Stockhausen 1928-2007

[Cage & Stockhausen, 1958]

The obits in the Telegraph and the NY Times are barely polite. Better are the L.A. Times and London Times. I was mentioning them to somebody last night, thinking he would agree with me about their snarkyness, but instead he said, "Yeah, it's incredible there's so much media attention to a person whose music no one in the world ever has listened to." Tis the season.

Among the brighter memories of the mid-1970s is listening to the 1965 Deutsche Grammophon LP of Gruppen and Carre, with Stockhausen, Maderna, Kagel, et. al. conducting. I borrowed it over and over again from the Rockford Public Library. I didn’t realize at the time how unusual it was that I had access to such things.

I’m listening to Gruppen now. The piano and brass make exquisite sounds. But the whole is more than that. There is a pleasant impersonality to it; it’s like a series of landscapes. Call it a train journey through cities and countryside, in fair weather and through storms, in the bustling daytime and serene night-time.

Reading about this strange, difficult person, I prefer to think of the story of Leonard Bernstein screaming "Karlheinz! Sit down!" from the podium, when for a joke Stockhausen stood to accept the applause after a performance of a Morton Feldman piece.

Jacaranda are performing Stimmung next April 12.