Stockhausen: The Unlikely and Reluctant Father of Electronica (an unfinished idea)

Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Man. The Myth. The Legend. The Dreamer. The Visionary. The subject of controversy. The pioneer of electronic composition. The father of modern Electronica? It is an uncanny linage, but yes; Stockhausen’s name has been referred to more often than any other composer in the field of modern experimental electronic, Ambient, and dance music. The burring question is: why would a composer with such strict serial tendencies be held in such esteem by the next generation of electronic composers who seemingly have vastly different ideas and ideals about the compositional process? Composers, Sound Artists, Performers and DJs— from the entire spectrum of modern electronic music—such as Bjork, Richard D. James (Aphex Twin, AFX), Maryanne Amacher, Ritchie Hawtin (Plastikman), Merzbow, Pan Sonic; the list goes on and on. The answer to this question, I believe, comes down to pure aesthetics. My interest here is not so much in form—the practitioners of Electronica seldom pay any credence to this as much as they do to other aspects of Stockhausen’s creativity. What unites these artists and composers is a specific and obstinate composition mood; a mood that not only permeates each artist’s aesthetic stance in general, but also changes from composition to composition and from album to album. This is Stockhausen’s greatest gift to the new generation of electronic composers. Maryanne Amacher coined the term “Sound Characters”—which also happens to be the title of her one and only full length CD—and I believe that these “characters,” which vary from composer to composer and performer to performer, is the thread that unites artists working in the electronic compositional medium; a thread that began, unwittingly and at times defiantly, with Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Beginning at the Beginning (sort of)

The electronic music revolution began nowhere else but Germany, and Stockhausen had a firm hand in pushing the inevitable along. It begins with two German groups, both of whom studied with Heir Stockhausen himself: the members of the group Kraftwerk, as well as one of the most prolific members of the group Can, Holger Czukay. Kraftwerk pioneered the minus-man machine-run electronic music that permeated the 1970s and influenced anyone—directly or indirectly—who made or makes electronic music. The music of Can is a bit of an anomaly; albums changing sound as quickly as they were released. However, the constant electronic experimentalist was Czukay, who eventually left the group to focus on his radio and tape experiments that ceased to fit within the structure of the group—no doubt that Stockhausen’s teachings played a part in this. The use of short wave radios and tapes—albeit within the context of an experimental free jazz group—was clearly the influence of Stockhausen’s teachings. Czukay, in a 1997 interview, recalls his very first, and monumental, experience with the esteemed composer:

It was around 1958 when he visited the conservatory in Duisburg where I attended to take some composition lessons. Stockhausen was giving a public lecture about what was new going on on the musical battlefield. For the first time I heard electronic music from a tape. To me, it sounded like flashing toilets in outer space and the whole audience was laughing. Everyone had probably the same sort of imagination and couldn't get it together as being music which we were listening to. I remember very well how he reacted and how he had remarked that he had also seen people laughing when they were involved in a heavy car accident. For me, it sounded strange and exciting at the same time. But how could I "manufacture" these strange sounds myself? That was for me the most important question which I had to solve sooner or later. It obviously required a special knowledge and also money to get hold of these special machines. All of a sudden a man sitting beside me raised his hand and said to Mr. Stockhausen: "Sir, I think you do all these weird sounds for giving us a shock and out of this situation you are going to make a lot of money, am I right?" Stockhausen replied that he did these "experiments" just for musical reasons. He didn't need the money as he had married a rich wife. My alarm clocks were shrill ringing and from this moment on I knew I had to stay close to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Maybe he had to offer some more good advice which I urgently needed to make my way as a composer, too.

This is the moment where the use of machines as the primary compositional tool took seed. From this point forward, the world of electronic music would never be the same. Short wave radios and live manipulation of tapes were no longer viewed—at least in the case of Czukay—as ornamentation, but as instruments in their own right; a precursor to the pervasive laptop Electronica that we know and accept today.

Just before the formation of Can, Czukay saw his old composition instructor once again performing Microphone I, reaffirming and articulating the ideas that had yet to come to fruition. Czukay’s recollection of the performance was so strong; it seems to have burned a place in his memory and artistic aesthetic forever:

It was amazing to see how he had organized live set-ups. Let's take his piece "Microphonie I" which he had composed in 1966. Four musicians were standing at a huge tam-tam* with some "creation tools" and a microphone in their hand. The tam-tam was prepared at parts with chalk or colophony** so that a hard paper bucket for example could scratch upon the chalk- or colophony field. Or an electric razor was another device which created a rich world of sounds, when it was touching the surface of the tam-tam. Two microphones was scanning the different sound areas of the tam-tam and got connected with 2 Maihak W49 radio play Eq's, passive filters with a strong cutting characteristics(years later I was able to get hold of them at an undertaker's shop). Stockhausen was sitting in the audience at a little mixer and created something like a "tam-tam live dub mix". If you are able to attend such a performance these days, it still would sound completely up to date. Such a thing together with a right DJ could perfectly fit into the end of the nineties.

Or let's face one of his electronic masterpieces "Kontakte". I've heard from other DJ's that they have made performances with this piece of music going along with rhythm tracks and so did I. Of course such a piece is strongly thought out and entirely composed and in the composer's view, it shouldn't be regarded just as another effect bank. But this music can be heard in so many different ways and not only in a concert hall with darkened lights and the ears rotating like radar antennas that not a tiny bit is going to be overheard. In order to make a naked electronic music event more live and adequate, Stockhausen additionally composed a score for percussionists, so that the electronic music and the musicians came closer to the audience this way. Imagine, this was in 1960 and 37 years later, we don't have any difficulties in linking to completely other stuff from "foreign" musical worlds in order to find out how rich our possibilities of performing can be. I can hear the warning voices stating that everything can be brought down to a cheap effect. Yes, it can. But if we get only even one good example which proves the contrary it makes it all worthwhile.

