Not necessarily anything to do with Karlheinz Stockhausen (excavated from diary entries 20 February–10 November 1994)

C O M P O S E R ' S N O T E B O O K not necessarily anything to do with Karlheinz Stockhausen (excavated from diary entries 20 February10 November 1994) Richard Barrett This text, not necessarily anything to do with Karlheinz Stockhausen, is an attempt to articulate certain questions of "influence " (a word more often glibly thrown out than deeply considered) regarding the effects of the music ofKarlheinz Stockhausen upon the author and his own work. Richard Barrett, born in 1959 in Wales, currently resides in Amsterdam, where he works as a composer. He also performs live electronic music (primarily in the duo FURT with Paul Obermayer) and teaches at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague. His most recent composition is Unter Wasser, a theaterpiece in five acts based on a text by Margret Kreidl, which was premiered in September 1998 in Amsterdam by Marianne Pousseur (mezzo-soprano) and Ensemble Champ d'Action, conducted by Koen Kesseh. this seems for some reason an appropriate time to begin putting in order some thoughts about Stockhausen, a Sunday afternoon in Amsterdam, much work currendy on Vanity [1], listened a couple of hours ago to Stockhausen's Schlagtrio, which for the first time became a fascinating experience, after probably fifteen years of avoiding it on the grounds of its schematic aridity, this time it seemed to open itself at last to my ears, its internal relationships becoming somehow relationships of space rather than time, the points of sound m a p ping out illuminations in a dark emptiness, was this what was intended at the time, I don't know, in listening die composer and his intentions vanished, I felt I was making a pathway through the sounds radier than being led dirough them, true to my convictions regarding listening as an activity, some kind of echo of die ecstasy of lostness which was a constant feature of my earliest powerful musical experiences, that's it, that's die reason for writing this (digression: listening must be interactive or not happen) "interactivity" as a fashionable means of freeing the listener's imagination is too likely to lead to the opposite result, if you asked most intelligent people what diey found least interesting about music they probably wouldn't reply that it isn't interactive enough Writings published in the Composer's Notebook section of Leonardo Music Journal are taken directly from the composer's hand and are published here in raw, uneditedform. I shall not succeed in discussing Stockhausen of course, but you've probably gathered that already, ah diere's no fooling you readers, nor should there be, as B.S.Johnson says somewhere Mantra for two pianos and electronics, heard for the first time probably in 1973, soon after beginning regular visits to die record library in Swansea, die walls covered in litde slots containing litde cards bearing strange names which gradually became familiar, over die centuries and die continents, Stockhausen was one to which I frequendy returned thereafter, names and records, objects from which sprang worlds, Mantra I remember as evoking a sequence of white rooms with bright windows a litde like die music classroom at school, not diat I spent much time diere, gave it up early on, die most ineradicable memory of diose classes, dunking about diem now, was being informed categorically that "understanding" the music of Webern was predicated on analyzing die minutiae of its structure from the score (that is to say independendy of die experience of listening), this made trying to listen to Webern an ungrateful business for many years, if my musical education had continued who knows how many odier doors would have been closed, diese days Webern's music doesn't seem so bad at all, especially when understanding seems to have been capriciously eluded again with Webern an experience of space, as I would later conceive negatives [2] as an internal itinerary, whose velocities and perspectives are in some way composed, in some way serially composed, it did take Xenakis to show the way toward compositional mediodologies I felt were idiomatic to my own perception, but die "outside-time" domain, die simultaneous, spatial view of musical relationships, is...