composers havetried-they employ variations on a theme of somebody else, or a folktune. As early as the medieval Gregorian chant compositions, the tra-dition to use something you find that the people know has always beenappreciated by composers, because that allows them to make variation

forms. In order to transcend the variation forms, and make mutations,one needs to go even one step further and to compose in a given com-position more than one formula, as I call it, the formula, a musicalobject which is recognizable and can be precisely memorized. It mustbe not too long, not too wide in intervals, not too complicated inrhythm, but it must not be too primitive, as practically all the popularhits are because then they are emptied too easily and they are just

91




cliches of the triad-music which has been used so much that we cannotwork with it anymore. (That is a pity, because it would be wonderfulif we could stand now in a moment in

historywhere the triad

couldbe something interesting, as Mozart made whole melodies with justtwo triads going up and down and very simple rhythmic variations,two intermediary notes between the two triads and that was the whole

melody, the theme. And you could build a quarter of an hour ofmusic with it and everybody was happy and still most of the peopleare.) So we are, unfortunately, not in a situation to start at such a sim-

ple and early historical moment, but we have had all these styles. It's

extremely challenging and interesting now to build melodies which arenot built on these simple relations of triads and are not built on simpleperiodicity, repetition of the same durations, and yet are clear enoughand sharp enough and have such a strong self-identity that they canfunction as found-objects which are treated in many different new waysof transmutation, transformation, etc. So once you discuss all these

things on a higher level, rather than think it is the question of oldmusic or new music, instrumental and electronic, or vocal and elec-

tronic, that is only interesting for a short while-for ten or fifteen yearsand then this problem is no longer an essential problem.

What is essential is that now in the next step we build again. Wemust go beyond even the Beethovenian formula of only two themes,where the second theme was never really treated in the developmentform, but only the first one-the second theme, serving as an interme-

diary calming down, was a side theme. But what is really interesting[came] after the time of serial

compositionwhich ended

upwith com-

positions which were built entirely on one series and still Schoenbergused these series as a theme in the traditional sense. I tried to trans-form Schoenberg's method into what I call structural composition,where the intervals being used were constantly permutated in a way inwhich you couldn't recognize a "theme", the series as such, as a deter-mined sequence. The next step was that I started to work with for-mulas and built entire compositions on the perceivable transformations

of one formula into another, or the expansion or condensations of aformula, as in Inori or Mantra and Trans for orchestra, and now inSirius. This work is built with four basic melodies, which are fourmelodies of The Zodiac, which is a cycle of twelve melodies, each mel-ody with its own central sound, its own ambitus, order of intervals, itsown duration, its own tempo, etc... The four main melodies of Siriusare Aries, spring; Cancer, summer; Libra, autumn; Capricorn, winter.

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Everything is built from these four melodies, which are, in transitions,transformed one into another, or one appearing at certain moments

with the rhythm of another and vice versa, one melody triggering thetimbre of formants of another, etc.-all the very subtle interrelation-ships among four melodic lines are used in a way that is completelynew to me.

DF: So, then, these permutations of a melodic formula are to be per-ceptible on a conscious level?

KS: Oh yes Much easier than before. You see, now we work with

energies: more or less energy at a given time, energy in registers, energyin certain degrees of brilliance and darkness, a coming or going energy,or having a certain curve of energetic presentation and withdrawal.Now we come again to figures. It is as if we had gone, compared tothe evolution of life, again in a very short time, historically speaking,through the entire process of building form from the one-cellularbeings, from the chemical substance where the pure chemicals areworking, bouncing against each other, and one by one building life inlittle formulas until developed forms come out of the process-this ishappening now and increasingly in my work. Much later on, this willbe recognized as the greatest change in twentieth-century music his-tory, I think. There is a new kind of formula composition which isbuilt on several formulas which the composer has built for a given com-position, so that these are his concrete objects, so to speak. Then wecompose literally whole processes of evolution of forms from sheer mat-ter

(whichis

vibratingmasses of

vibrations) through processes fromsimple figures to the most complex, most developed, most personalmusical Gestalten, which then meet each other, and we have a newcounterpoint in a new way.

