The notorious German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away this week.  I’m working on a Max/MSP patch and some tape loops in his honour.  Stockhausen was a God-like figure amongst music technology and electronic music composition students.  He is the grandfather of electronic music, whom we all looked up to with reference and respect.  In college, I would occasionally DJ under the moniker Karl Steve - the love child of Stockhausen and American minimalist composer Steve Reich.  Karl Steve would do things like mix together bits of “his own stuff” from Music for 18 Musicians, as well as choice selections from John Zorn and Terry Riley, and lay them over top of stripped down versions of tunes like The Bomb, by The Bucketheads.  Young attractive women would come up to Karl Steve and actually buy him drinks!.. while he was doing this.  Such is the power of the Karlheinz…

I love this exerpt from Wikipedia:

Early in 1995, BBC Radio 3 sent Stockhausen a package of recordings from contemporary artists Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner and Daniel Pemberton, and asked him for his opinion on the music. In August of that year, Radio 3 reporter Dick Witts interviewed Stockhausen about these pieces for a broadcast in October (subsequently published in the November issue of the British publication The Wire), asking what advice he would give these young musicians. Stockhausen suggested they should give up repetitions, which he does not appreciate, which he found to be “like someone who is stuttering all the time.” He further suggested that “one should not serve any existing demands or in particular not commercial values.” Stockhausen was most positive about Scanner’s music, which he found “very experimental, because he is searching in a realm of sound which is not usually used for music”, but felt “he should transform more what he finds. He leaves it too much in a raw state.” Stockhausen suggested an example for each artist from his own works. For Daniel Pemberton, who he criticised for the overuse of tape loops, and whose sense of harmony he found particularly weak, Stockhausen recommended

He should listen to Kontakte, which has among my works the largest scale of harmonic, unusual and very demanding harmonic relationships. I like to tell the musicians that they should learn from works which already [have] gone through a lot of temptations and have refused to give in to these stylistic or to these fashionable temptations… (Witts 1995)

Stockhausen also suggested that Robin Rimbaud, Scanner, listen to his work Hymnen because, although “he has a good sense of atmosphere”, “he should transform more what he finds.”; in the work of Aphex Twin (Richard James), he suggested “changing tempi and changing rhythms”, and that he listen to Gesang der Jünglinge; and, similarly, he found Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) too rhythmically repetitious, and suggested he listen to Zyklus.

The criticised musicians were then invited to respond, and all but Plastikman obliged. Daniel Pemberton was “very impressed considering the time it was done: the 1960s”, but wished that Stockhausen would use more basic repetition: “It would be very good to put some Hip Hop breaks under, actually.” He concedes, “I know what he means about loops though; that’s because I haven’t got much equipment.” Scanner found Hymnen (which he had never heard before) “very good actually—better than I expected. At the end there’s a recording of him breathing. It’s quite uncomfortable—like being inside his head.” As to Stockhausen’s criticisms of his own music, “I take some of what he said about my music to heart”, but he “disagree[s] about repetition: I think, as John Cage said, repetition is a form of change, and it’s a concept you either agree or disagree with. I like repetitions.” Aphex Twin’s reaction to Gesang der Jünglinge: “Mental! I’ve heard that song before; I like it,” but he did not agree with Stockhausen’s critique, in that he wishes Stockhausen would “stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to. . . . You could dance to Song of the Youth[s], but it hasn’t got a groove in it, there’s no bassline” (Witts 1995).

We’ll miss you Karlheinz.

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