There is much further to go in terms of discussing Stockhausen's works in terms of their sonic (and also textual and theatrical) dimensions. Or are we to believe those who say that this music has no meaning other than in a purely technical sense? What we have from before is the following:


So, Stockhausen uses serial techniques on various levels in the process of composing. But an obvious response to that is 'so what'? I'm asking this because I'm wondering what is necessarily achieved through such means that couldn't be achieved through, say, the chance procedures that Cage was employing at the same time (I'm not saying that the two means couldn't produce quite different aural results - I think they do - but why and how are the issues at stake here)


Well, some elaboration of this particular reading of what Stockhausen's 'concept' of serial composition is would be welcome at this juncture. I don't have the early volumes of Stockhausen's Texte to hand, but recall a lot of mystical talk about how reduction to the most fundamental parameters and their organisation according to serial principles provided for some sort of communion with elemental aspects of human and cosmic forces. I think it would be a brave person who continued to assert the veracity of this conception - surely what counts is what the pieces he composed according to such conceptions amount to regardless of all the meglomaniac and mystical claims Stockhausen made for what he was doing?

But in terms of a 'systematic framework', is that an audible or purely compositional phenomenon? Can there be any dialectical tension between a framework and a work which supposedly 'transcends' it if such a framework has no audible meaning for a listener (which I would argue it certainly does in, say, free atonal works of Schoenberg, where a tonal framework is clearly implied at the same time as being undermined)? Maybe on a compositional level Stockhausen conceived of a framework, and conceived of going outside it, but I'd like to know how this has a audible meaning in the text works, say.


My issue here is with the fact that these matters are presented entirely in compositional rather than perceptual terms. It's not even clear what it means for serial techniques to be audibly manifested in terms other than pitch. With rhythm or dynamics or other parameters, one might say that one hears a result that contains such a distribution of durations, dynamics, etc., as to counteract any sense of clear hierarchical organisation (though I'm not really convinced that Stockhausen or anyone else truly achieves this other than in a small few moments - indeed often the sections in many pieces that attract most attention are those that least do this), but that's really about creating something a-metrical or a-linear rather than specifically 'serial' (in the sense of demonstrating some type of development of a 'series'). But in the text works, I am at a loss to see what it means to say that they are in some sense 'serial' in terms of what we hear without a much broader articulation of what exactly audibly 'serial' music entails.

Just seen this now...


Glad you say that - in the end, does it really matter all that much what they are 'supposed to do'?

Re: Klavierstück X - it's a piece I know extremely well and have played often. In terms of pitch, the piece is quite generalised - I don't hear much in terms of either distinct harmonic colourings in different regions (other than at the most basic level of the distinction between a predominance of either notes or clusters) or other types of correspondences on a medium-level; the music seems to work more on a gestural level (more so than, say, the more pitch-oriented pieces 5, 6, 7 and 9 in particular). Why it succeeds (or at least I feel it succeeds) has to do with the resulting drama and dramatic pacing. After the first five pages, in which one hears all the basic types of material (and all their expressive connotations on a static level - vehemence, wispy delicacy, unstable nervousness, rhetorical declamation, fantastical exploration with varying degrees of excitement or calm, even playfulness at times), obviously you then have the long series of fragments separated by silences of varying lengths, but usually long (here the serial techniques applied to durations counteract the possibility of a sense of regularity which might become predictable). Through the course of the piece, there are various passages in which some sort of fragment of a melodic line emerges from the arabesque-like grace note figurations, but this does not particularly develop (I don't hear such lines as becoming any more lucid through the course of the piece than they are in the first fragment on page 6). But other elements do seem to follow various types of trajectory at various different points - for example, the use of full arm clusters, which reaches a first climax on page 11 (so that the gesture that comes on the following page has both an impassioned and exasperated quality), and an even more violent one on page 20. Somehow many of the gestures on the next few pages from that have to my ears a certain quality of the grotesque about them, in light of the cataclysm that has preceded them, though the passage on page 15, say, with its full arm glissando clusters in both directions even more so (not least because of its certain impracticability and what that produces visually, with arms flailing around all over the place). The long streams of repeated notes on page 28 are the first appearance of such a figure except for its brief use in the opening section, but somehow seem like they have 'escaped' from the rest of the writing (the uses of repeated clusters creates such a sense, as if the repeated notes were a distillation of this figure which has occurred at various points earlier (somehow this can seem like the most climactic moment of the work). Through the course of the later stages of the work, I hear a new type of intimacy in the music for the most part (still tempered by harsher interspersions, but these are less frequent), whilst the appearance of a clear F#-D sixth at the top of page 35, coming after a group of arabesques which partially imply a tonality of E, has an almost Bergian quality about it. And much else besides. What interests me is that many of these results were as much the product of what Stockhausen's system happened to throw up rather than so much a preordained result (assuming Henck's description of the compositional process to be accurate). But then Stockhausen would make some more intuitive modifications to things in various ways, and ultimately he wanted to sign his name to the result. How much did he have an idea of what sort of result his processes were likely to produce before starting to work on them? Maybe that does not particularly matter - but can one then see the use of system as a means of 'transcending' (in the simple sense of 'going beyond') momentary intuition? So to some extent the piece is 'discovered' then individuated (different, say, to the work of Ferneyhough, where there is a greater degree of hands-on intuitive decision-making whilst assembling the piece at each stage, generally composed in a linear fashion - a range of techniques used as tools rather than so much a grand plan)?


