An analysis of Stockhausen's remarks

September 20, 2001

Below is an article about some recent astounding statements made by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Following it are some excerpts from an article I published last year that partially explain the general mentality behind remarks such as Stockhausen's. 

William Osborne
http://www.osborne-conant.org 

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HAMBURG, Germany, Sept 18 (AFP) -

Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 73, has roused indignation in Germany
for describing last week's catastrophic airplane assaults on New York as
"the greatest work of art ever."

The renowned contemporary composer, who was speaking to journalists in
Hamburg late Sunday, immediately retracted the remark and asked them not
to report it.

But as a result of what he said, two concerts featuring Stockhausen
which were to be given Tuesday and Wednesday were cancelled by the
organisers of a music festival at the request of the local cultural
authorities and festival sponsor, Hamburg's general director of music,
Ingo Metzmacher, who had invited the composer to stage performances of
his own works at the current Hamburg music festival.

The German news agency DPA said the composer had quit Hamburg, greatly
upset by the affair.

In a statement issued by the music festival organisers, Stockhausen said
he had been asked whether characters in his work, such as Lucifer, were
historical, and that he had replied "they are always contemporary, for
example Lucifer in New York.

"I recalled the destruction of art. Any other words outside of this context
have no relation to what I meant," he insisted.

Hamburg culture senator (minister) Christina Weiss said the composer's
reported remark was inexcusable, given the grief and mourning in the
United States.

"Out of feeling for the political culture of the city and the federal
republic, the concerts had to be cancelled," she said.

According to DPA, the composer, who had been asked about the attacks on the
United States, said: "What happened there is -- they all have to
rearrange their brains now -- is the greatest work of art ever.

"That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of,
that people practice madly for ten years, completely fanatically, for a
concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole
cosmos.

"I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing."

[End of newspaper article.]

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The idea presented below is complex and can only be understood by reading the whole document at the URL given. It is preceded by about 4000 words of historical and sociological documentation to show how the concept of the artist-prophet evolved and its relationship to pathological forms of transcendence in music. The artist-prophet is a cultural conception I use to refer to the 19th century's transcendentally inspired hero-artists. Transcendental idealism emphasizes the primacy of the spiritual and intuitive over the material and empirical. The passage is from:

Symphony Orchestras and Artist-Prophets: Cultural Isomorphism and the Allocation of Power In Music
Published in Leonardo Music Journal (Vol. 9, 1999) M.I.T. Press
(on the web at <www.osborne-conant.org/prophets.htm>
by William Osborne

[...] To a considerable degree, the twentieth century modernists continued to model themselves on the image of the nineteenth century artist-prophets they claimed to oppose. Generally speaking, they distinguished themselves from the Romantics by bringing a tone of rationalist objectivity to their work, which was culturally isomorphic with the predominantly scientific and technological spirit of the twentieth century.

This complex bifurcation between the romantic and objective spirits of modernism formulated some of its most profound artistic expression. One thinks of T.S. Elliot's detached, objective language expressing a world view that ranged from Dante's medieval spirituality to Anglican devotion, or Schönberg and Berg's rigorous theoretical structures enveloping expressionistic emotion, or George Crumb's post-Webern influenced cell-theory capturing the spirit of Lorcian animism, or Pederecki's harshly dissonant early style gradually returning to romantic forms. Perhaps the clearest representation of romantic transcendentalism manifesting itself in the modernist artist-prophet is Karlheinz Stockhausen, who not only played a notable role in the technological development of electronic music, but who also believes that his highly mystical cycle of seven long operas is being completed from a higher plane of consciousness. 

Patriarchal transcendentalism is inherently self-destructive, because its raises Mind over Nature, or the spiritual over the material. In artistic expression it thus tends toward recurrent cycles of ecstasy, revolution, destruction and remorse. This was vividly illustrated by Hitler's appropriation of the image of the modernist artist-prophet.[33] The itinerant painter-cum- artist Führer from the garrets of Vienna was finally heard, and with his "divine" inspiration and "scientific" understanding, hoped to destroy the world and create a revolution based on "scientific" notions of racial evolution, eugenics and euthanasia. (Similarly, the Italian Futurists, who worshiped both modern technology and the romantically transcendent authority of the "superman", were among the first devotees of Mussolini.) 

This was culturally isomorphic with the modernist continuation of the 19th century concept of the artist-prophet who was viewed as a source of truth and justice, and who was to be followed through a cycle of destruction and rebirth. In the land of Bayreuth, Hitler's success depended to a large degree on his ability to blur the borders between the artist-prophet and the absolutist dictator. With his dictatorial melomania, he envisioned the Third Reich as a large work of music theater to an astoundingly literal degree.[34] Fortunately, his Götterdämmerung was more complete than the revolution that he hoped would lead to a new world order of scientifically bred but romantically transcendent supermen.

The larger design of Hitlers ideology as an artist-prophet included the recreation of humanity according to a new aesthetic. From this horrific perspective, the Holocaust was a work of art, a purification of culture, a sculpting of the human race. Western culture had developed a frightening ability for idealizing aesthetics in a way that enhanced the allure of evil. Aesthetic and political ideology had synthezised into a single terrifying force. Human life became clay in the artist-prophets hands.

[The web version of the article contains a photo of a Nazi political poster with a Nordic family showing this newly "sculpted" race created by Hitler the Führer and artist-prophet.]

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My article attempts to outline the history of how this horrific mentality evolved. If you read it, you might see how the concept of the artist-prophet I outline relates to Stockhausen's statement about the terrorist attack:

"That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of,
that people practice madly for ten years, completely fanatically, for a
concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole
cosmos.

"I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing."

If one understands that pathological transcendence can be, and frequently is, an inherent part of the artist-prophet's patriarchal mindset, Stockhausen's statement is not so unpredictable.

It might be that the computer will play an important role in the continuing evolution of the "transcendent" artist-prophet, the way it raises music above the limitations of the body and networks the artist to the entire world.

William Osborne
http://www.osborne-conant.org