Stockhausen : conversations with the composer / Jonathan Cott.
| Author/creator | Cott, Jonathan |
| Other author | Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 1928-2007. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication Info | New York : Simon and Schuster, ©1973. |
| Description | 252 pages : illustrations, portraits, facsimiles, music ; 24 cm |
| Subjects |
| Partial contents | Introduction -- Part one : New York, February, 1971 -- Part two : Kürten, Germany, September, 1971. |
| Contents | Part one. New York - February 1971. Hymnen: music for the postapocalypse ; "Becoming conscious is already being on the other side" ; "We are all transistors" ; Intuitive music ; Periodicity: "God breathes periodically" ; "We are an electric system" ; Conversation with Suzuki: artificial versus the natural ; Musical time ; A tone's inner life ; Japanese culture: imitation and transformation ; An apple on the moon: the known object in a new world ; Foreground-background technique ; Timbre composition: "The material itself must be part of the creative act" ; Stimmung: melodies, rhythms, and chords of timbre ; Periodicity versus free play ; "Play the vibration in the rhythm of your smallest particles" ; Rhythms of the universe ; Colors of meditation: violet-red and gold ; Brain-wave music ; Musical atomization ; Spatial motion ; Osaka's world's fair: the spherical hall ; Changing perspectives ; "Frist you must make the music, and then the music changes you" -- Part two: Kurten, Germany - September 1971. The sleepers and the waking ; Hitler, Sri Aurobindo, and Ghandi ; "The spirit will be the music itself" ; Dreaming Trans ; The sound wall and the weaving chair ; Violet-red light ; Hearing through Trans ; Transpersonal music ; Transcendental sound ; Description of Trans: four events ; Visual events and sound: Kontakte and Originale ; Relativity and determinism ; Student seminars in communication science ; Cage, Pollock, Mathieu ; Piano Piece XI; Stimmung ; Making a sound texture ; Statistical characteristics ; The tree of sound ; Individual figures and multiplicities ; Russia and America: preplanning versus randomness ; The essence of sound ; Subject-object perception: non-Aristotelian logic ; The integration of all sounds ; Music of the spheres ; The acoustical garbage machine: the sound swallower ; The power of sound waves ; Stimmung ; A letter from Japan ; A sound's inner life ; Sound envelopes ; "The secret of timbre composition lies in the production of very specific cycles of rhythmic changes" ; Studio experiments: enlargement of the musical parameters ; Historical development of melody, rhythm, dynamics, timbre composition, music in space ; Unified notation ; Chinese music ; Pythagorean comma ; Microtones ; Transubstantiation of rhythm into pitch and vice versa ; Rotation table experiment: "You change the pich by altering your position in the room" ; Rhythmic cadences in Mozart's music ; Serialism ; Le Corbusier ; "Nature creates divergent species by expanding certain parameters" ; Boulez on musical "Specialists" ; Space-age consciousness ; On being called "Authoritarian" or "Radical" ; Student disruption of Amsterdam Stimmung performance ; Music and social "Realities" ; Henze's new music ; The function and meaning for a true artist ; The eraser and the fire: a composer's best friends ; Master-disciple relationship ; Eagles ; Flying sounds in Hymnen ; Return to the apocalypse ; The spirit and the body ; Diary ; The Body of Black Light ; Genius and Wealth ; The golden egg: music therapy for chickens (with a word from The Secret of the Golden Flower) ; Craft and Stravinsky ; Stravinsky as engineer and Wagner as Gagaku composer ; The pope and the cats - a story from Rome ; An American Indian folktale ; The interpretation of dreams ; The piano of pain ; Telepathic music and nervous music publishers ; An angry postcard ; Seminars for orchestral musicians ; The loss of melodic feeling in contemporary music ; Feldman and Bernstein ; Repetitions ; Stomach of God ; The thirteen tears ; Listening in the dark ; The breath of the world ; Hymnen: a personal and analytic discussion ; Applause feedback in Momente ; The hymn of Pluramon ; Musical frames ; Decomposition ; Music born out of chaos ; One being becomes another ; Alchemy ; Plus-Minus: a composition