RM: I thought perhaps that listening to the radio as a child and at school might have impressed on you the idea of other cultures, and other freedoms being 'out there'?

KS: No, no, I didn't listen to the radio as a child. My father listened to the news and that was it. At boarding school in Xanten a group of us who were in the jazz band used to listen late at night to English army broadcasts of American jazz music every now and then, which was forbidden. Not often: all in all perhaps ten times in four years. I don't think there was anything special in that.

RM: Were you aware that the wartime Frontberichte news reports from the front line were studio creations using new tape technology?

KS: No, I wasn't aware of this in the Frontberichte I heard at school: as far as I remember, there was mainly marching music at the beginning and end, a Wagner motif to announce the most important news item from the front, which were broadcast every once in a while, and then we used to hear just the voice ... Aha! sometimes there were sound effects of airplanes. But I mean, the reality was much more interesting: every night I heard such sound effects for real

The first impression I had of tape montage was when I was in Paris from the autumn of 1951 to the beginning of 1952, and heard the first examples of musique concrète, which were so unusual. That's it.

RM: The experience of working in a studio has brought new concepts of harmony, form and timing to music. Do you agree that studio training also alters the way you hear, and your sensitivity to sounds at different frequencies?

KS: Definitely. I have said I can't imagine any other colleague of my generation who has spent so many years and hours of his lifetime in a studio, and I have also done all the mixing of recordings of my music as well, which is very similar work. It took me practically four years in the studio to complete the composition and then the recording of SIRIUS: I mixed the recording combining the soloists and tape at least three times, and the last of these, for the stereo album, took almost three weeks. I am constantly in the studio listening, and certainly I have become aware that I hear much, much more than anybody else, simply because of the training. Quantitatively I hear more, and the result is that I hear more in the qualitative sense, much more polyphony. And when I feel something is wrong, I listen several times, and then I know exactly what it is: the overall dynamics, or a particular group of sounds, or a particular instrument whose level has to be brought up or down.

I am now so used to working with up to 24 faders simultaneously, and bringing certain instruments or voices in or out, that I can hear s difference of only 1dB in some cases, though everybody tells me, Herr Stockhausen, you're crazy, a change of 1dB cannot be heard, it is a waste of time. The DG people in Hannover (1) have got used to the fact that I mark the fader positions up 1/2dB on a single channel, to get the balance completely right. It can take three hours, pushing faders back and forth, to know what I want for a take, say of thirty seconds: listening and performing on the mixing desk at the same time, like a player on a musical instrument. There are whole sequences lasting up to thirty minutes which are now in the electronic tape of SIRIUS, uncut, as the result of many, many attempts. The demands on one's listening ability are tremendous.

I also think playing in the Group Stockhausen has contributed, having taken part as a performer in all the recordings of AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN, and in the many performances of FÜR KOMMENDE ZEITEN 'For times to come', which is music for which you do not need to read a score. The experience of closing the eyes completely, sometimes for as long as fifty minutes, and being only ears: this has developed my listening processes enormously. I don't mean physiologically or psychologically, I simply mean in terms of a total awareness: of the sound environment during a performance of four or five musicians who are all doing different things, and of the complexity of the sound.

RM: Does film mean a great deal to you, either as a representation of myth, or in a technical sense as structure? What is your attitude to film music, its orchestration and form?

KS: I'm not aware of orchestration and form; such things don't interest me very much while I'm watching a movie, no matter what is on screen. What I liked about films when I was younger, in wartime, was that they often made me weep, kept my eyes shining full of tears, because they were always about guys in submarines, being in love with their girls at home, going away and never seeing them again, but their love would go on for ever--this kind of fantastically idealized, fictional love made a deep impression on me. I can pick out very few films that I have liked since that time: like everybody else I enjoyed Chaplin's The Gold Rush, but I didn't like his other films so much, finding them exaggerated. The more successful he became, the more his films emphasized the sentimental side, and the formal side became weaker and weaker. I was also not impressed by the pie-throwing aspect of his earlier films, which is humour of a terribly primitive kind. But there was quality, here and there.

Some films have impressed me only after I became aware of moment-form in my own compositions. In Antonioni's The Red Desert for instance there is a scene where you are looking through the small window of a wooden cabin into the mist, when suddenly the bow of an enormous ocean liner moves silently past, very close, and only then do you realize that you are next to a canal. Or the shot of a light bulb against a white wall, hanging completely still on the left of the frame: that light bulb becomes so important from the fact that there is no camera movement at all, everything is conveyed in the stillness. Once film-makers discovered that film could stop as well as move, move at different speeds, and go from one extreme of total stillness to the other extreme of total movement, then to my mind the movies became interesting.

Blow-Up is another film I particularly like because it is concerned with processes of expansion and contraction similar to those I use in my music: you see a photographic image blown up just as I blow up my musical formulas, and the image is expanded to such an extent that you end up discovering figures in the detail that you would otherwise never see. This is a very musical idea, butit is only through having already made the discovery in my own work that I am able to recognize something like it in the film.

RM: There are musicians who specialize in accompanying silent movies, and their approach seems to have elements in common with your intuitive music, albeit in a rather primitive way. For instance, they respond directly to the screen image, without thinking, drawing automatically on a catalogue of music that is always at their fingertips.

KS: We did that once. It was after the last of three concerts the group gave in the courtyard of the Fondation Maeght in St Paul near Nice in france, which included an all-night performance of UNBEGRENZT 'Unlimited' from AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN. The owner of the foundation showed us a film of a French sculptor who makes welded sculpture in bronze, a very lively film, with fire and sparks like a blacksmith's. I was asked to compose a score, but decided instead that our group should sit in front of the screen and play intuitively while the film was being shown. We gave ourselves a verbal direction, like a text from AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN, and watched the film and played, and they made a recording. Afterwards they suggested a second try, also to be recorded, but we said no, we would leave it at that. So that became the music for the film which is now fairly well known in the art world as a musical composition. But I don't think it was particularly well formed. It was very spontaneous in detail, but in other respects was simply led by the events on the screen: the musicians reacted like tourists being shown around, you see--Ha! and --Ho! and so on. Fortunately we had, as always, two very sophisticated players in our group, one of whom, Harald Bojé, is very mean and aggressive, while the other, Aloys Kontarsky, has an extraordinary sense of humour. Really, a superb gift of repartee, and when you put them together with Johannes Fritsch, who can do superb animal imitations, amongst other things, on the viola, you have a good team, so there was a lot of humour in the performance. At times the music was a good deal wittier than the film. But it doesn't go much beyond musical conversation: it's not as deep or as rich in thought or form as my composed music.


NOTE:
(1) At the time of recording these conversations, Stockhausen's principal record company was Deutsche Grammophon; in 1990 ownership of the master tapes was transferred to Stockhausen Verlag from whom the remastered catalog is available non compact disc.

Robin Maconie is author of The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Oxford University Press 1976, 2nd revised edition 1990, 3rd edition in preparation), editor and co-author of Stockhausen on Music (Marion Boyars 1989), and collaborator with Barrie Gavin in the production of the BBC 'Omnibus' 1981 Stockhausen film portrait Tuning in. He studied under Messiaen 1963-64, and with Stockhausen, Pousseur, Eimert, Aloys Kontarsky, Bernd-Alois Zimmermann and others 1964-65. His most recent publication is The Science of Music (Clarendon Press, 1997). He is currently Professor of Performing Arts at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia.

maconie@earthlink.net