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    Stockhausen Musical Research Paper

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    bartsten333
    Arnold Stockhausen was a highly influential yet controversial 20th century German composer. His 1957 work "Gruppen für drei Orchester" was groundbreaking in its use of spatialization of sound. It influenced Stockhausen's later electronic music and helped shape music in the latter half of the century. Research on Stockhausen and his works like "Gruppen" has grown over time, utilizing new computer-assisted analytical methods. However, Stockhausen remained a divisive figure due to comments he made about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Future research will likely provide more balanced perspectives on Stockhausen and further technical analyses of his spatialized compositions.

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    Stockhausen Musical Research Paper

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    bartsten333
    143 views5 pages
    Arnold Stockhausen was a highly influential yet controversial 20th century German composer. His 1957 work "Gruppen für drei Orchester" was groundbreaking in its use of spatialization of sound. It influenced Stockhausen's later electronic music and helped shape music in the latter half of the century. Research on Stockhausen and his works like "Gruppen" has grown over time, utilizing new computer-assisted analytical methods. However, Stockhausen remained a divisive figure due to comments he made about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Future research will likely provide more balanced perspectives on Stockhausen and further technical analyses of his spatialized compositions.

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    Arnold Stockhausen was a highly influential yet controversial 20th century German composer. His 1957 work "Gruppen für drei Orchester" was groundbreaking in its use of spatialization of sound. It influenced Stockhausen's later electronic music and helped shape music in the latter half of the century. Research on Stockhausen and his works like "Gruppen" has grown over time, utilizing new computer-assisted analytical methods. However, Stockhausen remained a divisive figure due to comments he made about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Future research will likely provide more balanced perspectives on Stockhausen and further technical analyses of his spatialized compositions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    143 views5 pages

    Stockhausen Musical Research Paper

    Uploaded by

    bartsten333
    Arnold Stockhausen was a highly influential yet controversial 20th century German composer. His 1957 work "Gruppen für drei Orchester" was groundbreaking in its use of spatialization of sound. It influenced Stockhausen's later electronic music and helped shape music in the latter half of the century. Research on Stockhausen and his works like "Gruppen" has grown over time, utilizing new computer-assisted analytical methods. However, Stockhausen remained a divisive figure due to comments he made about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Future research will likely provide more balanced perspectives on Stockhausen and further technical analyses of his spatialized compositions.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 5

    Stephen Barton

    Research Assignment Essay

    Arnold Stockhausen was a controversial and remarkably influential German composer.

    Stockhausen was controversial not only because of his involvement with the musical avant-garde

    (including both electronic and instrumental music), but also due to how he engaged with society

    on non-musical issues. Notably, his response to the World Trade Center attack brought him

    notoriety within the United States. His influence reached far beyond the narrow realm of the

    classical avant-garde and many popular artists cite him as an influence, e.g., The Beatles and

    Miles Davis.1 Stockhausen’s Gruppen für drei Orchester (1957) marks an important milestone in

    the development of twentieth century music. Gruppen was composed for three orchestras (each

    with its own conductor), separated spatially. The effect that this creates on the listener is that of

    overwhelming sound masses that are directional and layered. The conceptualization of sound as

    textural groups in this work belie some of the influence of Ligeti on Stockhausen, as well as lays

    the groundwork for Stockhausen’s later electronic music. In some sense, Gruppen marks a

    starting point from which Stockhausen and others drew ideas that would shape music in the latter

    half of the twentieth century.

    The state of research on Stockhausen is not lacking. As an individual, he has attracted a

    cult following that has manifested itself in the form of many websites and even essays that seem

    to have the sole goal of praising Stockhausen without any critical evaluation. This attitude may

    seemingly belong to a fringe group of fanatics, but aspects of this have appeared in many

    scholarly works as well, albeit in a less overt manner. However, there is an opposing camp,

    largely located within the United States, that remember Stockhausen in a more negative light.

    1
    The Beatles and Stockhausen. http://www.stockhausen.org/beatles_khs.html.
    Stephen Barton

    This was evidenced in his obituary published in The New York Times; almost immediately after

    announcing the death of Stockhausen, the obituary goes on to mention his comments regarding

    the World Trade Center attack, stating that “he became infamous for calling the attack ‘the

    greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.’”2 Additionally, the characterization of

    Stockhausen in this article is marginally negative as it ends by asserting that his “conviction

    guided all his actions…but it left him an isolated figure at the end.”3 This contrasts greatly with

    the characterization of many European scholarly articles and newspapers such as The Guardian.