which produces its own children ; Punkte and antimatter ; Assassinating Plus-Minus ; "Clothe yourself with the new man" ; A poem from Stimmung: Diffff-daffff-diffffffff ; How Stimmung was composed ; "Time cannot be separated from being" ; Composing Processes ; Structuralism ; Language, Babel, telepathy ; Synchronicity ; An infinite series of the I, the you, and the it ; A ternary system of logic ; The new spiritual family ; The spiral: "The circle which leads to ecstasy" ; The Kataragama religious festival of Ceylon ; The Omizutori ceremony in the temple of Nara, Japan ; New areas of musical composition ; (1) Micro-macro continuum ; Taping rhythms ; Twenty-one octaves of musical time ; (2) Metacollage and integration ; (3) Expansion of tempo scales ; Expansion of scale and range of tempi ; (4) Feedback ; Intuitive versus determinate music ; (5) Spectral harmonics ; (6) Music-in-space ; Anything can function as rhythm ; Topology of space: projecting and drawing sounds in space ; Walking and Running music ; Ensemble ; Music for a House ; Varese's Espace ; Concerts in the caves of Jeita, Lebanon ; Outdoor concert at St. Paul de Vence ; Sternklang in Berlin's Tiergarten ; Painting and music: Rauschenberg and Johns ; Size as a musical parameter ; Brueghel and Bosch ; Degrees of perfection at a given moment in a composition ; Plans for a music house ; "Walking from one hall to another 'as if you were going through an enormously enlarged score'" ; Mantra: an analysis of its creation and structure ; Traditional versus new music ; Macbeth becomes Lady Macbeth and then an animal; new people appear and disappear, no one character goes through the entire play ; Mantra mirrors ; Each note with its specific form ; Twelve mantric expansions ; Alice in wonderland ; Form scheme ; Mantra and oriental music ; Ring modulation ; Condensation of Mantra ; Satprem on Sri Aurobindo ; Mantra and the galaxy. |
| Abstract | Still in his early forties, Karlheinz Stockhausen has been hailed as "the Prophet of a new world of sound" and "a composer of unarguable greatness," and attacked for his "mystical, semi-hippie philosophy" and for his "impenetrable" music. Not since Stravinsky has a composer generated such excitement and controversy. But unlike composers such as Schönberg, Webern, and Stravinsky - who worked almost solely within a Western tradition - Stockhausen has fostered within himself a global musical responsiveness. His concerts in Europe, New York, Japan, and the Middle East have offered occasions for a new kind of musical ritual and, in some instances, have provoked disruptive audience protests. Stockhausen's following among the young (one critic has called him "the Pied Piper of Youth") can undoubtedly be attributed to his pluralistic temperament as well as to the fact that Stockhausen's recent concerts have seemed more like thaumaturgical rituals than the typically decorous "cultural" event. In this book of extraordinary conversations, Stockhausen talks to Jonathan Cott (poet and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine) about the artist's role, as both receiver and transformer, and about new ways of breaking down the boundaries of audience-composition perceptions. The composer discusses his life, his unique approaches to composition, his attempts to integrate Eastern and Western musical traditions, and his explorations of new sound material and designs for acoustical environments. He offers provocative views on the relationships between contemporary music, art, and politics, speaking always as an advocate of the integrative function of art. For Stockhausen, music is a medium by which to discover oneself; and it can, in his words, "become still more open, universal, more cosmically oriented. Sooner or later when one has achieved this consciousness, one will travel there as a cosmic tourist and by that show that everything exists at once."--Inside cover. |
| General note | Includes catalog of Stockhausen's works published by Universal Edition, 1950-1971. |
| Bibliography note | Discography: pages 249-252. |
| Language | Conversations conducted in English. |
| LCCN | 72093506 |
| ISBN | 0671214950 |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Music | Closed Stacks - Ask at Circulation Desk | ML410.S858 C7 1973 | ✔ Available | Place Hold |