About time too
MUSIC _ MICHAEL NYMAN
Stockhausen's one-night stand at the St Pancras Town Hall was predictably a staggering and welcome shock to London concert life. (Normal service was resumed as soon as possible.) To the conservative, annoyed by a few high decibel rat- ings and the concert's apparent disregard of the printed programme, it was perhaps an op- portunity to make an early application to the Trade Descriptions Act; to the rest it was a unique—and so unrepeatable—experience: a
concert of his recent music, about his music, which as a whole was his very newest 'com- position.'
It is, of course, the probing originality of Stockhausen's sound-world which draws the crowds—the concert could have been sold out three times over, which is due recognition of the foresight of the Macnaghten Concerts in arranging his only public appearance here in the
last three years (deplorably and ludicrously a projected tour was cancelled through lack of
money). Yet the concert represents the most re- cent stage of Stockhausen's voyage of dis- covery, a continuous and often circular search into the musical application of quasi-mathe- matical systems, into structural and time prin- ciples, into sound itself, into the thought processes of the performer and into methods of presenting his ideas to the public.
The last point is important, for the idea of arranging the seats in circles around each group of performers was not intended deliberately to confuse those who were searching for the row and seat number on their ticket, still less to disrupt convention for its own sake. The deployment of musical and physical space, mostly disregarded by other composers, is fundamental to Stockhausen's musical think- ing. It works in two different ways, one external so to speak, where a musical image is rotated round or across the hall in various directions (as in Kontakte, performed at the proms this year); and the other 'internal' and textural, so that a particular series of images hits you at various degrees of closeness or distance, from different perspectives, in different degrees of focus. This technique Stockhausen has already used to great effect in his early electronic piece Gesatzg der Iiinglinge, but far more brilliantly and subtly in his Telemusik (1966), where the use of a six-track tape recorder enables the com- poser to construct a space-spectrum ranging from the cutting immediacy of Japanese per- cussion instruments to the distant, almost sub- liminal sounds of an oriental folk tune.
Mobility of musical images is one thing, more important in this concert perhaps was Stock- hausen's new attitude to the mobility of a musical work as an object. For the concert was planned as a continuous performance of two pieces from Aus den sleben Tagen (written in May this year) into which were 'slotted' Solo, for trombone and two tapes (in a superb real- isation by Vinko Globokar), and Teletntisik. This is the newest stage in Stockhausen's evolu- tion towards a free, non-European, non-mastel-- work position—a position developing from forms whose movements can be shuffled about and played in a number of different orders, through pieces where a combination of signs and notational raw materials are worked ourby
the performers themselves, as in Plus-Minus.
Aus den sleben Tagen takes the apparent emancipation of the performer one stage further, for its fifteen pieces consist simply of verbal directions, designed to induce a certain state of mind in the performers before playing, to create according to Stockhausen a more or less 'permanent state of intuition,' so that all past musical memories and stock responses would be avoided in favour of sounds 'such as had never been heard before.' The often bril- liant music created in this semi-improvisation by the Arts Lab Ensemble (formed by Hugh Davies, who assisted the composer with the electronic 'control' of the performance) showed the extent to which Stockhausen is now directly involved in sonic, rather than theoretical, material.
The continuous 'electric flux' of this concert reflects the grandiose, perhaps megalomaniac, creative vision of Stockhausen—which he him- self described, in reference to Telemusik, as coming 'closer to an old dream—going one de- finite step further in the direction of writing not "my" music, but a music of the whole world, of all countries and races'—German mystical philosophy with a touch of the Mc- Luhans? Nevertheless, each of Stockhausen's pieces builds up a strongly defined 'world' of its own, and they do so in two opposite ways, creating a fascinating interplay between the known and the unknown : in a work like Tele- musik the composer acts as a kind of filter, in- cor,porating 'known' sounds taken from eastern folk music into a complete electronic fabric; whereas Mikrophonie I starts from nothing, at least only a single Chinese tam-tam, from whose electronically modified sounds is created a world so compelling that we gradually come 1wperceive it almost as a compost-grown par; our natural environment.
Thus Stockhausen's music could from angle be viewed as a collage, in which 'known' is not used as an object in itself
as an introduction into an unfamiliar are experience: the use of live instruments in A takte. the boy's voice in Gesang, and n especially the national anthems in flyiltne, (1967), part of which was played in the ve:,t, of .Solo heard at the concert. However, de, it the 'religious' or mystical inspiration of Stock- hausen's work we are not hypnotised by the music, but on the contrary made more aware- if only because many people find this music so repellent—of what is actually going on. for Stockhausen's sound structures. like Bach's, are complex and need to be listened to in depth. The process is helped by Stockhausen's con- ception of time as existing in the continuou, present, a conception which dissolves tradi- tional development and recurrent forms into the 'now-moment,' although a work like Komakte is not as desiccated and illogical as Stozk- hausen's block-eared critics make out.
For what seems to be Stockhausen's procesi of composition could be described as the Blow- Up principle in reverse: his preoccupation %kith the chemistry of sounds, with audible material as particles, represents the photograph at its most magnified, while as the music builds up it becomes less and less detailed until in it final form the microscopic chaos of the moment is composed into the complete picture. And that after all is not very far from traditional ways of putting music together. Judge for yourself on 19 January when Macnaghten Concerts present the first English performance of Mikrophonie II at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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