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FROM: mclaren
TO: New practical microtonality list
SUBJECT: Karlheinz Stockhausen's foot-in-mouth disease,
55-equal, etc.

Karlheinz Stockhausen has a long history of making
weird comments. Since the 1950s Stockhausen has
become infamous spouting pseudo-scientific mystical
gibberish apparently intended to create an aura of
scientism and/or profundity around his music.
Alas, Stockhausen only succeeded in making
himself look ridiculous.
Stockhausen's bizarre comments about the World
Trade Center tragedy as "art" seem par for the course,
part and parcel of the entire modernist project of
trying to degrade and dehumanize all art and music
and literature by removing all vestiges of human
emotion and human response. Of course Karlheinz and
his ilk do not consider themselves to be engaged in
a process of self-degradation, just as the fanatics
who steered those 757s into the world trade probably
did not believe that they were degrading themselves.
Nonetheless, the bottom line in both cases (modernist
post WW-II music, Islamic suicide bombers) boils down
to nothing more nor less than abject self-debasement.
Stockhausen's contemptible efforts to wriggle out
of what he said, aided and abetted by the odious
webmaster James Stonebraker who calls for the reporter who
documented Stockhausen's comments to be "fired"
and censored, are likewise par for the course.
The entire project of modernism in music and
art can be summarized as a Stalnist purge of all human
elements from music and art. As with Soviet Stalinism,
musical modernism requires plenty of heavy-handed censorship
and threats and intimidation and rewriting of history
to accomplish this subhuman goal.
It's all standard stuff. Look at the history of
modernist music from the late 1940s right up through
the present time, and you will find an uninterrupted
trail of censorship and intimidation, purges and
threats, dissenters silenced and written out of history,
ideological deviants turned into unpersons and
character-assassinated into oblivion:

"Just as Marxist-Leninist thought led to forms of
government meant to remedy the excesses supposedly caused
by the exhaustion of capitalism, so Schoenbergian-Boulezian
practice was touted as the alternative to a purportedly
exhausted system called `tonality.' These attempts to
revolutionize, respectively, our economic and musical
worlds had several other things in common besides their
Germanic origin. The application or enactment of both
ideologies required that their alternatives--and those
who would support them--be publicly denounced and
discredited, and a form of double-speak was employed
in support of these `revolutionary' ideas. The apologists
writing in Pravda held sway in support of a failing system
in the same way that Herbert Eimert, Milton Babbitt, and
Charles Wuorinen dominated the pages of Die Reihe and
Perspectives Of New Music for many years. What is so
interesting is the suddenness with which these application
of science--some have said pseudo-science--to economics and
music have been rejected and are now seen as merely...
experiments that failed because they denied basic human
realities: economic and cultural diversity in the
political realm and the necessity for perceptual forms
of organization and the power of intuitive
processes in the world of music." [Appleton, Jon,
"Machine Songs III: Music in the Service of Science--
Science in the Service of Music," Computer Music
Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1992, pp. 18-19]