Clearly Czukay saw the Electronica revolution in these early years, and still, to this day, maintains a practice that is forward looking while never forgetting its roots. This is Stockhausen’s contribution to modern electronic music.

Bjork

Perhaps one the most outspoken—within the broad genre umbrella of Electronica—about her love, admiration and influence of Stockhausen is Icelandic composer and performer Bjork Gudmundsdottir. Bjork has always straddled the uncharted territory between the avant-garde, ultra-modern electronic music, pop, and some other magical place. It is this magical or mystical musical territory, I believe, that has been appropriated from Stockhausen’s aesthetic (the mere idea of Licht alone is proof), which fuels Bjork’s creative fire and always has her finding new inspiration in his work and ideas.
Each album, since she began as a solo artist, has had a distinct aesthetic stance. The most explicit is Homogenic—which is Stockhausen to its core, aesthetically speaking. The concept is simple, and was planned that way from the very beginning: electronic beats, strings (played mostly in 5ths) and voice. The album never strays from this formula—it is the audio embodiment of Stockhausen’s discipline. And it works! What Bjork understands, via Stockhausen, is that placing limitations on compositions brings out the spirit of the pieces. Once one accepts that all of the pieces are based on a unifying groundwork, the work has room to breathe, to come alive, to permeate the psyche. Bjork continued this method of composition with Vespertine—a decidedly electronic album, yet uses specially made music boxes that appear on nearly every composition—and with Medula, an “electronic” album that employs nothing but voices; a modern echo of Stockhausen’s masterpiece, Stimmung.

Bjork’s admiration of Stockhausen isn’t my own mere speculation. In a recent ArtForum article, the Icelandic Princess had some extremely poignant words. It is now time for me to shut the hell up and let Bjork take over:

For me, Stockhausen was one of the pioneers who started a new root in music. The electronic root, whose aesthetic is very specific, has its own organic interior, a structure that has DNA independent from other music trees (for example, the classical Beethoven/Wagner/Mahler tree or the blues/rock/Philip Glass branch). When Karlheinz harnessed electricity into sound and showed the rest of us, he sparked off a sun that is still burning and will glow for a long time…
Now the 21st century has started, Karlheinz was right, things are great, we are communicating telepathically, of course (as he prophesied), and music schools have changed, allowing more room for fresh young minds that are writing music on computers. I look around me, listen to the rumbles and the noises and all the music that is being made today by youngsters, and I feel he wasn't so far off. He knew.

Enough said.

Aphex Twin

Richard D. James (a.k.a. Aphex Twin, a.k.a AFX) is one of the most elusive—and some would contend the most important—figures in the electronic music world, often fabricating outlandish stories about his creative process. This is all in the name of keeping a certain sense of mystery behind what he does. For James, it is not so much about the means then it is about the ends—and it is this sense of mysterious magical music making that puts him directly in the Stockhausen lineage. One cannot speak about Electronica without mentioning Richard D. James (or any of his pseudonyms); he is arguably the reigning king of the genre. James has explored and mastered every nook and cranny of Electronica, all of it’s many sub-genres. From early Rave inspired music, to Ambient (probably the best example since Eno’s Ambient series of records), to Drum and Bass (and it’s sub-sub-genre, Drill and Bass), to prepared piano works, to Kraftwerk inspired Electro. James is never satisfied to stay in one place for too long. Again, placing him well within an aesthetic tradition that Stockhausen helped set in motion.
However, as prolific and influential to modern Electronica artists, when James’ work (specifically the tracks “Ventolin,” and “Alberto Balsam,” from the album, I Care Because You Do) was brought to the attention of Stockhausen himself in an interview in the modern music magazine The Wire, he had a less than favorable reaction to what many consider to be classic Electronica pieces. Stockhausen’s response:

I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth [Gesang der Junglinge], which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all theses post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were not varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence
of variations (382).

Even though James takes Stockhausen’s comments on his work with a grain of salt, his respect for the man never falters. It is clear that they are of two distinct, very different generations of listening and composing. It is my own contention that Stockhausen is so caught up in his own work and his own imagination, that it is difficult for him to imagine something other. However, Stockhausen’s essence remains in James’ work. The static rhythm to which Stockhausen was referring to is seldom ever present in James’s work before or since. To what degree Richard D. James cites Stockhausen as an influence is quite unknown; being such a secretive artist, I doubt he would ever confess any influence. What is evident, through listening to James’ catalog, is that Stockhausen’s penchant for creating specific moods or firm aesthetic stances has had a tremendous impact upon James’ creative outlook, output, and influence on a whole new generation of electronic composers.

With Stockhausen now long gone, what are we left with? Serial compositions? Fudged mathematical realizations? Not for me. As an electronic composer, personally, I am left with the legacy of pure ideas; ideas that come form the ether. With Stockhausen, it is very easy to get caught up in the micro; the tiny particles that make up the whole. However, I believe that there is something bigger at hand, something cosmic; something universal. No one will ever be what Stockhausen was; thus what we should take from this phenomenal composer, no mystic, are the sum of his parts—for that is what ultimately matters. One could spend an entire lifetime trying to decipher the how’s and why’s, but these are not important. What is important is that there was a man named Karlheinz Stockhausen. A human that was driven by something beyond his earthy body; a human that knew there was something beyond his own existence. This idea, and this idea alone, is the reason to keep moving forward with music and to never look back.