[NewMusic] stockhausen

[Tim Perkis]

I can offer an anecdote about how stockhausen changed and defined my life.

I was about 12 or 13, living in a small town in Ohio, and saw a 
documentary on Stockhausen on the public tv station from Cincinnati -- 
fooling with the rabbit ears and straining to see the fuzzy black and 
white image, I was completely blown away by the depiction of the life of 
Stockhausen, and the music he was making. I hadn't really heard any 
serious contemporary music at all before, but I loved what I was hearing 
immediately, and I remember thinking: You can do that?!?! You can 
actually spend your life doing that?!?!?! How impossibly wonderful!!! 
(And all praise public television as well, a cultural lifeline.)

This of course was all in the context of a town and life where being ANY 
kind of artist as a way of life was just not on the menu, not a 
conceivable mode of of existence... the idea of spending your life doing 
this outrageous exciting and beautiful music was just... I really 
couldn't have imagined such a thing was possible. After that I dug up 
all the scratchy Stockhausen records I could get from the public 
library, and ever since then, even after finding out what a nut and 
asshole he could be, I've always thought of him as the ultimate real 
thing; for me he's always represented a reference point of how far human 
beings can go in terms of sensitivity and creativity.  He was the real 
thing.



Phillip Greenlief wrote:
> David Slusser <slusser at pixar.com> wrote:  On Dec 7, 2007, at 9:16 AM, cliff caruthers wrote:
>   
>> The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away on December 5th 2007
>>     
>
> There may be some kind of cosmic reverberation;
> I just heard KCSM playing the sfSound group on
> my drive into work. What can you say about KS?
> He's in the cosmos for sure, perhaps as "Light".
>
>
> PG:
> With Invisible Choirs singing praises...well, good night, KS. You earned the rest.
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