Stockhausen's Secret Theater

Stockhausen's Secret Theater: Unfinished Projects from the Sixties and Early Seventies
Author(s): Richard Toop

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 91-106
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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STOCKHAUSEN'S SECRET THEATER:
UNFINISHED PROJECTS
FROM THE SIXTIES
AND EARLY SEVENTIES
RICHARD TOOP
N THE LATE NINETIES, to think "Stockhausen" means to think

"opera"; more specifically, to think of Licht, with its seven operas
named after the seven days of the week. This epic venture came as a
shock to the New Music World when Stockhausen first announced it in
1977; after all, opera was a "traditional medium," and in the previous
decades, Stockhausen had steadfastly rejected offers to add to traditional
genres (including opera). Yet it is clear that in the years preceding that
announcement, "music theater" of one sort or another had become a vir-
tual obsession for Stockhausen, whether it was a matter of the orchestral
piece Trans, with its string players seated on sharply raised daises behind
a purple-lit gauze curtain, the rustic tumbling in the leaves in Herbst-
musik, the praying mime in Inori, the ritual actions of the Indianerlieder
(and indeed the whole of Alphabet fur Liege, of which they form a part),
92 Perspectives of New Music
Musik im Bauch and Atmen gibt das Leben, or the astral visitations of
Sirius. Even going back to the early sixties, one finds theatrical elements
aplenty: the illuminated tam-tam at the beginning of Kontakte-not to
mention the avant-garde "happening" Originale, constructed around
Kontakte-the applauding chorus of the I(m) "Klatschmoment," which
began the 1962 and 1965 versions of Momente, and at least one of the
text-pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen: the ill-fated Oben und Unten.'
With the exception of the "chorus opera" Atmen gibt das Leben, none
of these pieces invoked opera as such, or even, apart from Trans, the
theater. For the most part, they involved the theatricalizing of concert
music, in a way that was technically not unlike Kagel's "instrumental
theater," albeit with a very different socio-aesthetic standpoint. Yet if one
looks at the sketch-books from the late sixties and early seventies, and in
particular, at a couple of little B5-format notebooks covering the period
from 1967 to 1973, a very different picture emerges. The idea of music
theater and, quite explicitly, music for the theater, is omnipresent: one of
the projects actually has the working title Oper (Opera), and like many
other projects, it includes elements which, in one way or another, fore-
shadow aspects of the Licht cycle (and even its most recent installments).
By way of preface to these projects, one should consider a couple of ear-

lier orchestral ones which have received at least passing mention in the
Stockhausen literature.2 The first of these is Monophonie, originally
intended for performance at the 1960 Donaueschingen Music Days. The
complex circumstances surrounding this work can only be touched upon
here. Briefly, unlike many projects referred to below which never really
got beyond the conceptual stage, Monophonie engaged Stockhausen's
attention to such a degree that in mid-1960, in the hope of completing
it, he locked himself away in the same Swiss retreat where, some years
earlier, he had composed Gruppen. Instead of appearing in person as a
composition lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, he wrote the
essay "Vieldeutige Form"3 (which includes many references to Monopho-
nie) and asked Heinz-Klaus Metzger to read it on his behalf. The text
leaves certain "windows" for Metzger to add his own, not entirely sym-
pathetic commentaries-which he did, brilliantly.
The most immediately startling aspect of Monophonie was that it was to
be based on one note, E;-incidentally, the (spectacularly long) note
with which Carre' had begun.4 Its theatrical elements are twofold; firstly,
it was to be performed on a specially designed multilevel stage, which
Stockhausen had not only planned meticulously on paper, but of which
he had also made a wooden model (Example 1).
Stockhausen's Secret Theater 93
EXAMPLE 1
Secondly, despite a fairly prescriptive form-scheme, it would be essen-

