Ian,
I meant to answer a few “huge” (your word) questions that you had asked in #457, but I got caught up in work and also could not suppress the urge to finally write a first draft of my essay on Stockhausen’s
Himmelfahrt. That draft is written, and even though I am not very satisfied with it*), I have decided to turn my attention back to other things, like this one.
*) Describing music from a listening perspective is not always easy. Trying to convey in convincing terms what I think makes
Himmelfahrt so unique has been at times agonizing, even though stimulating as well. It also involves a lot of cross-checking by listening to other music, which is time-consuming (and sometimes frustrating, because initial ideas do not bear out). If, on the other hand, I would just want to describe how the work was composed, I could simply make an extract from the composition booklet of the Stockhausen summer courses 2006 and would be comfortably done. However, I have no interest in this easy way out: it would not convey the listening experience that this work provides. (Of course, my essay will feature some relevant and interesting compositional details as well.)
I'm interested in how Stockhausen's music impacts upon perception (which isn't something so subjective as to be unanalysable - if it were, which listeners respond to Stockhausen would surely be a wholly arbitrary affair), which might include such things as the production of pitch or rhythmic hierarchies and thus processes, whether intended in such a manner or not, and then the extent to which the types of perceptions it produces are dependent upon the serial techniques employed. As a non-negligible community of listeners (albeit a small minority) do respond to Stockhausen's music, and respond prior to knowledge of its detailed workings, what are the aspects that they respond to?
An obvious answer might be: they respond to tension, to the visceral impact, to the colorful, thrilling and innovative textures in Stockhausen’s music that often go to the extremes of what music can be. They also may respond to the musical expressiveness – with that I do not mean “romantic” expressiveness, but that the music is filled with an exciting inner life.
An even simpler, or if you will, more fundamental, answer might be, and also one that addresses the question to what extent serial procedures have to be recognized:
The ever-present question in developmental music is “What comes Next”?. This is logical, since music is an art of time, it develops in time. This question, which constantly demands compositional answers as the music unfolds, is answered in Stockhausen’s compositions – just like in any music that deserves to be called great – in a very satisfying, and often intriguing, manner. Since any developmental music constantly raises this simple at-the-surface question “What comes Next”?, the question is independent of the issue if the composition at hand is serial or not. Hence, also the at-the-surface answers that the music gives have to be independent in their impact from a (below-the surface) understanding of serial principles by the listener, even though, as we have seen, the underlying serial processes by which Stockhausen delivers his answers can be heard as such by informed listeners.
There is of course the other question of why, as a larger number do not respond to this music (if they have heard it - but there are plenty of people who have heard works by Stockhausen and other modernist composers and either do not respond, or respond negatively), whether there might be some key minority interests and obsessions of the community of Stockhausen-likers that are not universal, or maybe do not really have the potential to be so? Or could it be the case that most listeners will hear similar things in Stockhausen, just some choose to valorise the experience positively, others negatively (rather than simply 'not getting it')?
I don’t think that all listeners can perceive the compositional answers to the question they pose, “What comes next?”, as satisfying. For example, the pauses that Stockhausen employs to create tension – at least I hear it that way – are experienced by Sidney Grew as an annoyance. Obviously, expectations from listening to more traditional music will not be fulfilled. When you approach the music from a “traditional” mindset, and are not open to the solutions to specific new approaches of music-making, then the music will be lost on you. Yet I myself was surprised how easy it was to become familiar with the gestural languages of “modernist” music. It took me just a few weeks in 1999, whereas understanding of “traditional” classical music had taken me months when I started out with it at age 19. But then, my mind was completely open to it.
On a lower level that that, some listeners don’t even pose the question “What comes next?” since they are simply annoyed by the sound, i.e. to their ears, noise.
On the flip side, some of the listeners excited by Stockhausen’s music may just be thrilled by the general envelope of sound, without paying attention to the specific and detailed unfolding of the music in time.
And how might that relate to the techniques employed? Huge questions, I know, but important ones for analysis.
The serial distributions make for a satisfying spread of gestures and gestural connections over the time span in which the music unfolds.
This all may sound somewhat simplistic, but perhaps it is because on the most fundamental level the answer to your questions really is that straightforward.
