Demolish Serious Culture

[vrfats]

Gee, you've really got it in for Stockhausen.. I wonder why. Surely you can't be jealous

not in the least. I actually have a liking for stockhausen's work and appreciate his contribution to the world of electronic music especially kontakte but am a little amused by certain things.

[faster]

I do like virtuosity in improvisation a lot (seeing tatsuya nakatani perform was a huge revelation for me).

Yeah, I like virtuosity sometimes too, but seeing Nakatani was an anti-revelation for me.

[jon abbey]

yeah, I'd recommend Le Quan Ninh along somewhat similar lines personally.

[flies]

Stockhausen's writings are transparent bullshit. Powerful ideas infuse his music, but his attempts to communicate those ideas makes it seem like he doesn't understand them at all. Or else he's conning us. Either way he's an asshole. (I suppose an argument could be for why such a con could be considered meaningful, but deliberate bullshit is pretty hard to defend.) I cannot abide that sort of pretension, and I am infuriated that people around him permit that sort of behavior.

[jon abbey]

tense is a bit off there, so just making sure you know he died five years ago.

[Wombatz]

I'd say that from the 60s Stockhausen's personal hubris was sort of conflated with an "official" composer status by the leftfield for political reasons. That's ok, since he was sure asking for it, or in fact working from that, because if you think what he actually got going, that's pretty phenomenal. Maybe it helps to see him in tandem with Beuys, both of them largely coming on like a messiah, but that's rather about building a persona that will take on pre-conceptions of the romantic artist and were pretty subversive not just after the national socialists but after the still very culturally prescriptive thinkers (Frankfurt school) in the postwar years. I mean, just look at the work of both, and then ponder that that stuff posed as quasi-academical/managed to conquer the establishment. In both personas, there's actually much tongue-in-cheekness which might be difficult to read from outside Germany, and of course probably in later years, Stockhausen's persona would have mostly taken over his character ... but see it as part of the performance. They don't pay you the helicopters for being a nice guy.

[flies]

tense is a bit off there, so just making sure you know he died five years ago.

forgot. I think the rant sounds better in the present tense tho.

[Richard Barrett]

forgot. I think the rant sounds better in the present tense tho.

It sounds bad and unnecessary in any tense really. I'm sure that for every example of "transparent bullshit" you could find in Stockhausen's writings I could find you an example of the same kind of insight and fascination that makes much of his musical work so compelling. Also, how does a musician's inability or unwillingness to communicate their ideas in words (in a way you find acceptable) make them an "asshole"? Some of Stockhausen's statements are questionable but they're a model of coherence next to what some people say about him.

[flies]

forgot. I think the rant sounds better in the present tense tho.

It sounds bad and unnecessary in any tense really. I'm sure that for every example of "transparent bullshit" you could find in Stockhausen's writings I could find you an example of the same kind of insight and fascination that makes much of his musical work so compelling. Also, how does a musician's inability or unwillingness to communicate their ideas in words (in a way you find acceptable) make them an "asshole"? Some of Stockhausen's statements are questionable but they're a model of coherence next to what some people say about him.

I'm trying to refresh my memory, but having a hard time finding things written by him. Here are two things he wrote/coauthroed that are very clear and direct http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/emr ... hausen.pdf http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/emr ... lstock.pdf

Here's something more substantive that is also quite readable http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/Eim ... eihe-I.pdf

I have a very clear memory of reading some high-falootin word salad he wrote, but it seems that there's more to the story.

[Dan Warburton]

I find Stockhausen's writing quite easy to understand, providing one has a grasp of music theory and basic physics. Want something technically difficult? Try Xenakis's Formalized Music. Want something pretentious and needlessly complex? Try (all but three or four essays in) Noise & Capitalism. But I suppose round these parts Xenakis and Mattin are good guys, not assholes.

[Dan Bennett]

FM is a horrible book even if you understand the maths - which isn't actually difficult. And I love Xenakis.
I never felt it was obfuscatory though - just badly expressed.

There is that one grandiosely spiritual Stockhausen essay - forget the name, read it an age ago and it is just obfuscation in service of ego.
That's one essay though.
And he wrote Kontakte.
And he's famous as a composer rather than a writer. So long as people treat him that way I can't see a big problem with his personal ticks slightly silly spiritual flights of fancy and prose style. Xenakis was supposedly a pretty difficult chap too and, if I understand correctly, a fascist for a short while.

If you really really need to read someone knocking Karlheinz, read Feldman's interviews - at least there it's sporting and funny. He's much more entertaining than Stewart Home too.

[jon abbey]

But I suppose round these parts Xenakis and Mattin are good guys, not assholes.

um, what board have you been reading?

[jamess]

Want something technically difficult? Try Xenakis's Formalized Music.