I'm not sure what precisely you define as the 'higher-order parameter'?


Yes - very good in terms of giving a clear explanation of how the piece was composed, has much less to say on what the result amounts to.

Well, I wouldn't call that an 'analysis', just a rather ad hoc writing of a handful of things I perceive in the music (there are many more). I'm not sure that Stockhausen would necessarily discourage different ways of looking at his music, even if his own writings tend to focus on the technical and the 'spiritual'. But I do believe that even highly abstract music can still be in some sense 'expressive' and meaningful, either in its totality or in the combination of its parts (or, as often, through both).

I agree -- I couldn't have figured out Stockhausen's intentions without Henck's text.

Richard employs a kind of spatial metaphor here in reference to Stockhausen's serial methods that I have heard him use to describe his own compositional ideals... it also reminds me of Lachenmann's term that listening is a kind of Abtastprozess (tr.: process of tactile discovery) -- as if the music is not an aesthetic object itself, but rather enacts the exploration of some object in different ways. This act could, on paper, be very systematic, as serialism is, or it can be haphazard, as chance operations usually are. There is no saying whether the systematic or the haphazard approach yields more interesting, or more informative, or more effective results, though one could say that the systematic approach one is more likely to learn from  -- it's reproducible like a laboratory experiment.

If composers use serial technique nowadays, it is still with the intention to exploit systematic exploration, though rarely does one see fit to use the entirety of one's "data" in the final product. Instead, one might just edit out the boring stuff and keep what "sounds good" on a purely subjective level. That "sounding good" may correlate with how much the chosen passage illustrates the unusual features of the object being abgetastet. That isn't a proscriptive or predictive observation, just a hunch.

It does if one wants to learn and draw conclusions from the piece.

I'm sure Lachenmann would say something quite similar about his own metaphor. It's fun to get along so well w/people.

I'm not sure that anyone's doubting that Ian.
At the moment, from re-reading the whole thread, the only person that has laid any doubt on any particular reading of Stockhausen's output has been you, by implying that most interpretations offered do not hold up under independent scrutiny. I'm not sure what you mean by 'productively' in terms of this discussion. What are we producing here?

In fact, despite your eloquent summary of the experience of listening to Klavierstück X, you haven't really given a decent alternative to Richard's insights into the score. For someone doggedly asking for more and more detail and justification for every single argument, I would expect a little more substance on your side of the argument. It does rather feel like there's this bombardment of pointed questions seeking to dismantle any possible reading of the text before it ever gets going.

But then again, it's 1am and I'm not going to bed until I've finished my commentary, so my perspective on things is probably a little warped.
Time for some more Bach 'cello suites and another glass of whisky.

That may be easy for you to say as a pianist, but consider it from a composer's point of view:  If I'm interested in learning about a piece as a means of cultivating questions, if not answers, about my own music, the finished product is only half the story.  The problems Stockhausen sought to address–some spiritual, some predicated on a Newtonian, positivistic concept of musical organization, all worthy of critique–are as important to me as his solutions, especially because other composers have been considering and continue to consider related problems from different angles than Stockhausens'.

By the same token, it's instructive sometimes to pretend not to know anything about serialism and Sirius-ism when listening to KS' music (this principle is of course extensible to all music); is this what you mean by "simply. . . listening to it?"

For what it's worth, I agree with Chafing Dish's take on Klavierstück X.

Yes, those things can be interesting from a composer's point of view (and I have written at great length about such things, and the discrepancy between intention and result, in the context of other composers). I'm simply saying that one can equally learn from a piece, and to a high degree, simply by considering what the composer chooses to put in front of the public. If we want to go into all the other baggage that they explicitly put forward in the form of programme notes and so on (as Stockhausen does at great length - though personally I'm not convinced my listening experience is necessarily enhanced after reading all that) then we are in the realms of discourse analysis. It might be equally informative to ask why Stockhausen feels it necessary to make all of this stuff explicit and thus attempt to steer listeners in certain directions?


Well, I think if a work is meaningful at all, it should be meaningful to those who know nothing of serialism and Sirius, or who are not interested in such things. I've identified rows and their transformations, and the like, in analysing other works, but I'm not sure that necessarily tells much other than to composers who want to appropriate and develop such methods. Just as Schoenberg said to Kolisch after the latter proudly came to the former having identified the row in the Third String Quartet:

You have rightly worked out the series of my string quartet [No. 3]… You must have gone to a great deal of trouble, and I don’t think I’d have had the patience to do it. But do you think one’s any better off for knowing it?…This isn’t where the aesthetic qualities reveal themselves, or, if so, only incidentally. I can’t utter too many warnings against overrating these analyses, since after all they only lead to what I have been dead against: seeing how it is done; whereas I have always helped people to see: what it is! I have repeatedly tried to make Wiesengrund [Adorno] understand this, and also Berg and Webern. But they won’t believe me. I can’t say it often enough: my works are twelve-note compositions, not twelve-note compositions….. You may wonder at my talking about this at such length. But although I’m not ashamed of a composition’s having a healthy constructive basis even when it is a spontaneous result, produced unconsciously, I still don’t care to be regarded as a constructor on account of the bit of juggling I can do with series, because that would be doing too little to deserve it. I think more has to be done to deserve such a title, and actually I think I am capable of fulfilling the considerable demands made on me by those entitled to do so.