The webmaster James Stonebraker screams for someone to silence
and censor and "fire" the reporter who inappropriately
documented Karlheinz Stockhausen's remarks, just as
Pierre Boulez screamed during the 1950s "Any composer
who does not realize the absolute necessity of the
twelve-tone method is USELESS!"
All standard stuff. Part and parcel of the same overall
plan. Drain the human elements from music and crush anyone
who tries to resist, censor anyone who dares to speak out
against the ongoing ideological purges.
It's all typical, usual, standard, and quotidian. Absolutely
standard stuff for modernist music (or modernist art, or
modernist literary theory).
Why are you surprised by any of this, Joseph Pehrson?
_Of course_ Karlheinz Stockhausen spewed a bunch of
high-falutin' eerie-theory gibberish in which he
inappropriately attempted to equate a living horror
involving the screaming deaths of 7,000 people with
some artsy-fartsy pie-in-the-sky fancy-ass aesthetic
"theory." Naturally. Obviously. That's the entire
post-WW II modernist project--take vivid human realities
and turn 'em into cold dead subhuman theoretical
constructs devoid of human meaning.
Whether this is accomplished in modernist music by using
serial atonal rows to so scramble pitch and rhythm and
harmony that the resultant music has no discernible melody
and no perceptible rhythm and no functional harmony, or
whether this is accomplished in modernist art by sawing
a pig in half and submerging it in a vat of formaldehyde
and calling it "art," or by plunging a crucifix into a
plexiglas jar brim-full of rancid urine and calling it "art,"
or by severing a cow's head and sticking it inside a glass
enclosure full of maggots and calling it "art"... C'mon.
We all saw pictures of those sterile boring "art" exhibits
at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Joseph. We all know *that*
story. All part of the same modernist project. You should
have recognized, Joe Pehrson, that the overall intent
is the same in each case.
Namely, subject the audience to such grotesque sensory
assualts that they become desensitized and lose all vestiges
of humane emotional response. In this manner, the audience
becomes a collection of obedient little automatons responding
merely to sensory stimuli -- thus, when the Brooklyn Metropolitan
Museum gets pervaded by the overwhelming stink of rotting flesh
from the severed cow's head with maggots crawling on it, this
merely provides a novel sensory stimulus to the modernist art
connoiseur. Any art patron who fails to thrill to such a novel
sensory stimulus needs (obviously) to be exposed to more sensory
assault, the better to insure complete emotional numbing.
Likewise, when the concert hall thunders with screeching
grinding dissonances and spasmodic splatters of incoherent
musical notes interspered by bizarre noises and unpredictable
periods of interminable silence, this also provides merely
another novel sensory stimulus to the erstwhile modernist
musical connoisseur. Any Lincoln Center patron who refuses
to thrill (for $500 per seat) to such incoherent grinding
dissonances and random spasms of herky-jerky pitches must,
of course, be subjected to a lot more acoustic assault, the
better to insure full emotional lobotomy.
This has been the modernist musical project for 55 years:
subject the audience to Schoenbergian acoustic torment after
Bouelzian musical brutalization after Babbit-ian rhythmic
boredom after Cage-ian sonic bludgeoning until the audience
becomes numbed and gives up their annoying "obsolete" "decadent"
"outmoded" "antique" emotional responses, and merely smiles
happily as the piano burns or the violinst hacksaws the
violin strings, producing yet another wonderfully novel "modern"
acoustic stimulus.
Stalin's Soviet state employed exactly the same kind of
conditioning in creating the "new Soviet man." Torture the
child's mother in front of him, shoot the child's father in
front of him, beat the child's friends with bludgeons for
"anti-Soviet ideological deviance," and eventually the child
becomes the New Soviet Man, ready and willing and eager to
turn in his wife to the NKVD and help them rape her on
command.
It's an old, old story. All totalitarian systems use
such methods to desensitize and robotize their citizens.
Naturally the totalitarian ideology of musical modernism
employs the same sadistic methods in order to obtain the
same dehumanized reponse -- just as the Al-Qaeda terrorists
no doubt do in their desert training camps, just as the
Palestian terrorists do in their training camps, just as the
S.S. Einsatzgruppen did to prepare their commandos for the
the extermination programs against Jews in WW II, just as
today's Chinese "thought reform schools" do nowadays.
Totalitarian systems of thought all employ the same methods
and aim at the same results, and music modernism is no exception.
So why should we find ourselves surprised by Karlheinz
Stockhausen's subhuman response to an usnpeakable human
tragedy? To Karlheinz, as a good little modernist ideologue,
human emotions have long been banished from music -- and
so Karlheinz sits happily in front of his TV set and watches
screaming people fall from the twin towers of the World Trade
Center with their skin burning off, and to Karlheinz's
modernist ideology this is just another novel sensory
stimulus. And when howling women blubber and wail and collapse
in agony with blood spurting from their mouths and noses
as Trade Center Tower #2 subsides in a vast explosion of
rubble and dust behind them, to Karlheinz the modernist this
likely proves just another interesting sensory stimulus. Karlheinz,
like his modernist buddies Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt
and Alan Forte and Robert Morris, no doubt listened to the
shrieks and wails of the victims of the Sept. 11 tragedy
with keen interest as prime examples of unusual acoustic
stimuli. Like a vivisectionist who slices a dog open
without using anesthesia and remarks to his assistant as
the dog yowls and flails with ever-more frantic shrieks
and moans, "Fascinating activity in the organism's
vocal chords. Are we getting a recording of this?"
To the modernists, human emotion is anathema. Accordingly,
all becomes art -- in Walter Benjamin's memorably subhuman
words, "In modern art, everything can become everything else."
Thus, small children howling as Josef Mengele skins them alive
becomes potential art. A crucifix submerged in urine? Potential
art. Twin 757s plowing into the world trade center towers?
Potential art.
Why not?
After all, once human response has been banished, anything
becomes possible.
Once human emotion and human response has been purged
from modern music by the Stalinist-style censorship tactics
of modern university music departments, it's no surprise that
the so-called "modern" composers who emerge from this subhuman
environment exhibit all the human qualities of the Nazi medical
experimenters at Dachau. Ergo Stockhausen's remarkably
bizarre comments -- and of course the webmaster [ ]'s
typically Stalinist reponse ("the reporter should be fired,")
exactly like Stalin's reponse to the Soviet Census Bureau
that reported the USSR's population had plummeted as a
result of Stalin's disastrously miscoonceived agricultural
bugles: "Kill the members of the Census Bureau," Stalin ordered.
And of course it was done. The next Soviet Census Bureau did
not make the mistake of correctly reporting that the USSR's
population had dropped as a result of Lysenko's agricultural
malfeasances and incompetences. Instead, just like New York
modernist music critics, the Soviet Censur Bureau learned to
give the correct response to the new stimuli, and
they reported that the USSR's population was growing by leaps
and bounds in the 1930s even while 30 million kulaks starved
to death. (See Robert Conquest's "Harvest of Sorrow" for
details.)
It's all standard stuff, the typical totalitarian reponse
to inconvenient facts and inappropriate truths.
This is of course part and parcel of the entire project
behind post-WW II modernism. According to post-WW II musical
modernist ideology, only novelty matters, and so any acoustic
activitiy which produces novel acoustic stimuli is welcomed
in the concert hall. Thus we witness musical atrocities such
as John Cage's "concert" consisting of Cage placing a microphone
to his gullet while he swigs carrot juice, or acoustic
monstrosities such as Schoenberg's "Erwartung," which offers
us the musical equivalent of the medical experiments at Dachau,
or subhuman musical depravities such as Milton Babbitt's
String Quartet Number 4:

"Perhaps the most interesting thing about Milton Babbitt's
music is how totally uninteresting it can be. That seemed
particularly true of Babbitt's String Quartet No. 4 (1970),
which the Composers Quartet performed...presented by the
Performers' Committee at Columbia University. In the 15
minutes or so that the piece lasted, I didn't hear any
mood shifts or tempo changes, and never became caught
in any coloristic moments. I didn't notice any particular
intervallic or thematic relationships between the lines
in the various instruments. For that matter, I didn't
notice any patterns that seemed consistent enough to
be considered thematic at all. I didn't detect any
patterns in the way the music shifted between bowed
notes and plucked notes.. (..)
"One can find plenty of uninteresting music, but Babbitt
is one of the only composers whose work can ever seem
totally uninteresting, because he is one of the few
composers who ever achieved such a degree of abstraction.
A piece like this string quartet...isn't concerned at
all with dramatic, or emotional elements, as far as
I can tell, and it manipulates formal elements in
so many erudite ways and on so many levels that one
cannot follow the structural logic either. The extreme,
arid abstraction that results may not be very valuable
in any humanistic terms, but it is a rather remarkable
achievement just the same." [Johnson, Tom. "Milton Babbitt:
Uninteresting Can Be Interesting," The Village VOICE, 12
April, 1976]

