Stockhausen & the Sound of Music

If anyone knows anything about composer Karlheinz Stockhausen it is that as a cornerstone of the musical avant-garde of the 1950s, his music possesses an austerity that prevents it from being readily accessible—it is a music whose elaborately constructed structure would hardly lead one to consider it natural. In his writings about music, it is therefore surprising how often Stockhausen appeals to the limits of perception and the human body, and to nature in general. Still more surprising is the number of these appeals in an article devoted to electronic or synthesized music.

Stockhausen's 1971 article entitled "Four Criteria of Electronic Music" (in Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews. New York: M. Boyers, 1989) focuses on the dramatic changes in musical experience and methods that developed after the advent of electronic music in the 1950s. These changes stemmed from a fundamental shift in musical thought to an "idea of music as sound." In other words, the means of the electronic music studio allowed composers to isolate individual sound units for meticulous aural inspection, a process that divorces the sounds from the physical means that produced them. Yet, all the while making these observations, Stockhausen grounds his ideas about purely abstract sounds by connecting them with the physicality of our human bodies.

In dealing with both rhythm and meter he notes that they...

“…are organized in measures, traditionally to a fixed periodicity or tempo for a given movement, say fast, or medium fast, or slow, because everything was based on dancing or body actions, and that’s where the music came from.”

Of our perception of tempo, Stockhausen says that our bodies and bodily activities create in our temporal perspective a “certain middle position” by which all other phenomena are related. We measure any tempo faster than the speed of a relaxed heartbeat (about 70 beats per minute) as being fast and any tempo slower than the heartbeat as being slow. The same can be said of relaxed breathing pulse (about 20 to 30 beats per minute). In sum, this “middle position” is determined “by the body, by the breathing, the heartbeat, the speed with which the limbs—including the fingers—can be moved, the tongue, lips, head and so on.” Stockhausen then applies this idea of a so-called “middle position” to realm of pitch. High and low are determined by the position of the normal speaking voice.

Most fascinating in Stockhausen’s article is the connection he makes between various parameters of music—most notably pitch, rhythm, form—a connection made by what he refers to as a “unified time domain.” These musical parameters or “domains” are separated from each other due to the limits of our perceptual capacities as determined by our bodies. For example, if we take a rhythmic pulse and speed it up to sixteen attacks per second, which is the upper limit of our rhythmic perceptual field, we begin to approach the lowest level of perceptual pitch spectrum. Rhythm thus can transition very smoothly into the domain of pitch. Conversely, if we were to take the same rhythmic pulse and slow it down to a comparable degree, we approach the domain of form. Stockhausen sets, however arbitrarily, the transition between rhythm and form at eight to ten seconds. Thus, time, the musical time inherent even in the isolated sound unit, links the various musical parameters together. In Stockhausen’s summary words, “the ranges of perception are ranges of time, and the time is subdivided by us, by the construction of our bodies and by our organs of perception.” And the electronic music studio provides the composer with useful means of linking these divided musical parameters.

In the end, the isolation and inspection of music as isolated sound has led to fundamental changes in how we hear, create, experience music.

“New means change the method; new methods change the experience, and new experiences change man. Whenever we hear sounds we are changed: we are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is the more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.”