tially "open," and Stockhausen devised an elaborate scheme of hand-
movements for the conductor to spontaneously activate various parts of
the orchestra.
Though never completed-only one (large-format) score page seems
to have been written out-Monophonie cast many shadows. The "one-
note" preoccupation becomes one chord (one spectrum) in Stimmung,
and then a single pitch again in the first half of Inori, where the mime's
exactly codified hand movements also seem like an echo of Monophonie.
The specially designed stage becomes a feature of Trans.
The other orchestral work to get beyond the purely conceptual stage,
Projektion, is less radical in conception, despite its spectacular parapher-
nalia. The piece was to be for a huge orchestra divided into nine spatially
separated groups; its theatrical aspect arises from the fact that some of the
orchestral music was to be replayed cinematically via two screens repre-
senting "perfect" and "imperfect" time, as opposed to the live orches-
tra's "present" time.5 Ultimately the piece (commissioned by Leonard
Bernstein for the New York Philharmonic) proved impracticable, on

logistic and technological grounds, and was replaced by an orchestral ver-
sion of the Third Region of Hymnen. But here too there are many surviv-
ing materials: not just a form-plan for the whole piece (Example 2), but
detailed graphic sketches, and several pages of completed score in rough
copy.
Naturally, the sketchbooks from the late sixties also need to be seen in
the broader context of Stockhausen's completed works at this time.
Though the work of a high-modernist innovator could be said to be ipso
facto in a state of constant crisis, at this time the crisis was particularly
acute (as it had also been at the time of Monophonie). In the fifties, Stock-
hausen had been one of the pioneers of an ultra-constructivist approach
to composition. During the sixties, on the other hand, his scores became
more and more open, and ended up largely abandoning conventional
notation in favor either of "process composition" in which combinations
of plus, minus, and equals signs indicated how any given or found
material was to be transformed or, even more controversially, "text-
compositions" such as the collection Aus den sieben Tagen, consisting of
brief, "inspirational" texts greatly influenced by the writings of Sufi mys-
tics (though these texts can equally be seen as distillations of the preced-
ing "process compositions").6 These were followed, in 1970, by an
almost complete about-face: a return to precise notation, and a more
melodic-though still highly constructivist-approach to composition
which led naturally to the Licht cycle.
One by-product of this "crisis period" is that the sketches in these
notebooks are mainly verbal; they rarely involve musical notation, let
alone any kind of numerically based form-scheme. So Stockhausen is free
to operate at a purely conceptual level: to dream dreams without going
into too much detail as to how they might be realized.
Not everything in the sketchbooks has directly to do with composi-
tion; in the period around the Darmstadt performances of Aus den sieben
Tagen (August 1969), we find Stockhausen reflecting on the members of
his Ensemble, and on his role as a composer working with them. He cat-
egorizes his players as follows:
Gehlhaar: broadest spaces, surfaces, sustained bases, long durations

Alings: best translator
Jonas [Fritsch]: best transformer and dreamer
Boje: best dynamic force, irritant, stirrer
Kontarsky: motor, battery, energy outlet, and "brain" (coordination,
construction, technique)
I Jo 'YOV
A_
.-
E1, :=- 11 ME S-IR cwl a] L~- f.

ai \\ J.
!I,(aIP
1
. 0. .
, -,- - Y
He highlights a basic problem of group improvisation (or "intuitive

music," as he called the Aus den sieben Tagen pieces), namely the way in
which a "group mentality" can get in the way of personal invention:
Ever more apparent: each sound takes the others in another direc-
tion, diverts, converts. One danger: too often, doing something that
engages one or more of the others, and distracts them from what
they are doing. Too Much is the temptation: we must learn to listen
more to one another; if one person is doing something beautiful, or
on the way to finding it, don't disturb him, but keep quiet, or join in
so imperceptibly that the other person doesn't notice, or else feels
supported, animated.
As for himself, as a composer he becomes
A listener who amplifies hidden vibrations. He must be more than a

