This is the blogpost I never got to write. Nearly five months late. Calling myself out on my own procrastination.
I attended the Stockhausen Courses Kuerten in 2000, the first two weeks of my college year abroad. I was 21. I flew from Louisville, Kentucky via Detroit to Amsterdam, from there to Cologne, and took the train from the airport to downtown, then took a commuter train out to the end of the line, from which point I hopped on a bus, a year’s luggage in tow, and was dropped off on a muddy roadside in the tiny town dominated by an otherworldly ego. I met my hosts, who took me back to my room in the countryside for a quick shower, then took me back to town for a bite to eat.
Then they left.
I had no idea how to find my way back home.
I spent the night wandering the streets of the hillside town, finally curling up under a vinyl tablecloth on a picnic table in the courtyard of the elementary school where the courses would be held. In the morning I was greeted by students arriving for Markus Stockhausen‘s 7 am yoga class, and met with the festival organizers, who reconnected me with my host family.
My first night became an initiation ritual for me. I had spent a night homeless on the streets in a foreign city where (at the time) I barely knew the language and knew nobody. The next day, I attended rehearsals of the festival’s flagship piece, Sirius.
Markus Stockhausen as Aries in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sirius
More than anything else, Stockhausen’s (often misunderstood) worldview, from his orphaned childhood to his youthful postwar travels with a magic sideshow to his early pseudo-serialist days in the Darmstadt camp (…how time passes…) to his meteoric stardom of the 60′s to his personal crisis after the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970 to his subsequent mythical re-formulation of himself, every action and every work explored with increasing depth and detail the concept of Time, and humanity’s relationship with it.
In Stockhausen’s lectures that I attended in that late July of 2000, he imparted as fundamental the axiom that musical education is the ultimate meditative, transcendental human (and indeed universal) activity. As the center for his unfolding of time, he used 71 bpm, the average heart rate of a human being at rest. From this axis mundi, he proceeded to further create subdivisions of time toward the infinitesimal, and cyclic compounds of time toward the eternal, much like the Hindu Yugas. He believed that with adequate practice and discipline, a musician might train herself to perceive with absolute accuracy and without subdivision arbitrarily long intervals of time. (Musicians are typically trained to accurately subdivide time intervals longer than a second into sub-second countable units.) The last thirty years of his work have been focused on demarcating “natural” time intervals: LICHT is the seven days, KLANG the 24 hours, SIRIUS the twelve months.
Stockhausen claimed – sincerely or otherwise – to be a spiritual child of the star system of Sirius. He claimed he knew he would live to be 100 years old, then die suddenly and be reborn on Sirius.
Sirius, an 8-channel work in the round, begins with a recording of an ascending, partially filtered noise from a rotating speaker. This was to be the descent of the four celestial beings from Sirius (the performers of the piece), come from the stars to impart heavenly wisdom of the meaning of the seasons and the stars on mankind. They took the form of the cardinal points of our zodiac: Capricorn (a bass), Aries (a trumpet), Cancer (a soprano), and Libra (a basset horn). The piece proceeds to begin with the sign of the current season (in our case, Cancer), and work its way around the cycle of the four seasons, exploring the interactions between the archetypes as the year continues.
For me, the connection between myth, music, and experience was relevatory. As a professing Atheist still struggling out from under an oppressive fundamentalist, literalist Christianity, the ramifications of this unity of spirit and matter have become the subject of my inner life ever since.
Stockhausen remains a controversial figure. Deluded? Certainly. Egomaniacal? Perhaps. Flawed? Absolutely. Visionary? Undoubtedly. His body has returned to the elements, but his vision for humanity continues to take hold.
Karlheinz Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007 at his home in Kuerten. He was 79.
