I mentioned this fact in passing maybe two or three times to my girlfriend, who happened to grow up just down the road from Stockhausen in the suburbs of Cologne, and she astounded me with the gift of this long-sought recording for my birthday last October. So it was gratifying to be already engaged in his music when I got news of his death, to avoid feeling that little twinge of regret at not having paid enough attention to someone’s work while that person is still alive, the way I did with Ligeti.

Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), which portrays the Old Testament story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, was as spectacular as I remembered it, all the more amazing considering that it was realized in 1956. I guess it’s generally considered to be the first composition (or at least first significant composition) to mix pure, electronically generated sound with musique concrète, in this case, a recording of a boy singing a Psalm (evidently an apocryphal addition to the book of Daniel) from the Catholic mass in German. It’s backed with Kontakte plus three early studies for electronic sound. The package contains a thick booklet of Stockhausen’s voluminous notes, numerous excerpts from the detailed scores, and more charts and tables than you can shake a stick at. Indicative of the painstaking attention to detail is a photograph depicting a reenactment of an elaborate, home-rigged tape splicing technique he developed, so that he could perform his more tedious tasks at home and make the most of his precious studio time.

It’s also been fascinating to get reacquainted with Kontakte. This piece from 1960 exists in two versions; I already have a recording of the version for tape with piano and percussion (on the Wergo label), but this CD features the version for tape alone. The work has 16 sections (Struktur), several of which are further subdivided, and unlike the Wergo recording, each section of the piece is indexed as a separate track. For a work of this scale (thirty-five and a half minutes), this indexing underlines the fine attention to every minute detail of the piece. As an example, and in the spirit of evangelism, I hope that Stockhausen-Verlag will not begrudge my posting the gorgeous “Struktur XV” in its entirety. No event passed too quickly to escape Stockhausen’s scrutiny; he is in complete command of these 43.8 seconds.

I don’t know much about his recent work, though I’ve been boning up a bit lately. Around the time I first encountered Gesang der Jünglinge in 1993 or 1994, I asked a professor what Stockhausen was up to these days, and he replied something like, “He used to write such great music, but now he’s just trying to talk to aliens!” In one of Stockhausen’s obituaries, I read that he actually started off as a fairly devout Catholic (like his professor Messiaen, illuminating his choice of subject matter for Gesang der Jünglinge), who seems to have gradually developed his own unique strain of cosmic mysticism, as suggested by this prayer posted on his website.

The only recent work I know is the Helikopter-Quartett from 1993, which I consider a fascinating, audacious, curiously flawed, but ultimately inspiring piece. Like most of his music from 1977 until 2003, it figures into his gargantuan, 29-hour opera cycle Licht (Helikopter-Quartett is the third scene from Mittwoch). It’s a string quartet that also requires four helicopters, a huge audio-visual relay system, and a stadium in which to perform it. Helicopters have a complex sound with multiple components (I know, because part of my job is putting helicopter sounds into videogames), and it’s interesting to think of using this sound for musical purposes. But parts of the score require the musicians to count out numbers in German, which seems oddly superfluous, like they suddenly stumbled into a George Crumb piece.

Nonetheless, especially in the early days of my career, when I was doing a lot of work-for-hire music, and my creative impulses would occasionally clash with the producers’ commercial instincts, I used to listen to Helikopter-Quartett as the ultimate statement of artistic confidence and integrity. He doesn’t doubt for an instant that the quality of his music deserves anything less than these ridiculous logistics. And every aspect of the spectacle is spelled out in the score, including the post-performance discussion; Stockhausen composes everything. The kicker is that after the premiere and all the expense and negotiation and coordination it entailed, he had the audacity to revise the work, which necessitated a new recording!

But ultimately more relevant to my work in the non-linear medium of videogames is Stockhausen’s investigation of form.

In 1956, he wrote the mobile-like Klavierstück XI, which is structurally similar to some Earle Brown’s pieces. I checked out the score for this piece at the University of Washington music library a few years ago. It comes rolled up in a big tube, with a little stand that you unfold and to which you affix the printed score before placing it on the piano (not that I attempted to play it; it’s way, way beyond my capabilities). It was in the rare books section, so the librarian gave me white gloves to wear while handling the score. Several short phrases are spaced about the page, and the pianist may move from phrase to phrase arbitrarily. When any phrase is played for a third time, the piece is over. The most unique application of this mobile structure is that the end of each phrase dictates the manner in which the subsequent phrase, whichever it may be, should be played, so that the same material may be subjected to real-time variations.