music-maker, a connoisseur. He must be a seismograph registering
those vibrations which, once they have set a soul vibrating, give it
courage, and move it to fly to heaven.
Turning to the composition projects, one can't helping noticing how

many of them address the contest of Good and Evil that was subse-
quently to play a key role in the Licht cycle. This had already formed the
basis of a piece from Aus den sieben Tagen: Oben und Unten (Above and
Below, or Top and Bottom), whose title presumably alludes to a trau-
matic memory of his mother's removal to a sanatorium, where she was
subsequently killed off, as a "burden to the state" (this memory subse-
quently forms part of the first scene of Donnerstag).7 The polarization of
male and female indicated at the outset of Oben und Unten
MAN WOMAN
on the floor stands at a lectern

shabbily dressed beautifully dressed
degenerate, an animal noble, angelic
is radically expanded in a note for a performance in Warsaw

which makes clear just how idealistic (and perhaps unrealistic
hausen's expectations had become:
One would need to find a MAN who has hit absolute rock BOT-
TOM in life, and doesn't have any concern at standing onstage and
coming up with words that recklessly reveal his inner being.
Then one would need to find a WOMAN who is an angel, right

up at the TOP, full of warmth, absolutely adorable, whose thoughts
and feelings can be expressed in words.8
Compared to the Man in Oben und Unten, Lucifer in Licht is a com

plex, ambivalent character, and some initial relativization of evil is already
apparent in the most bizarre component of the sketchbooks: a projecte
"Hitler-Ballet."9 Given the controversy aroused by the inclusion of th
"Horst Wessel-Lied" in Hymnen, it is probably just as well that Stock
hausen never got too far with this project. But perhaps it has a place
the long upbeat to Licht, even though Hitler is represented as a naive ide-
alist engaging in a sort of perversion of the classic "pilgrim's progress
with a Faustian element thrown in. The last of three draft libretti begins
as follows:
After the war has been lost, a house-painter called Hitler ponders
how the country can be saved.
The demon SASS appears. He shows images of chaos, and of an
uprising with the remnants of the army. Hitler repudiates him. SASS
ensnares him, then cunningly assumes the form of the eagle Garuda,
with a swastika in his claws, and promises Hitler total power in
return for his life. Hitler consents. SASS unbinds him and transforms
him into a party leader in brown SA uniform. In doing so, he makes
his movements jerky. They celebrate the pact, and set out on a jour-
ney.
The two come across a novitiate monk called Goebbels. SASS
transforms him into a demagogue in a brown party-uniform. Th
gives him demented movements. The three of them meet an arm
officer named Goring [. .. etc.]
While there is no indication of the music itself, Stockhausen does pro

pose a very distinctive ensemble: male choir, three vibraphones,
drummers, gongs and small cymbals, three flutes, and three tromb
Though quite unlike any ensemble he had used up to that point, it s
prophetic in terms of Licht. one could view it as anticipating both
quasi-gagaku orchestra of DerJahreslauf[Dienstag] and the final, Fr
ciscan scene of Samstag.
Another ballet project is entitled Trampolin. Here there were to be