As I type there is a copy of that book to my left. I took it from a library in hopes of finding new ways to control material, or at the very least better understand Xenakis' own methodology. I have achieved neither. But I do think that Xenakis can be excused for writing a book about music that is only comprehensible to mathematicians: it absolutely does explain the level at which he thought whilst writing music. Similarly, Ferneyhough (whose writings are also on the formidable pile of books I've decided to subject myself to) writes in an incredibly verbose manner about his methods and work for the most part, but that is surely because both composers are working with incredibly complex ideas. You can't explain quantum theory in any great depth without using very technical language, just as you can't explain the intricacies of Metastasis without it.

[Richard Barrett]

Xenakis was supposedly a pretty difficult chap too and, if I understand correctly, a fascist for a short while.

He was never a fascist. (Where did you get that from?) And personally he was a generous and gentle character who however had no patience with bullshit of any kind.

[jon abbey]

seems like it's worth linking Richard's recent essay on Stockhausen:

http://richardbarrettmusic.com/Stockhausen2012.html

[Dan Bennett]

Xenakis was supposedly a pretty difficult chap too and, if I understand correctly, a fascist for a short while.

He was never a fascist. (Where did you get that from?) And personally he was a generous and gentle character who however had no patience with bullshit of any kind.

I remember from reading his biog that he joined a fascist resistance group in Greece initially, before later moving to communist resistance groups. Which is admittedly (at least potentially) a little different from "being a fascist for a short while" and would lean heavily on the circumstances he found himself in.
I have absolutely no investment in dragging his name down though, and I'd be happy to hear that I got it wrong - I think all his thought and a pretty decent chunk of his politics thereafter have enormous integrity.
Only ever mentioned to give context to some of the things Stockhausen gets taken to task for.

[Dan Bennett]

Want something technically difficult? Try Xenakis's Formalized Music.

As I type there is a copy of that book to my left. I took it from a library in hopes of finding new ways to control material, or at the very least better understand Xenakis' own methodology. I have achieved neither. But I do think that Xenakis can be excused for writing a book about music that is only comprehensible to mathematicians: it absolutely does explain the level at which he thought whilst writing music. Similarly, Ferneyhough (whose writings are also on the formidable pile of books I've decided to subject myself to) writes in an incredibly verbose manner about his methods and work for the most part, but that is surely because both composers are working with incredibly complex ideas. You can't explain quantum theory in any great depth without using very technical language, just as you can't explain the intricacies of Metastasis without it.

I do disagree on this. The ideas were radical and new, but I did find them badly communicated in that book. There are lots of applications of basic probability there that anyone with a basic grasp of maths could understand but for the language getting in the way. We're not talking Fourier transforms or calculating FM spectra using Bessel functions etc.

There are some lovely clear essays in his catalog though. There's one in a book Composers and The Computer which I like a lot and his critique of serialism is completely lucid.

[Richard Barrett]

I remember from reading his biog that he joined a fascist resistance group in Greece initially, before later moving to communist resistance groups.

It's true that when he entered the Greek resistance he initially aligned himself with the the incumbent administration in Greece, a right-wing government headed by Ioannis Metaxas, who, apart from being an authoritarian prime minister who suppressed opposition (especially from the left), refused to give in to Mussolini's demands to use Greece as a military base for Italian expansionary strategies and tried to keep his country neutral. As a result Greece was invaded, first unsuccessfully by Italy and then with overwhelming force by Germany. Describing Xenakis as a "fascist" even "for a short while" is thus not at all right. As you say, you weren't intending to drag his name down, but really anyone thinking of associating a fellow human being with fascism should check their facts first.

[Dan Bennett]

Apologies - I agree not the best way of phrasing it, and I agree it's important to be more careful than I was in this area.

But as for your point about checking facts, I think that's a little off - so far as I can tell it's far from conclusive that Metaxas wasn't a fascist - his regime is very often referred to as such, to the degree that you might call the distinction narrowly technical. I don't think it's the facts I had wrong, I think I put them quite badly - "briefly sided with a fascist regime", for example, wouldn't, I think be innacurate. (With "in politically difficult times" appended if you were worried that your audience mightn't understand the possibility for even fine people to exercise bad judgement in difficult circumstances.)

But we're well off topic here.

[Dominic Lash]

When I first read Formalized Music about 12 or 13 years ago I remember finding it tremendously exciting (though I did struggle with parts of it - in fact, the experience had a lot in common with most of my encounters with maths: I get it, and then suddenly I don't... seems much harder to have an 'inkling' or get the 'gist' in maths than other areas of discourse...). I agree it's pretty clunky in places (I wonder if it's better in French?) and I don't find it as rewarding anymore. But that said I recently read the transcript of Xenakis' viva for his honorary higher degree (I think it's called Arts/Sciences: Alloys) and something I took from that was how passionate Xenakis' feeling was, but how equally strongly he felt that such things couldn't be transmitted in rational discourse. So he seems to have taken a quasi-Wittgensteinian line about that "whereof one cannot speak" - which I find makes FM almost moving, in negative, as it were. A bit like the fantastic collection of texts that go along with La legende d'Eer - coming where it does, the excerpt from Scientific American at the end is just as emotionally powerful as the passages from Plato and Pascal.