DF: Webern believed that eventually the seeming differences betweenthe arts (music) and science would eventually be swept away by evo-lution of thought processes. Do you agree with his conception?

KS: My whole process of self-education is proving this. I have studiedfrom my beginning as a musician, acoustics, and [have always tried]to draw a lot of musical consequences from the knowledge of the natureof sound. I have studied phonetics, where I probably learned mostabout the statistical, microtonal nature of sound, and transposed thisknowledge into the macrotonal composition; also phonology, the studyof the systems of language. This was a very important time in my life.

93




Constantly, I have learned from technology, from science, by my workin the electronic music studio, designing circuits myself for equipmentand

workingwith scientists and technicians in the field of acoustics

andelectronics. Yes, we are fortunately beginning, in an early stage of de-

velopment (as in early medieval times), where the musician is study-ing his material constantly and learning from the inherent laws in thenature of material, and where he is abstractly developing new con-

cepts of musical formation and trying to produce new material whichfits these concepts. Yes, the medieval synthesis of the highest sciences-of music, astronomy, mathematics-is again in sight.

DF: Your compositional style has undergone considerable change,almost circular, in that you began writing completely deterministicmusic, then gradually transformed this into virtually indeterminatemusic. Now with works such as Mantra you seem to be swinging backtoward increasingly determinate music. Is this circular sequence ofevents a general life-concept concerning a composer's life?

KS: It's a spiral, I think, which means [that] even if Mantra seems

to be written down to the smallest detail, it represents a result, in itsorganic forming, of all the experiences I have had in performing, witha group, what I call the intuitive music. I could have never builtMantra and the other later works without these experiences; everynow and then I performed intuitive music with my group while com-

posing Mantra and in the same two months wrote a series of seventeen

compositions called For Times to Come, which have similar qualities,but developed further, as the text

compositionsAus den sieben

Tagen.If you know the work Inori, you could see that now I am begin-ning to combine the two aspects more and more, to create inter-references between the two concepts. In Inori, for example, there arepassages in which the musicians float in areas of sounds with muchlarger limits than in the deterministic structures, where certain for-mulas can be treated individually by each member of the orchestralgroup as concerns timing and fractioning of elements. Even in the

piece of last night (Sirius), there are several sections where the musi-cians get little fragments, and the timing and the subdivision of thesefragments is left to the discretion of the moment. So I think words likedeterministic and indeterministic become just what they are. They be-come very narrow points of view of a complete continuity. I have al-ways said that these are an aid for discussion, but this means not thatthese are two opposed extremes, but that a deterministic element can

94




be, as it is in a given composition, seen as an indeterminate element, ifyou look at it from a larger perspective, let's say, in the macro-form.The

completelydeterminate element that is written down and

playedexactly as is prescribed can function as an extremely indeterminateelement, and vice versa. We have produced [forms] in intuitive play-ing. If you listen to the recordings of Aus den sieben Tagen, you canhear clear forms-for example if you listen to It or Upwards, youcan hear a musical form of thirty-forty minutes [in] length, which

gives the impression of an incredibly severe deterministic structuring,because the musicians went through the experience of deterministic

music as well as indeterministic, like Kontarsky and Boje; Kontarsky'sinclination is toward the deterministic. They brought this experienceinto the intuitive playing, and therefore the strong structuring of formis also functioning, then, in the intuitive music. And vice versa.

