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SAVING FAITH: STOCKHAUSEN AND SPIRITUALITY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2017
Abstract
Invited in 2011 by Robert Sholl and Sander van Maas to contribute to a proposed symposium on the spiritual in late twentieth-century music, I accepted, not because I agreed with the project and its aims, but to defend Stockhausen's character and reputation from convenient misrepresentation. Sin and virtue, spirituality and the spiritual life ask to be addressed in terms of actual works and personal witness – in my own case, not least given the composer's complaint late in life: ‘You have to watch out for Maconie's nihilism’. The test of spirituality inevitably entails scrutinizing the motives of former Stockhausen disciples who changed their minds, among them two English composers of my own generation, Jonathan Harvey and John Tavener, who have since passed away. In 2014 the opening sentence of the present paper provided theologian and Stockhausen-forum editor Thomas Ulrich with an amusing starting-point (‘Suffering? How very Protestant!’) for just the second of a trickle of online discussions of largely pathetic inconsequence.
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References
1 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Questions and Answers on “Four Criteria of Electronic Music”’ filmed by Allied Artists 1971 and included in the BBC documentary Tuning In directed by Barrie Gavin, 1981. Transcribed in Maconie, Robin, Other Planets: The music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 2Google Scholar. See also www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGnkZnm9MPw (7/12/2011).
2 Stockhausen, ‘Four Criteria of Electronic Music’, pp. 107–8 in Stockhausen, Karlheinz, Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews, compiled by Maconie, Robin (London and New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1989)Google Scholar.
3 Cook, Nicholas, ‘Playing God: Creativity, Analysis, and Aesthetic Inclusion’, in Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary research in Theory and Practice, ed. Deliège, Irène and Wiggins, Geraint A. (Hove and New York: Psychology Press, 2006), pp. 9–24 Google Scholar.
4 Harvey, Jonathan, in conversation with Griffiths, Paul, in New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s in Conversation with Paul Griffiths (London: Faber Music, 1985), p. 51Google Scholar.
5 Tavener, John, The Music of Silence: A Composer's Testament, ed. Keeble, Brian (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 106Google Scholar.
6 A possible source of inspiration is Helmore's, Frederick Speakers, Singers, and Stammerers (London: Joseph Masters, 1874)Google Scholar, cited in Maconie, Other Planets, pp. 296–306. In the case of Inori a more likely source of inspiration is Bell's Standard Elocutionist: Principles and Exercises by David Charles Bell and Alexander Melville Bell, first published in 1860, a popular guide to English pronunciation with added hand gestures. That the composer was familiar with the literature of English pronunciation is evident in Carré and Momente, the choir parts of which adopt the notational conventions of Daniel Jones.
7 For a rare example of genuine counterpoint by Stockhausen see Mantra for two pianos and electronics (1970), a work in which the electronic ingredient is in large part controlled by the two soloists.