The key here is of course Tom Johnson's remark that
"the extreme, arid abstraction that results may not be
valuable in any hunmanistic terms..." To Karlheinz
Stockhausen and his fellow modernist musiKKKal fanatics
Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez and John Cage, "extreme
arid abstraction" is the entire goal, the alpha and omega,
the be-all and end-all. To Karlheinz and his buddies,
as to the rabid fanatics who steered those 757s into
the world trade center towers, the Ultimate Goal is all
that counts. The Grand Plan is all, human response
mean nothing. Emotion is contemptible, human life is
trivial. Only the Supreme Goal is worthy of discussion,
only the Grand Plan deserves their attention.
Such responses typify the decadence and depravity of
so-called "modernist" artists and musicians and literary
figures, specifically those artists and musicians and
literary figures who called themselves "modern" after
WW II. I say "so-called modernist" because the genuine
modernists created interesting and vivid modern art and
modern music and modern literature and poetry from
the 1890s to the 1930s. Then, around the time of the
rise of fascism and Soviet Communism, modernism in the
arts and in music and in literature/poetry got hijacked
and perverted, degraded into a subhuman cult of torment
and gibberish.
In exactly the same way that the noble and admirable
religion of Islam was hijacked on 11 Setpember by a clique
of ignorant and vicious fanatics and perverted into a
subhuman cult of death and suffering, modernism in art and
music and literature got hijacked in the late 1940s by a
group of ignorant and vicious musical fanatics. These
ignorant fanatics, whose Hall of Shame includes Arnold
Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt, spoke
with delight about destroying all previous modes of art
and music and literature. Boulez in particular seems to
enjoy talking about destruction: in an interview in
Contemporary Music Review, Boulez speaks with the utmost
contempt of musicians and audiences who want to conserve
the music of the past, and Boulez urges audiences and
so-called "modern" musicians alike "not to be afraid to
destroy the past."
Yes indeedy, all good ole Pierre needs is a turban and a
box cutter, and he'd be right at home in the cockpit of those
doomed 757s.
Like crazed madmen steering 757s into the twin towers
of the World Trade Center while screaming "Death to the
Great Satan! Long ling the jihad!!!" Schoenberg and
Boulez and Babbitt and their ignorant vicious ilk steered
the giant 757 of modern music into a flaming collision with the
musical public. In the process, the ignorant fanatics
who hijacked modern music destroyed the audience for
serious modern music, and made a laughingstock of themselves
and their so-called "music."
As for Stockhausen, he qualifies as one of the least
poisonous but certainly one of the most deluded of that
addplepa crew of musical modernists from the 1950s -- a
crew whose depraved musiKKKal ideology still holds sway,
by the way, over American and European university music
depratments.
For an evaluation of Karlheinz Stockhausen's so-called
"contribution" to modern music, let's hear from Leonard
B. Meyer:

"The theory of music has always sought support and warrant
from other disciplines--notably, mathematics and physics.
Music theorists have assumed that musical structures and
processes are similar to those of some model
discipline--favored because of the elegance of its theory,
the cultural acceptability of its doctrine...or some
combination of these. Today's theorists are no exception.
Indeed, the crisis in style has produced an almost
frantic search for plausible models for music and music
theory.
"(..) Such `borrowing,' however, may lead to unfortunate
consequences when the model, taken to be the `main event,'
begins to influence and mold the actual practice of music.
"The fallacies involved in the attempt to rationalize
the procedures of total serialism by an appeal to the unity
of the acoustic materials of music have already been
considered; and the dubious logic of subjecting pitch and
time to a single set of quasi-mathematical operations has
been discussed. Now I want to deal, first, with the use
of terms and concepts drawn from contemporary physics--
usually quantum theory--which imply that there are real
relationships between this science and music; and, second,
with the use of statistical concepts, more particularly
the mathematical theory of information, to explain and
justify the procedures of experimental music.
"The writing of the composer-theorists of the avant-garde
--particularly the European branch--is replete with terms
like space-time field relations, phase, quanta, statistics,
and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which are appropriated
from contemporary physical theory and mathematics. Here are
two brief examples:

`Here the passage of time can be determined only statistically
--time as the effect of juxtaposed quanta... Thus the vital thing
is that real time is produced by the shooting together of the
effect of quanta, their density, their direction and the speed
that becomes evident in them... But in addition one will apply
the theory of relativity.
`Such field-sizes are now the `elements' and composition
thus include the statistical character of mass-structure among
the elements. A `pointillistic' time-structure can now be
presented, vice-versa, as a special case of mass-structure--
the case when field-size equals zero, and each time-process is
fixed in the time-continuum by a point instead of by a field.'
[Karlheinz Stockhausen: "How Time Passes"]

