Karlheinz Stockhausen: Cosmic Pulses (review)

[Editor's Note: Karlheinz Stock-hausen passed away on December 5th, 2007. What this means for the future of the summer school itself is uncertain; but this review stands as a testament to undiminished critical interest in his work and life.]

The 10th Stockhausen Courses took place in the gentle setting of the town of Kürten, near Cologne, Germany, 7–15 July 2007. Approximately 130 instrumentalists, musicologists, and composers attended to pay homage to the living legend Karlheinz Stock-hausen, to study with his clique of approved interpreters, to get access to the archives of his work, and simply to listen and bask. The ten-day festival was tightly organized, held on the grounds of a local school, whose acoustically impressive gymnasium housed each night's concerts. A typical day might involve early morning gesture classes, an open rehearsal for that evening's concert, a musicological lecture from Richard Toop, interpreters classes in the afternoon with the faculty, an analysis lecture from Mr. Stockhausen himself, a bratwurst and beer in the local biker's bistro, the evening concert itself, and post-concert drinks and ice cream in an Italian restaurant up a hill in the plaza next to Kürten's town church.

Mr. Stockhausen himself was at the time a sprightly 78-year-old (he turned 79 on 22 August, a month or so after the end of the summer courses); his 80th birthday year would have been 2008. He was undiminished by age in his energies for composition, rehearsal, and self-promotion; his habits of hard work and an innate sense of purpose seem to have kept him eternally young and even fiery (or I hesitate to think how much of a dynamo he was as a younger man; I prefer to imagine the magnetic accumulation of years of experience). The course participants seemed to bask in the glow of a living legend, occasionally a little too uncritically. Indeed, access to Mr. Stockhausen was controlled by careful scheduling of the week's events.

At the concerts, instrumental works were interleaved with tape pieces (run from a Tascam DA-88 digital eight-track unit), which seemed to hold equal status. Mr. Stockhausen sat at the mixing console in the center of the audience for every concert, regulating the microphones he uses as a standard to amplify all acoustic instrumentalists and make their every whisper audible to the back row. There was a bias toward works from the 1970s on, including multiple arrangements of works for solo performer, as most readily provided by the expert interpreters on hand, and naturally continued at the three student concerts deriving from the interpretation classes. Lacking any larger ensembles, the performance of Inori (1973– 1974) for orchestra and mimes was conducted with a tape substituting for the orchestra. Perhaps most interesting to the electronic music community, though, were the many solo tape works presented, with all lights off but for a single spotlight high up. As Mr. Stockhausen explained, he had received so many comments from people uncomfortable with total darkness that he provided the moon, but he preferred that listeners close their eyes and occasionally move their heads to track spatial movement and scene.

He diffused (or sound-projected, as he termed it) over a rig of two layers of loudspeakers, adaptable to the eight-speaker cube of Oktophonie (1990–1991, 69 min) or the eight-track spatial projection of Choirs of Monday (1987, 69 min) and Mittwochs-Abschied (1996, 44 min). These large-scale works, extracted from acts of the Licht opera cycle, presented listeners with an exhilarating and draining acousmatic listening experience. The Choirs work is founded on recorded massed voices, spatialized in the auditorium, but the other two large-scale compositions use stock synthesized sounds. At various points during the week, especially with the presentation of works for tape and performer such as Komet (1994–1999) for percussion, the timbral presets—uncritically selected from commercial synthesiz-ers—underlying much of Mr. Stock-hausen's output since the 1980s were apparent. A current of the primacy of...