    Remarkably, Stockhausen’s comments regarding 9/11 garnered him full bibliographic treatment

    and an update on his career from John O’Mahony and The Guardian barely a month after the

    attacks.4 Clearly, the cult following of Stockhausen had not reached the United States to the

    same degree. One book, Robin Maconie’s Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz

    Stockhausen 1950-2007, stood out as the most balanced research regarding Stockhausen. Other

    Planets offers biographical information, analyses of works, and openly critiques the composer

    where Maconie feels it is due.5 Finally, the research and documentation of Stockhausen’s

    engagement with popular artists at large also plays a large role in the characterization of his

    personality. Stockhausen appears on the cover of The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts

    Club Band, as well as being the subject of an article on the musical interplay between Miles

    2
    Paul Griffiths, “Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer, Dies at 79,” New York Times, 8
    December 2007.
    3
    Ibid.
    4
    John O’Mahony, “The Sound of Discord,” The Guardian, 29 September 2001.
    5
    Robin Maconie, Other Plants: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen 1950-2007, 2nd
    ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield).
    Stephen Barton

    Davis and Stockhausen. This article not only ties him to popular culture, but places him in the

    same continuum of Debussy in his engagement with American jazz music.6

    Aside from research about Stockhausen as an individual, Gruppen and other works by

    Stockhausen have attracted a moderate amount of research of their own. One essay, written by

    William Mival, doesn’t even attempt to analyze the piece, but rather offers a discussion of how

    the performance history, public reception, and recordings of Gruppen have impacted our

    understanding of the work. In doing so, this becomes an almost historiographical treatment of the

    work, with the goal of developing an understanding not only of the work, but also the responses

    we have had to it.7 Most of the analyses regarding Gruppen and many of Stockhausen’s works

    focus on the idea of spatialization, his using of space as part of the performance aspects. An

    article that appeared in Perspectives of New Music, a new music journal (one of the main forums

    for discussion of Stockhausen), in 1998, offered an analysis of Gruppen, focusing on the genesis

    and structure of the work through the lens of shaping and spatialization. This article marks one of

    the earliest attempts at analysis of Stockhausen’s use of space to shape his music, while

    maintaining many of the traditional tools for analysis of music. The vocabulary and methods of

    analysis make this article more accessible to the average musician than some future research

    has.8 However, in 2006, Sara Ann Overholt submitted her dissertation to further analyze

    Gruppen and she does so with new methods of analysis that are accessible and illustrate the

    6
    Barry Bergstein, “Miles Davis and Karlheinz Stockhausen: A Reciprocal Relationship,” The
    Musical Quarterly 76 (Winter, 1992): 502-525.
    7
    William Mival, “Case Study: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen für drei Orchester,” in The
    Cambridge History of Musical Performance, ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell (Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 2012), 798-814.
    8
    Imke Misch, Frank Hetnschel, and Jerome Kohl, “On the Serial Shaping of Stockhuasen’s
    Gruppen für drei Orchester,” Perspectives of New Music 36 (Winter, 1998): 143-197.
    Stephen Barton

    enthusiasm for the expansion of research into Stockhausen’s music;9 however, a dissertation by

    Paul Miller in 2009, breaks with the idea of accessibility and offers a highly specialized and

    technical method for analysis of works of this style. Miller directly quantifies the spatial

    structures and offers computer assisted methods for analyzing and describing the form.10 This is

    a notable change in the methodology of analyzing classical music, representing a potential shift

    in future research.

    Future research to analyze the works of Stockhausen will likely continue in the trend of

    specialist development of computer assisted analyses. Not unlike how theorists have come up

    with methods to describe and analyze music in the past, they will undoubtedly do so for this

    genre of music as well. However, future analyses will likely depend more and more on

    complicated computer algorithms. As a result, this will lead to a remarkably better understanding

    of these pieces than we currently have and will afford musicians new ways to think and talk

    about music. Regarding research into Stockhausen as an individual, it is likely that there will be

    more balanced research with less emotional overtones, particularly with more distance between

    the subject and the researchers.

    A survey of twentieth century music would be incomplete without mentioning

    Stockhausen, a man whose legacy ties him to Western popular music, American jazz, and the

    classical avant-garde. A controversial figure and a cosmopolitan individual, Stockhausen and his

    work Gruppen set the stage for many trends of the latter half of the twentieth century.

    9
    Sara Ann Overholt, “Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Spatial Theories: Analyses of Gruppen für drei
    Orchester and Oktophonie, Electronische Musik vom Dienstag aus LICHT,” Ph.D. diss.,
    University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006.
    10
    Paul Miller, “Stockhausen and the Serial Shaping of Space,” Ph.D. diss., University of
    Rochester, 2009.
    Stephen Barton

    Word Count: 1,050

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