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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen: “an electronic wail descends into the depths and turns magically into a series of pulses”

On Friday evening, I was sad to hear of the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I was led to Stockhausen’s music by following back through the influence of bands I was listening to at the time. The Fall led me back to Can, a couple of members of which had studied with the great man.

Stockhausen not only fundamentally challenged my idea of music, but in seeking to understand him I was led back in turn to Webern, Schoenberg and their classical predecessors.

I consider myself very fortunate to have attended a weekend of concerts in Belfast, back in April 2004. Stockhausen visited the city to oversee and introduce these. (He was also honoured by Queen’s University.)

I was able to sit quite near the mixing desk where Stockhausen operated the controls each evening. I don’t expect ever to be in such close proximity to a major composer again.

I acknowledge that there was something of the showman about Stockhausen and that he was eccentric to say the least. But for me his work Kontakte has a quality of total reinvention which music hasn’t had since JS Bach.

Ivan Hewett catches this in his obituary when he writes:

What he has in abundance is the ability to focus a long and apparently rambling argument in a sudden, blazingly dramatic gesture. Stockhausen’s music contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un Faune or the upward swoop that ends Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Take for example the closing pages of Gruppen, where apocalyptic brass chords are teased from one orchestra to another over the listener’s head; or the moment in Kontakte where an electronic wail descends into the depths and turns magically into a series of pulses.

Stockhausen explained such effects. He said he had discovered that according to the laws of physics, pitch and rhythm were not separate aspects of music as we had once thought, but part of the same phenomenon. Slow a pitch down and it becomes a rhythm. Grappling with the laws of sound in such a fundamental way to create a new form of beauty: this can only remind us of Bach’s mastery of equal temperament.

I would like to repost links to notes on these concerts I attended in 2004, which I made on a blog I had at the time:

Big Media blogs

Brian Micklethwait and Guido Fawkes discuss the rise of the Big Media blogs. Blogs at online versions of old media institutions like TV stations, magazines and newspapers. In particular, they speculate that such blogs will not prove economically viable.

I wasn’t aware that bloggers on the Spectator or the BBC or Sky were specifically paid for their blogs, over and above the other journalism or broadcasting they do.

Anyway, I can’t accept Brian’s idea that the penny will eventually drop with newspaper and magazine proprietors and the plug will be pulled on their paid bloggers.

Papers have always lost money and as for TV, the BBC and Sky are hell-bent on interactivity and their blogs must be a relatively cheap way to provide this.

Guido must be rather worried at big media moving on to his turf and he’s right to be.

Speaking personally, I’ve been surprised in 2007 at how my blog-reading has shifted away from the amateurs with an agenda I was reading before, and shifted towards the more objective and fact-checked blogs written by old-school journalists.

Alongside this there has been a growth in free newspaper content this year. More free stuff, and more hard facts to be had for nothing. It tends to push opinion-making further into the background.

The notion of the blogger as “citizen journalist” which circulated a few years back has never developed into anything concrete.

Blogging hasn’t developed the way most of us expected.

Very few important stories have been broken by blogs; they have caught the old media out on very few important issues; they haven’t had as much political impact as we might have thought.

There certainly is a sense of debate opening up due to the internet, but a lot of it is happening in the comments sections of sites run by old-fashioned media. Until a new way of compiling individual opinions arises, then unfortunately the BBC’s Have Your Say and the old media blogs’ comments boxes will rule the roost.

I feel less interested in the blogs I once read. At the end of 2007, it is Samizdata and Guido whose fixed agendas look out of touch rather than the Economist or Nick Robinson who they constantly swing at.

The old media was slow to adapt to the new world, but has now done so more successfully than anyone expected.

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