This mobile-like structure is handy enough, but even more useful is Stockhausen’s notion of “moment form,” which permeates every element of the music, not just a few branching forks in the road. He elaborates on this idea in the liner notes to my earlier Wergo recording of Kontakte (comments reproduced from a 1961 interview):

During the last years, there have been forms composed in music which are far removed from the form of the dramatic finale; they lead up to no climax, nor do they have prepared, and thus expected, climaxes, nor the usual introductory, intensifying, transitional, and cadential stages which are related to the curve of development in a whole work; they are…forms in which at any moment one may expect a maximum or a minimum, and in which one is unable to predict with certainty the direction from any given point.

The idea is that the music can exist in stasis, not moving towards any dramatic climax, but just doing its own thing indefinitely, until, for whatever reason, it does something else. Kontakte is an accretion of small structures, not a big structure that’s been broken down into smaller subdivisions. The form is additive, which is to say, it’s the opposite of a traditional Western symphony that is divided into movements, sections, phrases, measures, beats, subdivisions of beats, etc., all working towards a big final cadence.

(This is the same revelation Philip Glass had much later when transcribing Indian music for Western musicians, and he points out that most non-Western music also shares this conception of music as being a behavior that can evolve. I’d also point out that many composers have found this type of music well-suited to spiritual expressions like Stockhausen’s, including Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich, not to mention a great number of composers operating way back when church music was the norm, such as Perotin or Allegri.)

You could call it non-teleological (thanks to Bret Battey for introducing me to this word), or non-goal-oriented music. And when music isn’t moving towards a specific goal, it’s free to go anywhere at any time. And that’s an exact prescription for music that must accompany an indeterminate, real-time process, in which the goal may not be forseeable. And that’s one way to describe a videogame.

I’ve often been tempted to make yet another analogy between film and videogames (there have been many), in regard to the influence of classical music on new media. I think you can say that Debussy, for example, is a very cinematic composer. A lot of his transitions sound like camera cuts. He encountered in some capacity this new technology and thought about what it meant for the world of ideas, and it was reflected (innately, and along with lots of other ideas) in his music, at a time when film was still finding its aesthetic legs and real film music basically consisted of borrowed ballet scores.

(Note that this is not the same as talking about how composers of horror film scores have looted the music of the Second Viennese School; while it’s true that audience’s ears have grown to accept sounds that were once considered cacophonous, that’s a different discussion, which is more about content, or what Morton Feldman might call the surface of the music. It’s not about grappling with the fundamental expressive or structural capacities of a new medium.)

In the same way, as the notion of modern computers seeped into the public consciousness, composers in the middle of the last century began to think through the aesthetic ramifications of the new medium, even though, in the majority of cases, they were not actually writing music for computers. John Cage didn’t use a computer to generate his random numbers until the very end of his life, but the idea of this possibility was surely there much earlier. It’s only now that everyone’s got a computer and videogames are truly mass media entertainment that these ideas can be linked back up to the technology that may have sparked them in the first place. This is true of Stockhausen’s moment form. What may once have been considered irrelevant intellectual conjecture is finding increasing application in the consoles of legions of videogame players.

This underscores the necessity of contemporary music; it structures ideas about who we are and the world around us. The media we use influences the way we think, and Klavierstück XI is basically a web page. To pick an arbitrary example, Beethoven’s music, as great as it is, can never fully address the experience of someone living today, because Beethoven never had a cell phone.

Around the time I first encountered Kontakte in the late 90’s, I read a quotation by Stockhausen that I think I’d go so far as to say I’ve adopted as a life principle, though I’ve probably stretched it a bit beyond its original context (which I have now forgotten). He said, as I recall, “In everything, I am trying to integrate more and more.” That’s already a noble enough goal for a piece of music: to think through every aspect of an artwork, accepting no tradition or convention untested, making sure every element has a reason to be there.

But I think this maxim can apply equally to a whole life, relating what one writes to what one eats, one’s grooming habits, how one conducts one’s relationships, etc. This attitude reminds me of how Laurie Anderson says she used to go to other artists’ homes early in her career to see what was in their refrigerators, or how my former composition professor Peter Hamlin used to invite students to his house for his homemade chili. It seems to me the most integrated and satisfying music results from truly living one’s art.

