musician on music

- For the past 8 years, in 3 apartments and 4 dorm rooms, I've had a poster of Stockhausen on my wall. My Dad found the poster in a thrift store (most likely Value Village) in Seattle, WA. How a poster of Karlheinz Stockhausen came to rest there is beyond my comprehension. This image is the one you see in the upper left. On the back it is dated November 4th, 1974. Although I'm not sure what exactly Stockhausen is listening for, the poster inspires me to maintain a careful ear, whether I'm playing, composing, or just listening.

 - My Dad occasionally rented the basement of our house out to friends of his. One of the renters was a bass player he had played with. This bass player also happened to have an interest in modern music, and would occasionally blast Stockhausen, Ligeti, Stravinsky, or other 20th-century composers on his stereo. Compared to what I was playing in my middle school band, this music was a revelation. We collaborated on one of the first complete MIDI realizations of "The Rite of Spring" to be posted on the web. And occasionally, we would spar on a computer golf game using the assumed names of our favorite composers (I remember his Castelnuovo-Tedesco vs. my Holst or Sibelius.) As a parting gift he gave me a t-shirt, which I still have, that reads "Stockhausen Rocks." One night when I was wearing the t-shirt, a visual artist asked me "What is Stockhausen? A concentration camp?" Quite the contrary.

- The AXIOM ensemble's excellent performance of "Kreuszspiel" (1951) in December 2006. Even before the sound begins, the setup is formidable - including the oboist playing from a nearly 5-foot tall podium and a specifically positioned array of percussion. When I started exploring this piece, I made all kinds of musical associations based off recordings. But in live performance, there was no comparison to the world of sound offered in even this earlier piece, which doesn't even scratch the surface of his Stockhausen's electronic work. I remember saying "this is kind of like hip hop..." about the combination of the repeated tones in the low piano and the percussion at the opening of the piece. Said Stockhausen, "I knew when I wrote it that it would sound like nothing else in the world." This is true. Apparently the premiere was met with a "violent" response.

- Finally, in the previous entry, I mentioned the catalytic Björk thesis. Björk's affinity for Stockhausen is now well documented, including her interview of the composer in 1996, but she is far from the only more widely-known musician to cite Stockhausen as a significant influence. At any rate, one thing in the interview that stuck with me was Stockhausen's response to Björk's question: "Just because [music] is more honest, it's more real?" Stockhausen responds; "Yes, but what most of the people like is a regular beat, nowadays they make it even in pop music with a machine. I think that one should try to make music which is a bit more...flexible, so to speak, a bit more irregular. Irregularity is a challenge, you see. How far can we go in making music irregular? Only as far as a small moment when everything falls into synchronicity, and then goes away again into different meters and rhythms. But that's how history has been, anyway."