dancers, each on a trampoline, executing various figures together, part
together, or individually. For each dancer there would be a musician wh
would produce equivalent musical figures, as well as spotlights th
would flash on for just a moment, giving the impression that the dancer
was hanging in mid-air, and slide-projections of each dancer in a yoga
position, projected at the greatest height that each of them can achieve.
Here there are clear pointers to the future. The interrelatedness of
music and gesture is not only a primary aspect of the mime's part in
Inori, but becomes a central aspect of Stockhausen's instrumental music
in the period leading up to Licht (Harlekin being perhaps the most obvi-
ous example). In Donnerstag, the first opera of the Licht cycle to be com-
posed, the three main characters (Michael, Lucifer, Eve) are represented
in triple form: as singer, instrumentalist, and dancer.
Two other major items involve orchestral pieces. One, whose heading
"Capri" is presumably just an indication of where Stockhausen was stay-
ing at the time, is a post-Stimmung overtone piece. The sketch records
the composer lying awake at night, listening with all the added acuity lent
by lack of light to the sound of a motor (a return to the airplane experi-
ences of 1958).10 He notices that the individual overtones make slow
crescendi and decrescendi, while the dynamic level of the fundamental
stays the same. On closer listening, it turns out that the fundamental too
undergoes slow-speed amplitude modulation.
Then the real-life experience begins to reshape as a composition. With
his "inner ear," he hears four pairs of double basses, producing exactly
calculated beats. Soon, the piece has become a potential treatise on
psychoacoustics, along lines not dissimilar to those subsequently pursued
by Alvin Lucier, but with a more speculative content. Given that one can
produce beats between pairs of instruments, Stockhausen wonders
whether it might not also be possible to compose with the beats between
those various beats. Utopian as such conceptions may be, they conjure up
fascinating perspectives.
The other orchestral project, bizarre in terms of Stockhausen's work in

the sixties, turns out to be particularly prophetic. It was to be called Das
himmlische Parlament (The Celestial Parliament), and as the sketches
show, it was to be performed on a specially constructed stage (Example
3)-in this respect it marks a transition between Monophonie and Trans.
The first annotations for the piece include the following:
The whole thing like a parliamentary discussion: each instrument

makes its own typical kind of "speech," discussions, interjections
(very funny moments), with a few long, held notes. Sometimes a
wind player gets up and blows a "report" (solo signal) to the outside
(to one side, to the wall, straight into the audience, right up to the
ceiling), on one or another of the steps etc.
When one player, e.g. bassoon, is debating, the others sometimes

play in exact parallel motion, and sometimes statistically parallel.
The conductor sits at a table with a decorated little hammer (as in
parliamentary debates) and sometimes bangs it, sometimes makes
speech-like phonetic exclamations, sometimes gets up and does
some conducting.
The last part of the orchestral music is recorded on tape and
played back with time-delay. But one shouldn't notice this-the
musicians stop playing imperceptibly, one after another, but mime as
if they were still playing, and disappear one after another through
two doors built into the stage set. The sound from the loudspeakers
goes on and on, until the audience has left the hall.
_ V__ - . .; .- i --: :.....
Aspecs of ts pojet
ig in pallel mtin ae one emple, - "

_ I i- ~,'"....-,
i , i ' i i i : i I
i-. ~- C - .._
Aspects of this project go into Trans. The groups of instruments play-

ing in parallel motion are one example, and the "scenes" which interrupt
the latter piece-the drummer marching in, the stage attendant switch-
ing off a desk lamp, and the trumpeter who suddenly appears on a back-
stage ladder-are also clearly foreshadowed in the sketches for Das
himmlische Parlament, where they were to have taken the form of dem-
onstrations, interjections from the gallery, and so forth. But more
remarkable than any of these is the transference of this celestial parlia-
ment to Earth in the most recent part of Licht. The choral work which
forms the first scene of Mittwoch is entitled Welt-Parlament (World Par-
liament-1996), and requires a stage set which, not surprisingly, is very
similar to that for Das himmlische Parlament, though on a more modest
scale, as well as a president/conductor who wields a small wooden gavel.
As indicated above, the most extensive project in the sketchbooks is

entitled Oper. The sketches seem to cover a period from late 1968-
shortly after the composition of Stimmung-through to the end of the
following year. This was the period of the first performances of the Aus
den sieben Tagen text-compositions (notably the ones at the Darmstadt
Summer Courses). The majority of the sketches (most of which are sim-
ply headed Szene-"scene") consist of verbal annotations, along with a
few casual drawings. Their subject matter, mostly very typical of Stock-
hausen's work in the late sixties, can be summarized under eight principal
headings, listed here in order of increasing prominence:
1. Contemporary opera/music theater (a la Kagel);