Such a mantra doesn’t seem like such a bad legacy.

I had been curious to read some Confucius, so about two years ago I ordered Ezra Pound’s version of The Great Digest. I also picked up excerpts of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, a gargantuan piece of several hours based on the same work (”The Great Learning” and “The Great Digest” both being renderings of the Chinese “大学 Da Xue”), as well as the piano piece We Sing for the Future! I also started reading his book, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and in light of Stockhausen’s death, this seems as good a time as any to mention it here. In the introduction he rails against the capitalist notion of copyright, so I don’t think he’d object to my posting it.

Cardew was an assistant to Stockhausen from 1956 to 1960, and later an associate of John Cage’s. Cardew converted to communism in the 1970’s, and a significant chunk of the book is devoted to lambasting both of them as bourgeois idealists. Here’s a taste:

The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first, to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” The bourgeois ideologist today can only earn the title “genius” by going to extreme lengths of intellectual corruption and dishonesty, and this is just what Cage and Stockhausen have done. Inevitably, they try and lead their “schools” along the same path. These are ample grounds for attacking them; it is quite wrong to think that such artists with their elite audiences are “not doing anyone any harm.”

There’s all kinds of interesting stuff that makes this book worth reading. He provides a fascinating overview of the history of the Scratch Orchestra, a kind of pick-up avant-garde collective he founded to perform The Great Learning. He also does a thorough self-criticism of his own works, including The Great Learning and Treatise, referencing Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. It’s valuable as a glimpse of how China was perceived in the West in the 1970’s, and it raises all kinds of questions about the role of composer in society, the relationships between composer and performer and audience, the value of abstract intellectual inquiry, allegations of elitism, etc.

The Great Learning may be a flawed piece, but it actually contains a lot of unique solutions to the question of how to coordinate the indeterminate actions of multiple performers, reminding me in some ways of Christian Wolff. And I’m not completely convinced that a big piano piece like We Sing for the Future!, written after Cardew’s avant-garde reformation, is necessarily demonstrably more “useful.” But his comments about how “derivative” pop music “will serve for the ideological subjugation of the working class…through encouraging degenerate tendencies, drugs, mass hypnosis, sentimentality” do bring to mind Howard W. French’s recent article, “The Sound, Not of Music, but of Control.”

The first issue appeared in March 2006 with the Chinese title Audio Visual World 音像世界 and featured such controversial content as a cover story on Chinese protest rocker Cui Jian 崔健, an interview with notorious sex blogger Muzimei 木子美, and a scandalously self-serving history of the importance of Rolling Stone magazine in the history of popular music. A free Rolling Stone hat was included with each issue. It was promptly shut down.

The next month a revamped Audio Visual World hit the newsstands with the familiar Rolling Stone font, layout, and translated content, but the name Rolling Stone was nowhere to be found, even though the band the Rolling Stones was featured on the cover, in conjunction with their Shanghai appearance. Several issues followed in a similar vein, the covers graced with Johnny Depp, the Black Eyed Peas, and Placebo (prior to their performance at the Beijing Pop Festival last year).

Then last October the magazine was reborn a second time. A free CD was included, the Chinese name was now Music Space-Time (or something like that: 音乐时空), and the Rolling Stone name and logo were back. Many issues followed; we met Christina Aguilera, mourned James Brown’s passing, and celebrated 2006 in review. The last issue I ever saw featured Sonic Youth on the cover; I heard murmurs of official discontent surrounding their April shows in Beijing and Shanghai, so perhaps the periodical fell afoul of regulators once again. In any event, Music Space-Time (there must be a better English name) has since resumed publication in a completely new format that doesn’t resemble Rolling Stone in the slightest.

Throughout each iteration, pride of place went to Rolling Stone’s staple Western acts, especially if they happened to be visiting China, with much of the content translated from the English version. Second came the Chinese rock scene, with the Subs on the cover one month, and features on bands such as Muma, Tongue, and the Ruins (not to be confused with the other Ruins, from Japan, likely of greater interest to GNO readers). Taiwanese pop icons like Jay Chou and Jolin, so prominent on the Chinese airwaves, received scant mention.