"The meaninglessness of such vacuous fustian has been discussed by John Backus and the fallacy of inappropriate quantification has been pointed out by Mel Powell. The number of technical or theoretical terms and concepts borrowed from quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and acoustics--but left undefined in the writings of the European serialists--is so vast that it would be futile to try to discuss them all." [Meyer, Leonard B. Music, the Arts and Ideas. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967, pg. 254]

We also get an window onto Karlheinz Stockhausen's
"contribution" to modern music from the acoustician John
Backus:

"The baffling technical language we encounter contains
a considerable amount of what appears to be scientific
terminology--definitions, acoustical and physical terms,
etc. (..) We may therefore examine Die Reihe with a critical
eye... We wish to see if the scientific terminology is
properly used, to see if the charts, graphs and tables
have any real significance, and to determine the technical
competence of the material from the scientific standpoint. (..)
"Karlheinz Stockhausen contributes a article of forbiddingly
technical appearance. (..) What he means by `statistic'
variation is not known; his later discussion of the term (I, 48)
only confuses matters further.
"His subsequent discussion becomes more and more inspired;
mention is made of `harmonic, sub-harmonic, and chromatic ptich-
scales,' `spectral composition,' `line- and band-spectra,' and so
forth. The climax is reached in a paragraph which must be
quoted in full to be appreciated (I, 47):
`Differentiation of the intended permutation of timbres is
obtained from the complexity resulting from the simultaneous
combination of the six formant regions within one sound process,
from the varying of the elements or groups of elements, in all
their components, according to the series and of coordinating a
special intervallic scale of partials or of medium frequency
width ratios in each formant octave.' - Stockhausen

"This is formidable language. What are the six formant
regions? What is an intervallic scale of partials? Or a medium
frequency width ratio? What is a formant octave? None of these
phrases has been used or defined previously. The individual
words have perfectly well-defined scientific meanings, but are
combined in ways that make no sense as acoustical language. The
paragraph quoted is an excellent example of technical jargon
without technical meaning. (..)
"We conclude that Stockhausen's technical language is his own
invention, using terms stolen from acoustics but without their
proper acoustical meanings, and that the technical jargon he has
developed is designed mostly to impress the reader and to hide
the fact that he has only the most meager knowledge of
acoustics." [Backus, John, "Die Reihe--A Scientific Evaluation,"
Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1962, pp. 160-171]
There is a term which describes the use of `technical
jargon...designed mostly to impress the reader and hide the fact
that [the user] has only the most meager knowledge of acoustics.'
The term is "scam."
Such pseudo-scientific scams were used to sell snake oil in
the 1890s, Florida swamp-land in the 1920s, perpetual motion
machines in the 1950s, junk bonds in the 1980s, and derivative
stock options in the 1990s. The use of technical-sounding
gibberish to baffle and nonplus the unwary dupe is a staple of
astrologers, spiritualists, fortune-tellers, ufologists,
perpetual motion machinists, orgone therapists, bogus swamis,
crystal-power healers, psychic surgeons, aura readers, and
dowsers from time immemorial.

"In fact, the articles in Die Reihe conform to all the best
traditions of pseudo-scientific writing in their disregard of
accepted meanings of scientific terms, their unintelligibility,
and their complete lack of any reference to the results of other
workers as support for their statements." [Backus, J., "Die Reihe
- A Scientific Evaluation," Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 1,
No. 2, 1962, pg. 171]

In actual fact, what is misnamed musical modernism today is
in reality a primitive superstition--a throwback to such crude
mystery cults as the cult of Baal, or the belief system astrology
or gematria. Worshippers of Baal hurled their children into the
white-hot arms of a dead bronze idol becuase they had been deluded
by ahandful of power-hungry high priests into believing that Baal
was an all-powerful force of history...whereas, in reality, Baal
was merely a dead empty shell propped up by a foolish belief system
which had no contact with reality.
In the same manner, parents today hurl their children into the
white-hot arms of a dead idol called Musical Modernism, paying
hundreds of thousands of dollars for wasted college tuitions
because they have been deluded by a handful of power-hungry
academic musical high priests into believing that Musical
Modernism is an all-powerful force of history... Whereas, in
reality, Musical Modernism is merely a dead husk surrounded by a
foolish musical belief system which has no contact with reality.
Because it resolutely avoids the test of reality, musical
modernism is mere numerological mysticism -- alebit using more
elaborate mathematics than were used during the Middle Ages, but
with the same results. Namely, a vast mass of incoherent and
turgidly cabalistic nonsense:

