Revisiting Stockhausen

The magazine Artforum has put together a remarkable tribute to Stockhausen, consisting of extended articles by Robin Maconie, Stockhausen's chief chronicler, and La Monte Young, giant of American experimental music, along with shorter tributes by Irvine Arditti, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Morton Subotnick, Maryanne Amacher, and Björk. There's much worth noting: Maconie's passionate defense of Stockhausen's post-9/11 commentary ("The opinion of a musician both of whose parents were victims of war — the mother by lethal injection, the father on the Eastern front — a survivor who worked the final six months of resistance as an orderly in a field hospital caring for and comforting American war victims of Allied phosphor bombs, speaking English to them and playing music to ease their suffering, deserves respect as the view of one who knows what war is about...."); Young's story of how he was afraid to show Stockhausen his long-tone Trio for Strings when he went to Darmstadt in 1959 ("Why didn't you show me this at the beginning?" Stockhausen said, after studying it for a long time); and Björk's rhapsodic account of how listening to Stockhausen opened her young musical mind ("...while classical teachers in my school kept moaning about the good old days of music ... [thinking] that with our sportsmanship, will and self-denial we could masturbate the old dead beast and perhaps it would groan for another few years"). I attempted to convince Björk to become Stockhausen Guest Blogger here after the composer's death; evidently, Artforum practiced stronger persuasion. Joseph Drew has been writing about Stockhausen in depth at ANABlog.

Update: Note an upcoming Alarm Will Sound show at The Kitchen (March 21 and 22) that will evoke an imaginary meeting between Stockhausen and John Lennon.