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Karlheinz Stockhausen speaks up about the WTC
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Oct 10 19:40 UTC 2001 |
The following is from
http://www.andante.com/magazine/article.cfm?id=14377
which I urge you to check out.
I used to listen to an LP of Stockhausen's electronic music once in a
while and found it very poetic and beautiful. But he is a *very*
strange guy. Here's his quote, which has become quite infamous in
Europe:
"What has happened is — now you all have to turn your brains around —
the greatest work of art there has ever been. That minds could achieve
something in one act, which we in music cannot even dream of, that
people rehearse like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for one
concert, and then die. This is the greatest possible work of art in the
entire cosmos. Imagine what happened there. There are people who are so
concentrated on one performance, and then 5000 people are chased into
the Afterlife, in one moment. This I could not do. Compared to this, we
are nothing as composers... Imagine this, that I could create a work of
art now and you all were not only surprised, but you would fall down
immediately, you would be dead and you would be reborn, because it is
simply too insane. Some artists also try to cross the boundaries of
what could ever be possible or imagined, to wake us up, to open another
world for us."
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dbratman
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response 1 of 1:
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Oct 10 23:22 UTC 2001 |
Stockhausen has been slammed for moral obtuseness for treating the
deaths of thousands of people as an art statement. But I don't think
that's what he really meant, and I think I understand his real point.
What he was trying to say, obtusely to be sure, was that regardless of
the moral aspect, this act made everything he'd tried to accomplish as
a composer look small by comparison.
But implicit in that concept is that a kind of awesome horror (even
without danger) is the _kind_ of emotional reaction he's trying to
elicit in his works. And if you consider things like the "Helicopter
Quartet", described in the article, I don't think that's a mis-
description. More than a composer, he's a kind of theatre director,
attempting to send audiences home with a feeling of "well, that's
something you certainly don't see every day."
It's not Stockhausen's moral credo that bothers me. It's his artistic
credo.
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