Title link takes you to a post on Audio Lemon featuring a rare Stockhausen interview. It is well worth watching. In the beginning of the video there is what looks like a keyboard (pictured here - note the time it comes in when you check it out). It doesn't appear again in the video. Does anyone know what it is? Also, this is probably blasphemy to even throw this out there, but I find it fascinating how he and other composers who primarily used traditional instruments are considered to be the pioneers of electronic music. I understand the music composed is very akin to music composed on electronic instruments, and of course many of these composers use electronic instruments, but is the music truly electronic in essence, and did they compose their music specifically as electronic pieces? The same goes for many electronic music events that oddly rarely feature the synthesizer. What do you all think? : )
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Rare Stockhausen Interview - Electronic Music?
Title link takes you to a post on Audio Lemon featuring a rare Stockhausen interview. It is well worth watching. In the beginning of the video there is what looks like a keyboard (pictured here - note the time it comes in when you check it out). It doesn't appear again in the video. Does anyone know what it is? Also, this is probably blasphemy to even throw this out there, but I find it fascinating how he and other composers who primarily used traditional instruments are considered to be the pioneers of electronic music. I understand the music composed is very akin to music composed on electronic instruments, and of course many of these composers use electronic instruments, but is the music truly electronic in essence, and did they compose their music specifically as electronic pieces? The same goes for many electronic music events that oddly rarely feature the synthesizer. What do you all think? : )
14 comments:
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stockhausen is THE grand daddy.....period....Kontakt is the bomb....
ReplyDeleteThat's Harald Boje and the Elektronium, if I remember my Stockhausen right. This pic looks like it's from around the late 1960s, which means we're looking at his performing ensemble of the day.
ReplyDeleteIf there was no "tape music" or early electronic music there would not have been grounds for Buchla and Moog, not to mention Bell labs and the early studios, private and school owned.
ReplyDeleteEveryone who worked on what would be the basis of what we think of as a synthesizer today were answering very specific needs of the composers.
As for the point about the music, you have to keep in mind that you're talking about a period where electronic music was in its infancy. There were few synthesizers, and very rarely were they used in live performance. Stockhausen, however, often used live electronics...either to generate sounds or to process them in real-time...which was a genuine innovation in its day. Plus, his approach to 'instrumental music' was massively shaped by his work with electronics; compare something such as his "Gruppen" for three orchestras spaced around the audience (first use of electric guitar in 'classical' music, btw) with his "Gesang der Jünglinge", which also makes use of similar surround-the-listener techniques. Or "Mikrophonie I", which uses a giant tamtam, but which then subjects it to very unorthodox playing methods, special microphone techniques, and live filtering. For 1964, that's some pretty impressive stuff.
ReplyDeleteSo you really can't separate Stockhausen from the electronics, even if he's using conventional instruments. Quite often, there's nothing 'conventional' about what's being done with them, and the root all goes back to his electronic composition techniques. Remember, this is the guy who came up with the rule that rhythm = pitch, and then went on to demonstrate that point very aptly in "Kontakte", and that realization came about due to his experiments with pulse generators and what happens when pulses slow from AF to LFO-type rates, and how we perceive those changes. We're talking some pretty basic synthesis methods, sure, but there were only the barest stabs at synthesizers back in 1959, and Stockhausen did what he did without the aid of them...but shaped what we recognize as synthesizers would be capable OF doing when they finally came into existence.
Saying Stockhausen wrote for 'ordinary instruments', therefore, is kind of like saying that Kraftwerk did some nice pieces with guitars and flutes. It doesn't tell the whole story.
Excerpt of an interview between Stockhausen and Lara Lee for the film Modulations.
ReplyDeleteQ: When did you realize the future of music lay in electronic sounds?
A. 1953. I was working in the studio for Musique Concrete in Paris in 1952, when I was studying with Olivier Messian in Paris, at the age of 23. I was allowed to work in the studio and realized "Etude Concrete", it still exists on record.....
I knew that the synthesis of sound and space music would be the most important aspect of the music of our time and of the future, since '53. And with every work I have tried to expand my experience, moving sound and space, and finding new ways of superimposing different tempos and rhythms. In particular what is most important to me is the transformation of a sound by slowing it down, sometimes extremely, so that the inner of sound becomes a conceivable rhythm. And then even slow it down more, so that this rhythm becomes a large form, with sections. Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.
You can read the full interview at
http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/stockhauseninterview.html
For me you have to pick and choose with stockhausen. There is stuff I really don't like such as the Klavierstucke and all the serial stuff.
ReplyDeleteThen there is music I genuinely enjoy like Tam Tam, Kontakte, Microphone 1.
And then there are pieces I appreciate technically but see them as experiments like Gesang der Junglinge which i like in parts but mostly because of it's technicality.
I think when electronic sounds started to seep into other forms of music it was more than just a technical framework that was adopted. It was also a therotical framework... a way of understanding music, sound and space. On the liner notes for Miles Davies' On The Corner he credits Stockhausen with introducing him to the idea of music as a process of addition and subtraction. By this I mean electronic music, if it exists at all, is more than just the instrumentation. It's a musical methodology.
A synthesist before synthesizers.
ReplyDeleteStockhausen rules! (not too many opportunities to say that)
ReplyDeleteThere are a few composers that write for the orchestra as if it's one big synthesizer: Ligeti, Varese, Scelsi, Murail
I know what you mean Matrix but I think when he said synthesis he meant a coming together of two forms of music. One based on tonality and one based on spatalization and multi-array loudspeakers.
ReplyDeleteStudie 1 in 1953 was an experiment with Pure Tone or sine waves and Studie 2 was an experimentation in spatization using found sounds. I think that just about set up the template for electronic music.
If nothing else I'd see him as one of the fathers of sampling, editing and sound design. Synthesizers in a large part came out of the desire to simplfy the process of sound design.
That's my $0.02 anayways :)
Actually, Study II is also a synthesis piece: subtractive. Stockhausen used filters to subtract spectra from white noise, then imposed envelopes manually onto this. Study I is additive synthesis, using pure sine tones and a synthetic scale based on the square root of 5 to generate artificial spectra. Again, more manual envelope work. The 'Etude', which predates these two pieces from 1953, is the 'found sound' piece, which he did while studying in Paris in either 1951 or 52. So even from the very beginning, Stockhausen was working with the basics of what we all take for granted these days.
ReplyDeleteYeah, its Harald Bojé with his modified Electronium. You had a post about this instrument recently:
ReplyDeleteHohner Electronium
This clip is from 1968 or 1969. Stockhausen wasn't exactly a pioneer using synthesizers. Though some of his musicians were in a way early adopters. Specifically Bojé and Eotvos.
Stockhausens early venture in electronic music was triggered by his serialistic ideal at the time. Initially he saw it as a way to apply serialism to timbre. Electronic instruments came later. He didn't specifically score for electronic instruments until "Sirius" in 1976.
yes Stocki is the man, brilliant tape sound manipulation and shortwave bliss
ReplyDeleteThere was a period when Stockhausen was about as purely electronic as anyone could be in the mid-20th Century. While the French were playing phonographs of choo choo trains, Stockhausen's mentors in Germany, Mssrs. Eimert et al, were restricting their sound sources to those purely in the electronic realm, i.e. oscillators, noise generators. They had an almost religious belief that they were carrying on Webern's dictum of total control of all musical parameters (which was briefly interrupted by other German people trying to control all mankind). They figured electronic music was the cleanest, purest way to achieve said goal.
ReplyDeleteborn on a different planet......what a looney.....he must be related to Sun Ra
ReplyDelete