Now when pieces are played which seem to be completely deter-minate in their notations and also their way of rationalizing their tim-

ing and spacing of sounds, nevertheless, they have this fabulous flowof organic movement and, well, of open form, of open forming. So

these words are useful only in a discussion to clarify certain elementsof notation, interpretation, of working in a studio, where different pro-cesses have different methods to determine how to express somethingyou want in numbers or measures. Or, on the other hand, texts likeAus den sieben Tagen, which are formulated with general indications,give a direction but do not specify too much, which frees a musicianto listen more rather than read. There are many methods, and I thinkthat I will be able, during

mylifetime, to

composea few

examplesof

a perfect synthesis of the two aspects, where strata in a given composi-tion are left completely open for the intuition of several musicians, andthe other musicians react to them-like transformers and modulatorsin a studio do-to the material that's brought them, and swallowing it,so to speak, transform it into a process. Or vice versa: then the intuitiveplayers take something out of this transformed material again, as speci-fied material, and through repetition and clarification build new formu-

las during that particular piece, which are then fed back into the ensem-ble as material to transform. This happened already in the orchestralversion of Hymnen, where the tape is constantly feeding precise materialinto the orchestra and the musicians are given symbols which indicatedegrees and directions of transformations; they have to pick out certaintones or intervals, transpose them upwards or downwards with increas-ing or decreasing speed, etc. So I think the time is almost right in which

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these aspects become unified, like in the universe, actually. I have

always said if you look very closely at an atom, there seems to be a

lotof

random activity going on; but again, if you look at one of thesmaller planets very precisely, then you see that it moves itself in a

very regular way. The universe is, in all its macro- and micro-aspects,determinate and indeterminate. In general, it seems that the macro-movements are more determinate-give our human minds the impres-sion that they are more determinate-the sun goes up every morning,the whole clock of the universe seems to be very precise-whereas theindividual life of human beings, the cells in the body, seem to have

more space of randomness, more possibility of change from day to day,from moment to moment. It's only a question of perspective, how close

up you go to view. If you go too close it becomes random, indeter-minate; at a certain distance it becomes very precisely determinate,and if you go too far away it becomes random again.

DF: In several of your works, notably Hymnen which you call amusic for the post-apocalypse, and Sirius, you have written a music

for the future, not just music that is simply forward-looking. How isit possible for a composer living in one time to write for another time?

KS: Well, I think you must try to reveal within you the eternal nucleusof the person. People can on the surface live like pigs and still be angels;they're spiritual. Let's say this, I don't mean on a moral level at all;but I mean on the physical level, they can be incredible transmittersor receivers, certain people have that gift. I know a clairvoyant whois

certainlynot a

good exampleof humanitarian

quality,or

physicalquality, but he has that gift. This is also said about Edgar Casey, the

great American medium; smoking all the time, he really ruined his

body, terribly nervous, etc., but when he was in the state of deepmeditation, of deep trance, then he was the most incredible source of

knowledge about the future and the past, and he was able to say themost extraordinary things that have been proved countless times, aboutpeople's past lives, future lives, events that would occur, he predicted all

sorts of things. So if you want to transcend the general level of entertain-ment in this planet (which is very legitimate, because most people needentertainment of all sorts from the simple to the most refined, from themost tasteful to the most aesthetically developed, it is a kind of tessituraof fashion), if you want to transcend all this, then you have to discoverwithin you a particular quality of clairvoyance, a quality of the artist,an ability to receive something that is relevant a hundred years later or

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that was so fabulously rich in its content and so mysterious for the

majority that people were nurturing themselves for a long time after-

wards on this music or poetry. I don't say that you either have it oryou don't. You can try until the end of your life to try to discover thiseternal quality within yourself; and it's within all of us, in particularthose artists who already are willing to sacrifice their personal lives tothis hard work, which is incredibly hard work, to have practically no

personal entertainment and to give yourself away every day and everyhour and every minute only for this cause-to be used by humanity asa transistor, a radio, if you like. Others have compared it to an early

warning system, but I would like to go beyond this, as also an an-nouncement system, sometimes serious, sometimes joyous.

Then the artist can add more and more to the quality of what he's

doing, as well as the clarity and universality, by concentrating on thatinner center of his person which is often secretly in contact with thecenter of the universe. The artist becomes aware, himself (very oftenit is called madness), of that critical moment when he has contact withthis other world, because then he feels completely lost and he doesn'tknow why he's doing what he's doing. All he is trying is to be as preciseas possible in order to realize what's coming into him, as in daydreamsor night. So insofar [as] you can be conscious of it without becomingpompous or arrogant, you can be conscious of this specific quality ba-

sically through the state of emotion you go through yourself when youhear for the first time, at a certain distance, your own work, or whenyou see in people that you admire, when you feel in people that youadmire, this

particularreaction where

theyare elevated or transfixed.

