HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Eavesdropping on ghosts of Biko and Stockhausen
If we listen with care and imagination, we might catch the distant strains of a fascinating conversation
Much of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen is, to my semi-musical ear, unlistenable. Perhaps that is the point. When Stockhausen’s experimental compositions are performed, audience members don’t relax. They can take nothing for granted and they never know what is coming. It might be an awkwardly lengthy pause. It might be a cacophony of noise. It might be ethereal electronica, or industrial clamour. There is never the reassurance of harmony. Stockhausen’s soundscapes are not easily navigated. The German composer did not want his audiences to fall into familiar habits of hearing, to be comforted by musical traditions or conventions. When the Third Reich fell in 1945, Stockhausen was an orphaned adolescent; he was of that generation of Germans whose mission was "to start from zero". If, as Theodor Adorno declared, there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Stockhausen believed that composers who aimed "to get rid of the remnants" of Nazism — "to get rid of a lot of objects that were in ...
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