It's laughable because it plainly isn't true !
Your first sentence needs explanation.

No, I meant XI. Stockhausen (in conversation with Jonathan Cott):

Even in 1977 this must have raised a few eyebrows, I think. Ten years earlier it would have had more of a resonance. The main thing I wanted to bring up was the "work versus workings" bit.

In its time (as Autoharp rightly implies), Nyman's book would have been a useful corrective to the claims of Stockhausen (and not only him) to have invented every device known to modern music ab initio. And his views are far more nuanced than the accusation of "Anglo-American triumphalism" would indicate, as witness his comments on Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra in relation to Cage. At the time when Nyman was writing and for a while afterwards, there was I think some mileage to be got out of defining a divide between "experimental" and "avant-garde", although it was of course quite clear which side of that divide Nyman sympathised with.

I'm not so sure - he almost totally ignores European 'experimental' traditions, and wants to make the traffic across the Atlantic and the Channel almost entirely one-way. The rather arrogant dismissal of what those funny foreigners do comes through to me pretty consistently throughout the book, and indeed has permeated a lot of discourse around Anglo-American 'experimental' music ever since. It's rather telling that he conveniently omits to mention Cardew's work with Stockhausen, that Bussotti gets no more than the most passing of mentions, and he does not even seem to have heard of Schnebel (who was deeply involved with Fluxus). The fact that Cage's reputation in particular was built in large measure through the reception of his work in Europe is rather too inconvenient for Nyman's theories, also.

Surely Nyman wasn't interested in "theories", just in redressing what he saw as an imbalance, and the fact that we're still talking about his book 25 years after it was published might even be taken to imply that the same imbalance still exists, and that there's very little literature around which attempts to deal with those issues, either from a partisan standpoint or in the interests of inclusiveness. You yourself, Ian, have defended with quite some vehemence the vastly more one-sided view of things taken by Ben Watson in his so-called "story of free improvisation". Nyman's book in my opinion is a far more valuable piece of work.

I'm happy with the idea that intuition and structure transcend one another - in some ways it isn't a very precise verbalisation, but then it's music we're talking about, and a phrase like that taken in the context of the music it refers to can be more enlightening, and certainly less time-wasting, than any amount of pedantic qualifications.

Meanwhile, back at the music - I wonder if anyone has any opinions on whether Piece XI does or doesn't do what Stockhausen says (as I quoted) it does, or whether it even could? ... I think anyway that this is a pretty clear example of what he (thought he) was doing when letting the aleatoric cat among the pigeons, which is greatly different from the way Cage might have put it. In Stockhausen's case the "chance procedures" involved in the performance of such a piece are a means to a very different end from those pursued by Cage. While the idea of applying such random procedures may have come from Cage (although I think Xenakis had come upon related ideas completely independently), the reasons for employing them were very much Stockhausen's own.

The date is correct, Biroc.  I still have the old programme booklet. What a wonderful season it was: Bhakti by Jonathan Harvey, Music for Eighteen Musicians by Reich, Rothko Chapel by Feldman, the Second Violin Concerto by Tristan Keuris: I remember all these concerts very well.

I remember seeing myself in the audience when the concert was televised in september 1998.

What's mystifying is to render the music outside of the realms of the experience generated by sound - which, as I say, a lot of discourse about new music tends to do. 'Structure' can of course be a sonic quality, but it seems as if it is being conceived primarily on a compositional and intentional level here.

As far as whether 'intuition and structure need one another', I'm only really concerned about such things to the extent that they are manifest in the work. But 'structure' cannot be isolated from other things - it's a by-product of certain configurations of sonic material.

The neomaxozoomdweebie

O-e-oo, o-e-oo, o-e-oo, o-e-oo

(then lots of odes to breasts (from Stockhausen, not me))

No, just that more generally there's a tendency when talking about Stockhausen to focus too much on the technical side, I feel.


Sure - absolutely with you there.


That's what I'm not sure about at all. What if the result comes across quite differently from how the composer intended it? Are listeners meant to mentally 'censor' any other perceptions they have?

Stockhausen might intend me when listening to some of his music to hear it as some spiritually transcendent experience that will elevate my consciousness in the direction of Sirius, where the great master sits on his throne, but I'm damned I care what he thinks in that respect!


Musical works and musical materials have a life of their own, as well as have properties that precede and exceed what the composer intended for them. That's one reason that pieces can attain dimensions and meanings other than those which the composer intended. If the mode of listening that the composer prescribes does not accord with what many listeners experience from the sounds the work makes, that might demonstrate that the piece does not entirely succeed in terms of the composer's intention (though it can succeed in other ways). Also, there is at least the possibility that subconscious things may be communicated through a piece, of which the composer is not necessarily wholly cognisant.


But a structure consists of a set of relationships between things. Of course it can be a set of abstracted hierarchies and relationships which are conceived prior to any consideration of their meaning in terms of various musical parameters, but that's not how I see Stockhausen's works. I should have added time as well as sound to my conception above, of course - rhythmic structures (like those of Cage) are about durations of sounds, or periods of time in which sounds take place (sometimes in Cage's case the relationship between these and the resulting sounds is relatively arbitrary, even not having any real bearing upon the final sounding result), rather than other aspects of sound. But they are still predicated upon an aspect of perception (specifically time). And time is a property of sound (and of silence), of course.


These things aren't personal!



Do you prefer Molly Ringwald or the dark-haired one?