This sometimes happens at the moment of reception when you havethe very first moment of intuitive insight, you hear the musical com-

position-usually it happens unexpectedly during the hard work of amusical composition, this moment of reception, much too early, and

you have no time to realize it; but when it happens you feel by the

degree of internal agitation almost a high degree of danger. Then youcan trust that it's something important, and that it's coming into you.

Then you have to stick to it and think about it, to make it become clear.You have to think about it no matter where you are and all the timeno matter if you're on a bus or... you must always be close to it. Thenit clarifies itself more and more and more, and when you start physi-cally working it out, then it is almost already right, and all the workyou can do is to adapt it to the means of this planet-to the orchestras,to instruments, to rehearsal conditions, and this and that. But you must

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keep close to what you have felt as a totally unified entity and realizeit as precisely as possible, taking care not to listen to others' reac-

tions because they disturb it. Everybody wants to suggest something-you should change this or that-and then you are pulled away fromit. So the only one who can know what is to be, is yourself. So the best

thing to do is shut yourself off from reactions and from people whocannot listen and constantly know better than the artist. Even otherfriends who are artists shouldn't be involved, because everybody has adifferent kind of thinking and if you are abstractly thinking about a

composition, you may make the most stupid kind of suggestions, which

are either dictated by tradition or convention, or by commercialisticaspects, or by intellectual processes-nothing of this should happen.The best is to simply stick to that original sound vision that you havehad, and realize it. So, the more you have experienced moments ofthis incredible elevation of yourself and the people you admire (youcan be fortunate if there are one or two, who are even able to express it,after having heard something), then you reach that point which makescontact between a particular moment of this life on this planet andthe most important spiritual vibrations of the center of the universe,which is the future and past and everything at once. It's no longer eventhe future, it's "It", beyond time.

It's very interesting where this spiral ends. I think it's connected toits beginning, like the wire in an electric bulb.

DF: Might you discuss some of the circumstances responsible for thecreation of your latest work, Sirius?

K.S. Well, Sirius is now, [after] about two years, a concrete conceptof a composition in my own mind. It's built on the twelve melodies ofthe zodiac which I composed about two years ago, and its center iscalled "The Wheel". It has four seasons; Sirius always begins withthe season corresponding to that particular time of the year. The firstpart is "The Presentation"; the last part is "The Annunciation". If

you read the text, which I have written myself, of the twelve melodies

of the zodiac, you would discover that I have tried to crystallize assharply as possible the characteristics of the twelve particular types ofman, from the respective astrological signs of the human characters ofthe zodiac. It says in the additional text, which is spoken and sung bythe soprano and bass, what each of the four soloists represents: thefour elements, the four seasons, the four sexes, the four stages of devel-opment of any kind of life.

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99AN INTERVIEW WITH STOCKHAUSEN

The spirit of it is that it is music from Sirius, which is transposedon this planet and [reveals] the possibilities of this planet, because I

think that the culture of this planet has been mainly formed by visitorsfrom Sirius, especially in the time between 9000 and 6000 B.C., [ashave] most of our modern concepts of cultural achievements, as faras these are still available, because, as you know, an enormous amounthas been burned in the library of Alexandria, where all the secret

knowledge of architecture, of mathematics, of astronomy and of the

arts, and of the magnetism of the earth, of ecology, etc., has been de-

stroyed voluntarily by the Christian orthodox administration. But I

think that our main sources of present-day culture, as decadent as itmay be in most parts of the planet, stem from visitors from Siriuswhose main representatives (leaders) were Isis and Osiris. Through aseries of revelations which were at first quite nebulous, but have be-come more clear during the past few years, I know (as little as I knowabout details) that I have come from Sirius, myself. And I knowthat the highest kind of language that can exist for this highly devel-

oped culture is music. As long as we're inclinated toward the bodiesand possibilities of the body of this planet Earth, then everything fromSirius appears as music. It is structured in a direct harmony withthe forming principles of the universe, of the rotations, of the seasons,of different aspects of youth, man, woman, the friend, of the elements

earth, fire, water, air, of states of growth, etc. All of these characteristicsstem basically, and have been made conscious, from this culture, andthere are many other planets which have been influenced by theseuniversal

principles,which are communicated best

throughsound in

music that is the best and most universal way.