2. Integration of technology: electronic music, film, radios;
3. Humorous scenes;
4. Music from other cultures;
5. Religion;
6. Movement as music-"corporeal music";
7. Scenes and actions from everyday life;
8. Sex/eroticism.
These categories are not, of course, mutually exclusive-they merely rep-

resent emphases. For example, the very first scene in the sketches seeks to
address issues in contemporary opera from a humorous standpoint:
A sings a typical passage from "modern opera."
B interrupts. "Why don't you sing something decent, something

nice?" (imitates him). "No one will take you seriously. And a
proper song."
A "But if I sing something else, people will think that's what Stock-
hausen composed next. But in the score it says 'Sing a song you
love'"' (starts singing); soon after the song has begun, electronic
music coming through the loudspeakers makes a slow crescendo,
till one can only see that the singer is singing-one can't hear
him.
On the whole, "technology" tends to mean the use of radios or oth

kinds of music through loudspeakers for the purpose of instant music
transformation in the manner of Kurzwellen. In an early sketch, a singer
records himself, sings a duet with the result while recording the new
result, sings a trio with it, and so on. Elsewhere, singers imitate th
sounds that come through loudspeakers, and the loudspeakers them
selves "converse." Perhaps harking back to Projektion, various scene
make use of film, albeit in a fairly conventional, documentary way: there
are to be films of poverty and holy places in India, and films of hug
birds, whose audible wing beats will determine the musical structure.12
The opera's multicultural aspects can be traced back to the period
when Stockhausen was composing Telemusik, in which he used fragments
from all kinds of non-Western music (as he did again in Hymnen). H
subsequently acquired a complete set of the Barenreiter/Unesco discs
world music (in the pre-fusion sense), and for many years these remained
his favorite listening, and a constant source of inspiration. In particular,
he was fascinated by the African discs. So it is not surprising that, refer-
ences to Indian music and Sicilian hawkers notwithstanding, the ma
ones in the sketches for Oper are to music from Africa: from Dahome
from Nigeria, but above all from Gabon-"H6re Gabon!" (listen t
Gabon!), he keeps telling himself,13 and in particular he cites "the sty
ized storytelling with perfectly matched interjectors" and "fantastical
long notes amidst the fast percussion and people shouting." The influ
ence of these discs (plus the one from Rwanda) is clearly audible in som
of the new material Stockhausen composed in 1971-72 for the "Europ
Version" of Momente.
As for religious elements, since the sketches date from a time when Sri
Aurobindo was almost daily reading matter for Stockhausen,14 it is natu-
ral that they should be a regular presence, though they are not as perva-
sive as in the subsequent Licht cycle. The most startling single instance is
of a "completely realistic crucifixion scene," apparently inspired by
Griinewald, in which the body of a dead man was to be nailed to a cross.
Early on in the sketches, Stockhausen formulates a Prinzip des Ganzen
(a Holistic Principle, or Principle of the Whole):
Make everything, everything into music. Eating, walking, kissing,

playing tennis, making love, getting angry; everything is subsumed
into music-this runs through the whole thing, from start to finish.
In addition to being a generalized credo for the whole project, this gives
rise to two particular kinds of scene: those in which the physical move-
ments of the participants generate or at least affect the music, and those
in which more or less mundane activities are turned into music. As an
example of the former, one can cite the following, innately rather risky
instance:
Scene in which singers lie on top of one another, face downwards;

they all try to keep singing as long as they can (with groans and
exclamations)... ending with the whole choir in two (or more)
piles (preferably at the rear wall, where one can make the piles
higher). Finally, starting at the bottom, they start to make pffff
sounds (consonants), like air escaping from a car tire.
Examples of the second type-"scenes from daily life"-include
2 windows, behind which one sees girls sitting typing; they put on
make-up, polish their nails, comb their hair etc.;
Tennis onstage, with words sung at each stroke, or just before or

