[NewMusic] Stockhausen-RIP-memories

[olorin at lmi.net]

i figured it would happen pretty soon - that leaves boulez as the last  
'old guard' composer who studied w/ messiaen, and he's actually a  
later generation.

wow - lots of stockhausen memories, myself. highly influential. i  
remember studying robin maconies 1970's era book on him while an  
undergrad and listening to mostly electronic works and things like  
gruppen, punkte, carre, etc. the thing i was really struck with was  
how he would come up with a method for organizing a piece of music,  
and that method could be used to write dozens of pieces, all different  
and fresh. yet, each time he'd come up with a different form to  
organize  the next work, which would go in a completely different  
direction from the one before. it's like each one of his pieces would  
be a
style of its own. eventually after the 70s and the beginning of the  
Licht cycle he settled down somewhat into a recognizable style but  
still produced amazing and interesting music, the content and true  
depth of which will likely remain unsurpassed for generations to come.

like cage he believed that music had a purpose that was divine and  
holy, yet explored it in a different way. the results can be profound,  
amazing enlightening, but also ponderous and overly long (esp the  
opera stuff) but to me, i feel strongly the fault isn't with him -  
it's me. it seems a bit of hero worship, but i feel he's always had  
the human race's interest at heart, even though i might not be getting  
the message at this point in my life. i get the feeling he was  
creating art mainly for the humans of the future, not neccessarily the  
present, and i get a glimpse of it every so often.

of course i love when he's interviewed about the IDM musicians and  
tells them they should be listening to certain pieces of his music. i  
mean, this is coming from the guy who basically INVENTED electronic  
music based on electronic tones using magnetic tape, a pioneer of  
musique concrete, and ran filters and ring modulators on live  
instruments in the early 1960s. interestingly enough i love their  
response - basically 'you should listen to more groove based, simple  
harmonic structured music', which is what Stockhausen was mainly  
complaining about.

a recent listening of hymnen at the transparent tape music fest  
convinced me how
amazingly fresh and timeless that 45 year old music still is - the  
sounds that he created using tape machines and oscillators rival and  
even surpass anything you could reproduce digitally using max/msp or  
reaktor.

anyway - a great composer, an egomaniac with the work and ideas to  
back it up, a singular voice of modern music - he will be missed.

scott