Quotes & Sayings About Stockhausen

I have composed several pieces which are performed outdoors, not only in the auditoria. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

All the people with whom I was very close at one point in my life - Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann - they are all gone. — Pierre Boulez

Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen to journalist: "I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [was] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations."

Aphex Twin to journalist: "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to". — Karlheinz Stockhausen

So there is a personal sense of style for a given work - I don't like a general style, but every work has its own style, and I want to create a style for every work. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen. — Jonny Greenwood

But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

One experiments and has to choose always the best results. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

I looked at the headline: "The Devil Made Him Do It." It was an opinion piece about the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the "disjointed" but "grotesque" remarks he had made at a press conference. Lamenting the relative impotence of the arts in comparison to terrorism, Stockhausen had called the attacks "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos." I guess he thought of it as a Wagnerian spectacle, an opera of airplanes and towers. "Five thousand people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment," he said. "I couldn't do that. In comparison with that, we're nothing as composers. — Supervert

We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

When a certain piece of music penetrates a person, a resonance is set in motion and an inner voice says: I like this resonance. It elevates me. It develops hitherto unknown possibilities in me. I don't recognize myself. This is very interesting. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos ... compared to that, we composers are nothing — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Schaeffer gave me permission to work in the studio with a technician, but I've never worked with him. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

No, what is important is neither linearity or non-linearity, but the change, the degree of change from something that doesn't move to other events with different tempos in particular. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles. — Tod Machover

And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Pianists of extraordinary talent, such as Christina Petrowska,spend a large part of their early lives perfecting technique ... Miss Petrowska,a Canadian with a phenomenal ability to play the most difficult music cleanly, gave a demonstration of her achievements at Carnegie Recital Hall. A product of the Juilliard School who studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti in Europe, Miss Petrowska built most of her program around fiercely difficult contemporary works. She has fingers that work like chrome-plated pistons, and her high-seated position let her bring pulverizing power to bear. — Donal Henahan

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity - destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it's only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction. — Supervert

Boulez's only concern is with power. He lost the leadership of the avant-guard more than ten years ago to Stockhausen. Now others have moved in. With the need for power, where was he to go? So he chose to be a conductor. He is a wonderful musician, a wonderful intelligence. It's a pity there is no humanity there. Does he have sex? I think not. When men have no sex, they go after power in this big, obsessive way. — Lukas Foss

I was horrible at everything I ever tried to do and people respect me. The American Dream has come true!! — Karlheinz Stockhausen

If you saw my musical collection it's absolutely horrendous, I've got everything from Stockhausen to The Beach Boys to Gina G, all sorts of terrible things and other people come here and look at my record collection and go, "Ah, you can't possibly like that - how embarrassing!" — Thighpaulsandra

I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance? — Nicolas Cage

In particular what is most important to me is the transformation of a sound by slowing it down, sometimes extremely, so that the inner of sound becomes a conceivable rhythm. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

But being quiet and meditating on sound is something completely different and will be discovered very soon by a lot of people who feel that the visual world doesn't reach their soul anymore. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

"Have you heard any Stockhausen?" Beecham was asked. "No, but I believe I have stepped in some." — Thomas Beecham

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

It is true that the eyes dominate the ears in our time. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Each culture has some knowledge. That's why I studied with Saj Dev, an Indian flute player. That's why I studied Stockhausen's music. The pygmies' music of the rain forest is very rich music. So the knowledge is out there. And I also believe one should seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. With that kind of inquisitiveness, one discovers things that were unknown before. — Yusef Lateef

And I'm always interested when other musicians are trying to discover new worlds of sound. — Karlheinz Stockhausen