"...After assiduously studying Babbitt's essay `Twelve-tone
invariants...' Musical Quarterly, XLVI (April, 1960), 246-59, I
have covered several sheets of music paper with experiments,
exercises, and examples trying to penetrate the meaning of his
discourse, and finally approached my learned friend by letter for
more information. It was of no avail, and I gave up in
frustration since I did not wish to encroach further on his time.
I am afraid that the use of this language in Perspectives has
reached a point of diminishing returns: the possible increment of
scholarly prestige (not to speak of snob appeal) is compensated
by loss of communicability." [Krenek, Ernst, "Some Current
Terms," Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1966, pg. 84]

"Such a resultant rhythm has just as little to do with
ordering the sets as the previous example, and nothing to do with
their contours. If the supposition at the beginning of this
paragraph were true, it might at best be thought of as the
unstructured results of a conflict between two highly structured
elements. But the supposition is not true.
"I see no way for the ear to distinguish those attacks which
define durations for Po and those which define durations for RI2.
Thus, I see no way for the ear to perceive either order or
content." [Westergaard, Peter, "Some Problems Raised by the
Rhythmic Procedures in Milton Babbitt's Composition for Twelve
Instruments," Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1965]

"We are reminded of Oswald Spengler's prediction forty years
ago that the true representative of our age will be the engineer
and that the artist will become obsolete. Perhaps some artists
fear that he was right and attempt to demonstrate that they
really _are_ engineers, in order to be assured of a raison
d'etre." [Krenek, Ernst, "A composer's Influences," Perspectives
of New Music, 3(1), 1964, pg. 41]

"The flurry of enthusiasms of [the 1950s] centered not around
Schoenberg, whom Boulez had declared `dead,' but around Webern.
From the movement's inception in the United States, the newly-
influential academic segment of the population became prominent,
especially among themselves. In time it demonstrated how the
lives of artworks (whose dependence on the auspices of higher
education had in times past been negligible) could be sustained
by artificial means beyond normal expentency, regardless of their
direct aesthetic vibrancy.
"The era's post-Viennese energy induced a remarkable
production of analytical dissections and speculative tracts--more
those than public performances of music. The torrent of words and
numbers and fomulae unleashed about Schoenberg's methods, about
their more thorough exploitation by Webern, and then about
subsequent extensions (like those of Boulez and Babbitt) to other
musical dimensions, produced one of the most bountiful crops of
verbiage ever harvested in the cause of art.
"The movement also habored a hidden cul de sac for the
unwary. Its participants produced a fair amount of theoretical
'how to...' composers' shoptalk, which tended to be preoccupied
with manipulations of notes as permutable collections, rather
than with interpretive descriptions of phenomenal things. So the
unassailable as permutable collections, rather than with
interpretive descriptions of phenomenal things. So the
unassailable and unchanging concern of musicians for the art's
aural ontology became secondary to the orderings of serialized
particles. Permutations, reciprocal relativities,
combinatoriality, segmentation, source sets, derived sets,
intersections, adjacencies, partitions, germ cells, aggregates,
pitch qualia, hexachords, mathematical models, complementation
modulus-12, pitch (or note) cells, and the like dominated the
literature of Serialism. (..)
"Words have special powers: _permutation_ had an inimitable ring of profundity, and _modulus-12_ was sheer magic. Both seemed to
guarantee conceptual precision and mathematical certainty; both
hinted at the flinty `rigor' of the hard sciences. Such
terminology prompted a comforting fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s;
it allowed us metaphorically to put on laboratory smocks and
pretend to be `genuine scientists,' the Einsteins of harmony."
[Thompson, William, Schoenberg's Error, 1991, pg. 184]

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part 2 in next post
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--mclaren