Surprisingly, the experimental music scene got some decent coverage. One article focused on Shanghai’s growing underground scene, and Torturing Nurse was mentioned alongside post-punk groups like Top Floor Circus 顶楼的马戏团. There was even a picture of TN’s Junky and former vocalist Miriam performing at the now defunct 36mm CD shop. FM3 and their Buddha Machines also got a big feature. Laptop whiz Wang Changcun 王长存 and noise artist Ronez were represented in CD reviews alongside Bob Dylan and The Game.

For me the fascination was to try to see how at least one publication pieced together the fragmented Chinese musical landscape, to try to parse what constitutes underground music and the mainstream, to see what people are really listening to, and where it comes from. This task is all the more difficult in a country where legitimate CD sales count for so little that there’s no standard hit parade to arbitrate musical popularity. The charts in Rolling Stone China were primarily based on sales in Hong Kong or Taiwan, or on celebrity hot picks.

So in this spirit I attempted to translate into English the Rolling Stone review of Ronez’ release Ni Hao! I’m Deaf And It’s OK from the November 2006 issue, to see what was actually being said about this scene. I quickly realized that the writing (by Yan Jun 颜峻, in fact) was far beyond my skill level, so I relied heavily on my dictionary and on patient friends (several of whom reprimanded me for wasting my time on what they considered an irrelevant mouthpiece).

But I slogged through, and here is the fruit of my labor. The original Chinese version is mirrored on Sugar Jar, so you can check it for comparison. I welcome all suggestions and corrections. Enjoy!

Ronez
Ni Hao! I’m Deaf and It’s Okay
Harsh Noise
By Yan Jun (translated by Ben Houge)

The international standing of Chinese experimental music already exceeds that of rock and roll, and noise music is particularly prominent. Ronez, from Guilin, recently released an album on the American label Harsh Noise, and in addition to teaching foreigners how to say “hello” in Chinese, it further ushers the country’s underground music onto the world’s stage. By now, Ronez and Shanghai’s Torturing Nurse have joined stars like Stimbox and The Hater in the pantheon of noise artists.

“Harsh noise” was originally the name of a genre, usually indicating rough, hardware-generated sounds; mad exuberance; high energy; and fast-changing noise. Releases were typically hand-made and low-key, allowing the output to be prodigious. Ronez’ new album conforms to all of these criteria. From the first second, you begin to wonder if your speakers have blown, and over the course of one hour’s manic vibrations, you continually suspect that your neighbors are pounding at the door. Shrieking high frequencies assault your eardrums, punctuated by low frequency blasts that sound about as mellow as rock and roll. The seventh track’s shrill beginning contrasts sustained tones with intermittent pauses, exposing Ronez’ bent for humorous parody. (This is also the only track that fades out at the end.) He prefers piercing tones, high-velocity particles, and impulsive feedback, sometimes laying down a bed of low frequency noise as a cushion, sometimes sustaining high frequencies to test your endurance. All sonic events are clearly differentiated for a clean and solid mix. Your ear keeps rushing from one extremity to another, until you finally realize the whole album consists of nothing but extremities.

If someone were to assert that this kind of music, scarcely granting an opportunity to catch your breath, is more grand and outgoing than Ronez’ earlier work, I could only reply that it’s because he’s become more calm and unhurried. Before the end of the eighth track, there comes a moment of relief, masterfully yet effortlessly constructed to produce an additional adrenaline rush from the contrast. In the presence of such a veteran noisemaker, of what significance is deafness?

As sound art (soundfart?) being locked down as an established art form (fart form?), it’s time to move forward.

UPDATE: Thom Chin of 21floor/Bookystorie just sent me this:

As Thom Chin is still seeking to solve a technical problem and realize his video project, the program of Bookystorie was cancelled and will be replaced by a collaborative work of Zafka (sound) and CHEN Gang (video).

http://www.chinesenewear.com/maldivepunkfan

Still a lot to be done (categories, font, RSS subscription links, other details) but I’m the impatient kind of person, so let’s do it the web2.0 way: release in beta (even alpha) phase, and improve/adjust in open air.

Mind you, the title of the blog is to be read in Cantonese: Mau Dai Pun Faan.

It’s great to be back, although the people on Jianshe 6 Malu is getting a lot more snobbish.