Changing the subject slightly, I've just been reading Schiff's book on Carter and found this:


Now I think this is a fairly fundamental misapprehension of Stockhausen's piece and what is involved in performing it, and I would imagine most of us here, with the obvious exception of Esmé Muchgoddery, would agree. I was wondering, though, whether this is just an idiosyncratic opinion of Schiff's, or whether it's more widely held in American (academic) musical circles. Any thoughts on this?

Yes. I think you're too kind on Schiff.

Well, it's the only case I know of where someone puts such assumptions on paper -- others will take the rhythm at face value, or consider their difficulty in a dismissive fashion in order to make some larger point about the demise of the avant garde, etc.. --- as to whether there's a consensus, I don't care to speculate -- one professor once looked at a score of mine and said "quintuplets don't work." I didn't ask her to elaborate about the meaning of the word "work." But the lesson is, you get all kinds.

Maybe Schiff, in the manner of cowardly White House press correspondents, is advancing his own opinion by floating it as a status quo ("it was understood. . ."); I've never heard anyone over here make such a statement about Stockhausen's rhythms as opposed to Carter's.  However, although I can remember several performers noting the importance of rhythmic clarity in Carter's music, I can't recall anybody saying the same thing about Stockhausen (other than in passing, in a more general how-to-perform-postwar-music way).  Certainly I think that performers should apply same standards of accuracy to Stockhausen as to Carter or, for that matter, to any of the composers on this board who write "provocative jumbles of polyrhythms."  You know who you are.

When I read the comment from Schiff, however, I immediately turned to Roger Marsh's 1994 article in Musical Times ("Heroic Motives")–in it, Marsh cites Nicolas Ruwet, who apparently takes Klavierstuck I to task in his 1958 article "Contradictions Within the Serial Language," labeling one particular passage "a barrage of rather undifferentiated drumfire."  Although this accusation is made independent of performance-practice considerations and in the absence of a comparison case (e.g. Carter), it doesn't seem too far from Schiff's point of view–in other words, it's what you'd have to believe if you want to neutralize the cognitive dissonance between valorizing Carter and accepting Stockhausen-esque rhythms.

We also have to remember that some American academics are awesome and some are absolute toolboxes, and the toolboxes are usually louder.

Not only spatial notation but graphic in a couple of places (notestems without noteheads).

He got the Prize Git Prize for that from me over 20 years ago when I read that book at school. I hadn't even heard Le Marteau by then.

Oo, that's ringing a bell. Isn't that what that chap in the Musical Times wrote about the Ferneyhough 2nd Quartet? And proceeded to calculate the % difference between the score and not what the Ardittis were playing but what it sounded like to him?

Hm. Maybe if he had bothered to measure the actual durations of the notes in performance he might have had more of a point. (Over to you perhaps, Aaron? ) Besides which it might make a little more sense for him to have done that experiment with a passage that isn't in rhythmic unison, given that that involves its own compromises...