after, with grace-note groups etc.
At whirlwind speed, scenes of shooting, carrying away, burying, kiss-

ing etc., which can occur one after another.
The most direct application of this approach comes in Herbstmusik,

whose first three parts are entitled "Nailing a Roof," "Breaking Wood,"
and "Threshing." But some of the activities that constitute Alphabetfur
Lie,ge (e.g., "magnetizing food") could also be seen as "magic" exten-
sions of it, just as the "Baby Buggy Boogie" in Montag, with its massed
prams, could be seen as a more prosaic one.
The pervasive sexual/erotic elements require some special comment.
References in Stockhausen's works to his personal life begin to appear in
the early sixties, coinciding fairly exactly with the start of his relationship
with the painter Mary Bauermeister. The direct designation of Momente
as "Musik der Liebe" (Music of Love) may only emerge in the definitive
1972 version, but the early versions produced between 1962 and 1965
already include not only texts from the Song of Songs, but also an
avowed "portrait of Mary Bauermeister" via the solo soprano part.
Towards the end of the Fourth Region of Hymnen, "All the figurat
elements are washed out, and there's just these blocks of sound, wit
few shouts and echoes that repeat-seven, eight, nine times-names
women that I've loved."'5 Stimmung for six vocalists, dedicated
"Mariechen" (i.e., Mary Bauermeister), is described by Stockhausen a
"sex-tete" arising from "amorous days" spent with her on the California
coast, and incorporates three fairly explicit erotic poems written by
composer.
This explicitness carries across into the Oper sketches; moreover, rather
surprisingly, it transfers its focus from personal experience to voyeurism.
The following examples are just two of many, and serve as a reminder,
perhaps, that the Rabelaisian extravagance of the sixties now seems a long
way away:
Scene: Behind a wooden partition with slits about 20cm across, one
sees the (naked) breasts of many women, perhaps with shutters or
shop windows. Male singers draw their shapes in the air, and sing
matching melodies. The same with crotches and buttocks. Sing
along with a woman's slowly spreading legs-male voices.
2 women are each licking an ice-cream cone, pornographically;

when the cornet is finished, they drop it contemptuously (compose
the vocal sounds made while they are licking).
2 men come along, see them, sit down at some distance, and smoke
a cigarette, lecherously. When the women drop their cornets, the
men stub out their cigarettes with their fingers and then, aggres-
sively, with their heels. The pairs go off in different directions. A
beggar comes along, and puts the cigarette tips inside the cornets.
However, none of these "stage fantasies" got anywhere near an actual

theater. Maybe they were "upstaged" by Kagel's Staatstheater (1969-
70), but more probably Stockhausen felt the lack of any overriding
theme holding these disparate actions together. A provocative erotic ele-
ment resurfaces once more in Singreadfeel (1970),16 which seems to be
intended for private rather than public performance. Its main compo-
nents are an erotic "touch object" (available in phallic or mammary
form) which literally heats up during performance, and a chanted text
from Sri Aurobindo's On Yoga I. This juxtaposition is not quite as incon-
gruous as it may seem: in the midst of the Oper sketches, Stockhausen
cites a phrase from Aurobindo's Savitri: "A Passion of the Flesh becom-
ing Spirit." Whether this was an achievable ambition in relation to the
kinds of scene cited above may be doubted, but it does lay the
groundwork for the comparatively restrained erotic elements in Stock-

