What is a nihilist?

An unbeliever. When Boulez called for all opera houses to be pulled down, that was a nihilist remark. Now of course Boulez conducts Wagner and has his own opera house. Everybody wants an opera house.

You can't handle the truth.

Is the Jack Nicholson character right? Am I an unbeliever? Do Georg Heike's corrections of Stockhausen's essay '...how time passes...' (in Texte I, Cologne, DuMont, 1963, page 99ff) make him a nihilist? I don't think so. Of course belonging to an institution like the army or the church has its attendant responsibilities to the institution and to the faithful. The Pope would naturally want to distance himself from the notion that heaven and hell refer to the consequences of excess consumption of cholesterol or cigarettes, that the images of floating angels in Fra Angelico refer to the real but invisible world of sound and music rather than the visible domain of people and solid objects, or that the holy trinity is an anthropological conception out of Claude Lévi-Strauss. That's perfectly fair.

I am all the same intrigued (The Concept of Music, The Science of Music) by the symbolisms of religion and attracted to the idea that belief systems of all kinds, music included, are fundamentally rational and therefore debatable, 'falsifiable' if you like, in the sense made famous by Karl Popper. The problem with religions is that they tend to attract clerical minds. Music has long been a breeding ground for academics who have no understanding of acoustics or philosophy and who prefer exhortation and obedience to rational argument. Their time is up. All music - Stockhausen's included - can be discussed rationally.

That is precisely the line that Stockhausen himself used to take in the 1950s and early 1960s when this music was rightly seen as a partnership with the communications sciences. The same young man in a dark suit, fingers interlaced, discussing ORIGINALE with an attentive Cologne audience in 1961 (Texte 2, facing page 127) could be seen earnestly discussing information theory with excitable reporters in London. Elliott Carter ('Current Chronicle', Musical Quarterly 45.iv, 1959) wondered why money could be found to print an English language version of Die Reihe and not for a magazine dedicated to US contemporary music. It was because the musical theories of Die Reihe had a meaningful scientific agenda that the music and the publication were taken seriously; and it was because the theory attracted scientific criticism from Stanford and elsewhere concerning such matters as the proper use of the term 'formants' by Boulez or 'Hullkurve' by Stockhausen that the periodical ceased publication soon afterward and the music came under renewed and fervid attack by US academics of the Princeton-Columbia axis. It is amazing to find these doctrinaire criticisms from 1963 still alive and kicking here on the Web wherever the avant-garde is discussed.

Reply from Robin Maconie

Here is my friendly greeting to Stockhausen in the form of a quotation.

"The Salesians, who record their own changes of opinion with great serenity, when they do not simply fail to mention them, can be harshly critical if a piece of information published by some author does not coincide with their own most recent findings. In both cases they are committing the same methodological error. The fact that one item of information contradicts another poses a problem but does not solve it. I have more respect for the informants, whether they are our own or those who were employed in the old days by the missionaries, and whose evidence is consequently of particular value. The merits of the Salesians are so indisputable that, without failing in the debt of gratitude that is owed them, we can voice one slight criticism: they have an unfortunate tendency to believe the most recent piece of information cancels out everything else."

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and The Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. London, 1970.