Saturday, August 22, 2009
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN b AUG 22 1928
di & i lived in tri-plex in sarasota. it was owned by a fellow named pavchinski, a polish jew who'd actually been in the nazi camps in his youth. he never told me that but he did have numbers tattooed on his forearm. he was an odd bird, never looked you in the eye & seemed to be constantly in motion even while standing there talking to you. at first, the other parts of the tri-plex were rented by other new college students. then, pavchinski built some lean-to's out back & rented those to some truly disgusting bikers. the lean-to's didn't have running water. those folks didn't seem to need it. eventually, the biker's took over the tri-plex & the other small row of apartments pavchinski owed directly across from our bedroom window. di & i were the last of the new college students to get the hell out. it's not entirely clear to me why we waited so long. these folks had guns(& used them)& fought violently amongst themselves. they were not good neighbors.
anyway, before the bikers came, i remember pavchinski stopping by to pick up the rent check. i had a piece by stockhausen on the stereo. i noticed pavchinski seemed visibly disturbed by the music. as he stood there, waiting for me to locate the check, he began to twitch & spasm. it struck me that this music was somehow touching repressed memories, opening up old wounds, flashing him back to ugly & awful times. his shifting eyes seemed to be vibrating in his head. he snatched the check from me & nearly fell getting to the front door. "you like the music?," i asked to his back. he froze & spun around. i was shocked by his eyes, which were full of rage & murder. "music? music?," he spit out, "that's not music, that's noise!"
"He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization."
stockhausen is still an active & major composer.
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2 comments:
Danny, Stockhausen was, interestingly enough, strongly influenced by the works of Sri Aurobindo he read in the late 60's - apparently a number of his later compositions were interpretations of ideas he encountered in those writings - specificaly The Hour of God, SA's translations of Vedic hymns ("Hymns to the Mystic Fire"), and his concept of the Supramental.
Stockhausen's conception of opera was based significantly on ceremony and ritual, with influence from the Japanese Noh theatre (Stockhausen, Conen, and Hennlich 1989, 282), as well as Judeo-Christian and Vedic traditions (Bruno 1999, 134). In 1968, at the time of the composition of Aus den sieben Tagen, Stockhausen had read a biography by Satprem about the Bengali guru Sri Aurobindo (Guerreri 2009), and subsequently he also read many of the published writings by Aurobindo himself. The title of Licht owes something to Aurobindo's theory of "Agni” (the Hindu and Vedic fire deity), developed from two basic premises of nuclear physics; Stockhausen's definition of a formula and, especially, his conception of the Licht superformula, also owes a great deal to Sri Aurobindo’s category of the "supramental" (Peters 2003, 227).
i had no idea. thanks ken.
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