hausen's work of the seventies and thereafter.
In the later works, these elements are not only restrained, but also con-
sciously sacralized and ritualized. One exception, the tumbling in the hay
at the end of Herbstmusik, seems innocently adolescent to this author,
but was enough to incense the audience at the 1974 premiere in Bremen.
Another, a strip-club insert in Der Jahreslauf (which subsequently
became part of Dienstag), in which appropriately "low-life" big band
music concludes with a male voice (clearly the composer's) lecherously
exulting "Splitternackt!" ("Stark naked!"), seems more like a throwback
to the Oper sketches. But by now (1977), the context has greatly
changed. An early sketch relating to Der Jahreslauf is headed "Gottes
Theater" (God's Theater),17 and the sex show is one of a sequence of lit-
erally devilish "temptations" that will be overcome by an angel (again,
shades of Oben und Unten). In a commentary on the work, Stockhausen
writes that "the sensual power of sexuality in its thousand guises as confu-
sion, vanity, jealousy, venality, distraction, exhaustion, and paralysis has
always been the devil's greatest triumph in making creativity intoxi-
cated."'18 Erotic elements will abound throughout the Licht cycle (even
the ice-cream cornet has a place among the balletic couples in Freitag),
but not in the spirit of the sixties sketches that paved the way for Stock-
hausen's subsequent reinvention of music theater.
NOTES
1. The debacle surrounding the premiere in Amsterdam is described in

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte 4 (Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag,
1978), 123.
2. Robin Maconie, The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen (London:
Oxford University Press, 1976), 328-29. This information is consid-
erably curtailed in the second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990), 308.
3. Texte 2 (Cologne: Verlag M. Dumont Schauberg, 1964), 245-61.
4. It is extremely unlikely that Stockhausen knew of the "one-note"
pieces that Giacinto Scelsi had already started composing (e.g., the
Quattro Pezzi of 1958). Had he known them, or even of them, he
would probably have abandoned his own project as "insufficiently
original," even though it would have sounded nothing like Scelsi.
5. This idea seems to have been a response to the multiple stages and
film projection of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera Die Soldaten,
premiered in Cologne a couple of years earlier.
6. Cf. Jerome Kohl, "Serial and Non-serial Techniques in the Music of

Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1962-1968" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Washington, 1981), chapter 5 (also published as "Serial Determin-
ism and 'Intuitive Music': An Analysis of Stockhausen's Aus den sie-
ben Tagen," In Theory Only 3, no. 12 (March 1979): 7-19), and
Hermann Conen, Formel-Komposition: Zu Karlheinz Stockhausens
Musik der siebziger Jahre, Kolner Schriften zur Neuen Musik 1, ed.
Johannes Fritsch and Dietrich Kamper (Mainz: B. Schott's Sohne,
1991), 49-51. Stockhausen's own views on this issue are docu-
mented in Fred Ritzel, Musik fur ein Haus: Kompositionsstudio
Karlheinz Stockhausen Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik
Darmstadt 1968, Darmstadter Beitrage zur neuen Musik 12, ed.
Ernst Thomas (Mainz: B. Schott's Sohne, 1970), especially pp. 15-
18.
7. Cf. Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen: A Biography, trans. Richard Toop

(London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 13, and Donnerstag,
scene 1 ("Kindheit"), 21. It may also explain the "erdisch-
himmlisch" program that originally underlay Kontakte (cf. Richard
Toop, "Stockhausen's Electronic Works: Sketches and Work-Sheets
from 1952-1967," Interface 10 (1981): 149-97, and especially pp.
185-86).
8. Texte4, 123.
9. In the early seventies there were various attempts to "rehabilitate"

Hitler, and these aroused great controversy. Stockhausen refers to
this briefly, and dismissively, in his published conversations from Sep-
tember of 1971. See Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with
the Composer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 52.
10. Cf. Cott, 31.
11. This presumably relates to a comment Stockhausen wrote on the

blackboard during his 1968 Darmstadt seminars: "Sing a melody
that is good" (cf. Ritzel, Musik fur ein Haus, 20).
12. Birds become something of an obsession for Stockhausen in the late