ADDENDA: notes from the program (reprinted and translated from In-ternationes) by the composer.

The Composer on His Work(An introduction by the composer, Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen, astranslated from an article in Internationes, a Bicentennial publication inWest Germany.)

SIRIUS, the alpha star of Canis Major-8.7 light-years distant-is thesun of our local universe. Two hundred million suns with their planets andmoons circle around it and live from its light.

For the inhabitants of Sirius, music is the highest form of vibration. Forthis reason, music has attained its highest development on Sirius. Everymusical composition is linked to the rhythms of the stars, the time of yearand day, the elements, and the existential differences of the living beings.

The music, which I have composed and named SIRIUS transfers someof these principles of musical form and creation onto our planet. Thereare three phases in this work: 'The Presentation,' 'The Wheel,' and 'TheAnnunciation.'

THE PRESENTATION

NORTH-Basso Profundo

and

SOUTH- Soprano

present themselves

and

EAST- Trumpet

and

WEST- Bass Clarinet

NorthThe EarthThe ManThe NightThe WinterThe Seed

WestThe AirThe Friend, BelovedThe EveningThe AutumnThe Fruit

SouthThe Water

The WomanThe MiddayThe SummerThe Blossom

EastThe FireThe YouthThe MorningThe SpringThe Bud

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THE WHEEL

'The Wheel' of the stars and seasons is the clock of SIRIUS. Twelve

melodies of the zodiac are the signs of the months. According to theseason of the performance, one commences 'The Wheel' with one of thefour main melodies: ARIES, CANCER, LIBRA, or CAPRICORN.

The performance of 'The Wheel' takes approximately one hour. Eachof the four main melodies rules approximately one quarter of an hourand all twelve melodies divide the hour like the twelve numbers of theclock. 'The Wheel' revolves to the right.

Within 'The Wheel,' all is continuouschange

and transformation: therhythm, melody and timbre of ARIES, CANCER, LIBRA, and CAPRI-CORN transform themselves independently and, at times, jointly intoone another. Also, one is always emerging as another is departing, whilethe third and fourth melodies appear only softly and briefly. Everythingis formed from these four melodies. The other melodies appear only bythemselves; they are not utilized for metamorphoses.

THE ANNUNCIATION

After 'The Wheel,' NORTH and SOUTH (duo) and EAST andWEST (duo) say farewell, and in quartet they announce 'The Annunci-ation':

Only this period of creation has the virtue-still undiscernible foryou-that in the entire eternal infinite it is the only one in whichI, creator of all worlds, have completely taken on the nature ofthe human flesh.

I have chosen for myself within the entire, immense 'UniverseMan,' this particular cosmic capsule, and within this, the local uni-verse whose central sun is SIRIUS, and amongst the 200 millionsuns rotating around SIRIUS, I have chosen just your Earth,where I would incarnate as human being. Here I will raise, for alltimes and eternities to come, children completely similar to me,who, together with me, will someday reign over the entire infinite.

(Transmitted by Jakob Lorber)

The musical realization of the electronic music for SIRIUS was madeby me in the studio of the West German Radio Station in Cologne be-tween July 1975 and June 1976. Listening to this music, in particular to'The Wheel', one perceives how the newly discovered means and struc-tural possibilities of electronic music can awaken a new consciousness ofilluminations, transformations, and melding of 'Gestalten.' Impossiblewith the old musical devices, they approach closer and closer the art ofmetamorphosis n nature.

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Documents

An Interview With Karlheinz Stockhausen