It's a while since I looked at the score, but I seem to remember getting the distinct feeling that Stockhausen's original idea had been that performances of
Stimmung should ideally be open to variation and that the 'Paris' version was a compromise. I think I've read somewhere about a performance that was performed without a pre-determined version, so I'm curious to know if there have been more performances like this, or whether I've got the wrong end of the stick, up which I am barking.
For me, one of the most problematic aspects of the piece is the poetry. If it's in German I can just about take it, but when it's translated into the language of the audience (which is, I think?, what he prescribes)... The only English translation I have read was so clunky, unerotic and embarrassing that I just couldn't see it working. Is the original German as bad? IIRC, Stockhausen's instructions regarding the use of the poetry is quite vague, and allows for their complete omission...
Hmmm - are we meant to think that both the male and female singers come together as one in the particular adulation of breasts in this piece, or might this be one more example of a particularly masculine sensibility making pretences to universality?
I think that this is a very good point. For all of Stockhausen's talk of universality, his universe is principally a phallocentric one. Just looking at the roles that men and women play in
Licht, the power structures are quite revealing and play into fairly well established stereotypes.
Recently someone told me that in some private correspondence, Stockhausen spoke of his work in more explicitly political terms than in his published writings and pronouncements, in particular holding up some of his methods as entailing a resistance to commodification. I'm very interested to find out more about this - does anyone know any lesser-known sources where this has been referred to, that I might not have come across? His relationship with the 1968-ers (and his understanding of what they were all about) is another subject that would seem to invite further study and consideration.
Everything I've read on this subject suggests that he's so completely caught up with his own life and experience suggests to me that his political understanding of 1968 is somewhat individual. Hang on, something's coming back to me here but the library book's gone back - does he say something about how the mistake of 1968 was that the energy moved towards external revolution when they should have been focusing, like him, on internal revolution? It'll either be in the Tannenbaum interviews or
Towards a Cosmic Music and I think he talks about commodification as well but it's all tied up with how everyone should listen to
Stimmung because only then will they understand what it is to be truly at peace with the universe etc.
All of this is possibly relevant, let alone what actually happened to Stockhausen in 1968, which seems to have caused a personality change and sparked a rather dramatic change in his wardrobe.
