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Grex Classicalmusic Item 62: Karlheinz Stockhausen speaks up about the WTC
Entered by md on Wed Oct 10 19:40:24 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."

1 responses total.

#1 of 1 by dbratman on Wed Oct 10 23:22:44 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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