sixties and early seventies; perhaps this arises in part from his contact
with (and admiration for) the surrealist painter Max Ernst, but also
from childhood dreams. Examples are found in Hymnen, the text-
composition Zugvogel (from Fur kommende Zeiten), the Indianer-
lieder, Musik im Bauch, and even (presumably with tongue in cheek)
on the DG record cover of Sirius. They also appear regularly
throughout the Licht cycle. In most cases it is the image of flying,
rather than birdsong, that attracts Stockhausen; when studying with
Messiaen back in the early fifties, his response to his teacher's obses-
sion with birdsong was frankly dismissive. Writing to Goeyvaerts in
March 1952 about Messiaen's Messe de la Pentecote, he says, "It's
extraordinarily good in places, but still has these silly passages he
should have gotten over by now (bird-songs, flagrantly program-
matic details, added sixths, etc.)."
13. The same self-admonition occurs in the sketches for Stimmung.
14. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) developed a theory of spiritual develop-

ment which he called Integral Yoga. Stockhausen had acquired cop-
ies of his complete writings from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in
Pondicherry, India.
15. Cott, op. cit., 143.
16. Cf. Maconie, op. cit., 329
17. Texte 5 (Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1989), 148. The same

sketch page suggests a "Water Purification Scene," which harks back
to Aqua Divina, an unrealized project for the 1972 Aquatic Olym-
pics in Kiel, as well as loosely anticipating the first Act of Montag.
18. Texte4, 355

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Stockhausen's Secret Theater: Unfinished Projects from the Sixties and Early Seventies

Author(s): Richard Toop

N THE LATE NINETIES, to think "Stockhausen" means to think

By way of preface to these projects, one should consider a couple of ear-

Secondly, despite a fairly prescriptive form-scheme, it would be essen-

Bernstein for the New York Philharmonic) proved impracticable, on

Gehlhaar: broadest spaces, surfaces, sustained bases, long durations

E1, :=- 11 ME S-IR cwl a] L~- f.

He highlights a basic problem of group improvisation (or "intuitive

As for himself, as a composer he becomes

A listener who amplifies hidden vibrations. He must be more than a

Turning to the composition projects, one can't helping noticing how

on the floor stands at a lectern

is radically expanded in a note for a performance in Warsaw

Then one would need to find a WOMAN who is an angel, right

Compared to the Man in Oben und Unten, Lucifer in Licht is a com

While there is no indication of the music itself, Stockhausen does pro

Another ballet project is entitled Trampolin. Here there were to be

The other orchestral project, bizarre in terms of Stockhausen's work in

The whole thing like a parliamentary discussion: each instrument

When one player, e.g. bassoon, is debating, the others sometimes

_ V__ - . .; .- i --: :.....

ig in pallel mtin ae one emple, - "

Aspects of this project go into Trans. The groups of instruments play-

As indicated above, the most extensive project in the sketchbooks is

1. Contemporary opera/music theater (a la Kagel);

These categories are not, of course, mutually exclusive-they merely rep-

A sings a typical passage from "modern opera."

B interrupts. "Why don't you sing something decent, something

On the whole, "technology" tends to mean the use of radios or oth

Make everything, everything into music. Eating, walking, kissing,

Scene in which singers lie on top of one another, face downwards;

Examples of the second type-"scenes from daily life"-include

Tennis onstage, with words sung at each stroke, or just before or

At whirlwind speed, scenes of shooting, carrying away, burying, kiss-

The most direct application of this approach comes in Herbstmusik,

2 women are each licking an ice-cream cone, pornographically;

However, none of these "stage fantasies" got anywhere near an actual

groundwork for the comparatively restrained erotic elements in Stock-

1. The debacle surrounding the premiere in Amsterdam is described in

6. Cf. Jerome Kohl, "Serial and Non-serial Techniques in the Music of

7. Cf. Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen: A Biography, trans. Richard Toop

9. In the early seventies there were various attempts to "rehabilitate"

11. This presumably relates to a comment Stockhausen wrote on the

12. Birds become something of an obsession for Stockhausen in the late

14. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) developed a theory of spiritual develop-

15. Cott, op. cit., 143.

16. Cf. Maconie, op. cit., 329

17. Texte 5 (Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1989), 148. The same

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