Program #160, August 21 2003: Stockhausen turns 75.

In the past, I have almost done featured composer programs on Karlheinz Stockhausen, last summer being the most recent example -- but I have always seemed to find it necessary to combine his work with that of others, to frame it within some other kind of theme. This program was my first actual attempt to give Herr Stockhausen his due, on the day before his 75th birthday.

But how can you summarize the work of someone like Stockhausen in a mere three hours? While it might be possible to do this in a discursive manner, just as one could do for some other composer of high stature ("this is his x period, this is his y period, he was influenced by z"), doing it by playing some representative sample of his works is tough because he works on such large canvases. That's true even if you forget about the nearly-but-not-yet-finished macroproject that is Licht, begun in 1977 (and from which I played an hour-long extract [!] of one of its seven parts [!!] last week); most of the pieces that I've played from before that time are at least 90 minutes long, and obviously only so many of those would have fit within this program. So which would I use to make the claim "well, here's some fairly representative Stockhausen"?

Rather than get bogged down in that problem, I decided to focus on a very specific aspect of Stockhausen's oeuvre: the intertwining of his personal life (which is to say, his relationship life) with his creative output. I thought this made sense as a focus because it is clearly a very important dimension of Stockhausen's work: he involves his partners and family members in his projects in a very intimate way, composes pieces for them and about them, and -- first and foremost -- brings the same all-encompassing, universalist ethos to his work that seems to be demonstrated in his relationships.

Here too being summary is difficult, but I could at least make some suggestive points with the works at hand. We began with In Freundschaft, a piece composed for the birthday of one of his two current companions, Suzanne Stephens -- its original version was designed for her to play on clarinet, but it was always intended that the piece could be played on a variety of other instruments as well. Certainly composers re-orchestrate their pieces all the time, but perhaps it is natural that someone with a history of polyamorous relationships would stipulate the possibility of re-orchestrating the piece (here heard on the soprano saxophone) from the very outset.

Reaching back into the late 1950s, Kontakte is a key early example of Stockhausen's "moment form" approach to composition. He describes this approach:

"Each moment... is individual and self-regulated, and able to sustain an independent existence... moments are not merely consequents of what precedes them and antecedents of what follows; rather than concentration on the Now -- on every Now -- as if it were a vertical slice dominating over any horizontal conception of time and reaching into timelessness, which I call eternity: an eternity which does not begin at the end of time, but is attainable at every moment." (quoted from other materials, in the CD's liner notes)

An interesting, if not entirely programmatically clear, musical manifesto. But it could also be read as a manifesto for Stockhausen's thoughts about relationships, as well. To anchor this, we looked at the story behind the story for one of Stockhausen's masterworks, Momente. This was a rather typical '60s collage work, in terms of its textual inspirations, although (in many opinion) it did a much better job of musically integrating its various parts than did almost every other such work from that period. But other interesting aspects of Momente lie just below its pleasing surface forms and stated organizational principles, which involve ongoing interaction between three different kinds of elements: K-moments (for "klang", tone quality or timbre), M-moments (for "melody") and D-moments ("duration"). Now, at the time, Stockhausen was still married to Doris Andreae, whom he had wed in 1951; but he had already met and fallen in love with Mary Bauermeister, an artist who -- among other influences -- was the person who got Stockhausen very much interested in Eastern mysticism, including the works of Sri Aurobindo, still a major inspiration for Stockhausen (and both of his current partners). A "portrait" of Bauermeister is embedded in Momente partially through quotation from one of her letters to Stockhausen, but also through the construction of the "M-moments" themselves. In fact, the entire piece encodes the first of Stockhausen's attempts to form a polyamorous household, with Bauermeister moving in with Stockhausen and Andreae. The structural underpinnings of Momente correspond neatly to Stockhausen's desires for (and projections regarding the qualities of the members of?) the household, with K-, M-, and D-moments standing in for Karlheinz, Mary, and Doris.

The experiment eventually went awry, and Stockhausen soon married Bauermeister, although -- true to his "concentration on the Now" -- he soon moved on from her, as well. Since we don't know all the facts surrounding Stockhausen's personal life, we can't draw conclusions about the costs and benefits of any of this behavior for the participants. But we can easily see that Stockhausen's approach to love and sexuality must radically perfuse the deepest presumptions of his art; that the wellsprings of his creativity and musical modus operandi are intimately connected to his emotional life in ways that are laid bare by even the fewest details of his biography.

(I would be the first to agree that the circumstances of his parents' deaths must be part of the mix, too. But here the connections would have to be more carefully teased out; they are not as directly visible, and I suspect they are most connected to Stockhausen's art by virtue of somehow driving his desire to connect with a wide range of romantic partners. But now I am speculating, and here my speculations must end.)

I find this kind of connection-making deeply interesting, because I suspect similarly valenced connections are fundamental for every accomplished visionary artist. Granted, the ways in which they are fundamental will vary greatly -- and will not always be nearly as visible as they are for Stockhausen (Boulez is a good example of this; while I contend that careful attention to his oeuvre reveals a deep core of emotion beneath the seemingly über-cerebral formalisms, the case must be made much more carefully). Why does anyone make art? Why do they make it in the way that they do? Perhaps a key part of Stockhausen's inspiration ultimately comes from the collision of his passions with the strictures of the world around him. For better or worse, whatever one thinks of Stockhausen's art, one must agree that he has striven mightily to meet the challenge of making something positive out of the materials of his life. Would that many of the rest of us could do the same!