Karlheinz and company - part 2

Karlheinz Stockhausen's bizarre comments, which appear
in some qya to equate the Wrold Trade Center tragedy
some some kind of aestehtic gobbledygook, become
not merely comprhensible but inevitable when we study
the flipper-footed thalidomide origins of "modernist"
music.

The extraodinary staying power of this dead musical Baal
cult called "musical modernism" becomes clear when we examine
not merely Karlheinz Stockhausen's recent bizarre comments (we would expect nothing else, since Stockhausen is one of the composers who contributed to the modernist musical cult in the 1950s), but when we observe the living manifestations of musical moderist fanaticism today, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Back in 1962 the musical con job was revealed and the scam
of the modernist composer exposed. Yet the exact same musical
confidence game continues, today--right now. Robert Morris' music
theory article "Compositional Spaces and Other Territories," from
Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 39, 1995, pp. 329-358,
perpetuates the exact same kind of 1950s meaningless pseudo-
scientific jargon and the exact same sort of technical-sounding
yet musically empty quasi-mathematical gibberish...the same tired
old musical con job practiced by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the
1950s, by John Cage in the 1960s, by Pierre Boulez in the 1970.
It's merely been brushed off, polished up and trotted out to dupe
yet another generation of gullible young composers and naive
music student dupes.
In his 1995 article, Morris writes:
"A closer look at the realization reveals a functional
distinction between notes of long and short duration. Long notes,
sustained by at least one of the participating instruments, are
circled in the underlying design to show that each aggregate
projects its own ordered hexachord. The inside aggregates
(numbers 2 and 3) project transformations of the first hexachord
of the generating row; the long notes in the outside aggregates
project hexachords related to one another by T sub 1 1 but not to
the hexachords of the P row. If this were an excerpt from an
actual piece, these Q hexachords might be a reference to some
other hexachord in the word or even some other piece of music."
[Morris, Robert, op cit, 1995]

Empirical tests of listeners' reponses prove (as usual) that
such jabberwocky has nothing to do with the piece of music as
heard by listeners.

"Working on the basis of Allen Forte's very influential
application of set theory to music (1973), Robert Morris has
developed a computational `rationale for the selection of sets
that insure predictable degrees of aural similitude' (Morris
1980: 446), and this has been tested empirically by Cheryl
Bruner. Her conclusion is that Morris's system does not succeed
in its aim, because `the perception of similarity among
contemporary pitch structures seems to be tied to the context in
which the structures are presented.' (1984: 38.) Or to put it
another way, formal classifications of pitch-class context do not
suffice to specify the context within which musical sounds are
heard as similar or dissimilar, coherent or incoherent." [Cook,
Nicholas. Music, Imagination, and Culture. Clarendon Press:
Oxford, 1990, pg. 234]

Robert Morris' 1995 article offers us a magnificent case study
of incoherence, double-talk and obscurantism. What is an
"aggregate"? How does it "project" its own "underlying
hexachord"? How can one "project" a transformation?
In analytic and projective geometry, the term "projection" has
a specific meaning, but it is not used in its accustomed
mathematical sense in Morris' article. Instead, Morris' use of
the term "projection" has no discoverable connection with
mathematics, physics or geometry. What are "inside aggregrates"
as opposed to "outside aggregates"? What are they inside of?
What are they outside of? Morris do not bother to define any of
these terms before he tosses them into his verbal sewage-spill.
In particular, the phrase "the long notes of the outside
aggregates project hexachords related to one another by T sub 1 1
but not to the hexachords of the P row" stands out as an
apotheosis of unintelligibility. Is there any point in trying
to decipher mathematical terms which are not used mathematically?
Is there any sense in trying to unravel pseudo-scientific jargon
whose sole purpose is to render the meaning (if any) opaque?
How much of an egg do you have to eat before you realize it's
rotten?
------
Modernist ideology in music qualifies as a superstition because
the prime tenets of musical moderism constantly flout the evidence
provided by science about physical acoustics and the physiology
of the human ear.
Serialism uses too many modal tones--12 in all. It violates
Miller's number "seven plus or minus two"--the basic bit rate
which limits the capacity of humans to absorb audible
information. Total serialism compounds the violation of human
perceptual capacity:

"Immediate memory for digits, letters of the alphabet and
words was investigated extensively in Wundt's laboratory at
Leipzig at the end of the nineteenth century. If you were to hear
a string of letters read to you just once at a rate of 2 letters
per second, how many items would you recall? Wundt (1905), like
many later workers, found the number of items that could be
recalled in the correct order, the span of immediate memory, to
be about 6 'single impressions.' The repeated findings in a
variety of studies that people could recall between 5 and 9
items, whether the items were letters, digits, or words, led
Miller (1956) to argue than the span of immediate memory was,
typically, 7 plus or minus 2." [Smyth, Mary M., Alan F. Collins,
Peter E. Morris and Philip Levy. Cognition in Action. 2nd ed.,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers: Howe, 1995, pg. 156]

Atonal modernist music, by favoring vertical intervals which
fall within 1/4 of the critical bandwidth , produces unavoidable
audible roughness, which again creates innate human responses
which cannot be argued out of existence or changed by Pavolvian
musical conditioning. The disregard for the evidence of
psychoacoustics, cognitive psychology, physical acoustics and the
physiology of the ear is near-universal among modernist
composers like Stockhausen. So why should we expect Stockhausen and his ilk to offer apprporiate humane responses to the stimuli of the real world, when they have never been willing to give approriate humane reponses to their grindingly dissonant
and dehumanized musical stimuli? Listento "Kreuzspiel" or "Gruppen." You decide.
-----
Joseph Pehrson has commented that Stockhausen's early
electronic works prove interesting. That's certainly one opinion.
For my part, Stockhausen's shorter electronic compositions from
the 1950s remain tolerable -- "Studie I" and "Studie II" and
"Kontakte" (the 1956 tape version of Kontake, not the later
acoustic version).
However, even these early electronic compositions eventually
become wearing. I hear no audible organization in any of
Stockhausen's pre-1970 compositions, whether acoustic or
electronic. The electronic pieces sound novel and provide some
moemntarily diverting timbres, but the general incoherence soons
grows unutterably wearisome. Despite all the yapping about how
Stockhausen's early electronic pieces are "masterpieces," they
don't hold a candle to genuine early electronic masterpieces like
Ussachevsky & Luening's "Sonic Contours" or "Moonflight" or
"Invocation," or for that matter Dockstader's really tremendous
electronic compositions "Quatermass" and "Luna Park," or Pierre
Schaefer's "Etude Aux Chemins de Fer."
Overall, the French electronic composers completely blow the
German electronic composers out of the water. In retrospect,
after 50 years of history, there's just no question that Scheafer
and Henry created electronic music with infinitely more emotional
power and musical coherence than the random-sounding incoherent
bloops and bleeps churned out by Stockhausen and his Darmstadt
buddies.
By the way, you can buy Tod Dockstader's electronic music as
well as the superb CD "Pioneers of Electronic Music" with plenty
of early 1950s Ussachevsky & Luening, as well as the complete
electronic music of Pierre Schaefer, at www.cdemusic.org. I
highly recommend all these pieces.
As for Karlheinz Stockhausen's megalomania, that's another
issue. Post-Beethoven German composers have all suffered from
increasing megalomania as a group: whether you look at Wagner or
Reger or Schoenberg or Stockhausen, these campers have all got
some serious Froot Loops in their little musical bowls. This
history of increasing megalmaniacal craziness on the part of
late 19th century-early 20th century German composers seems to trace back to the invividous influence of the Prussian midnset on the
Germanic character proper. In large part, this peculiarly
Germanic pathology results from the philosophical influence of
Friedrich Herder by way of Fichte into Hegel and thence (in a
sinister example of cultural chromosome-jumping) to the Ivy League
crypto-fascists who espoused "scientific racism" in America as
the perverted basis of modern American mass education.
More about that latter in a subsequent post -- ditto its
depraved effects on the modern American unviersity, in particular
the modern American college music department.
-----
One final point: not many people are aware that Karlheinz
Stockhausen suffered a mental breakdown in 1970. When he emerged from (shall we say, to put it politely) his "rest," his
music changed radically. Suddenly Karlheinz started producing
hippy-dippy-type "happenings" like "Sirius" and "Sternklang" and
"Kurzwellen." The interested modern music fan may find it
informative to trace the connection twixt the ever-more-
convoluted and theoretically incoherent hypercomplexity of
Stockhausen's 1950s modernist compositions and his fate in 1970.
Whole tomes could be written about this connection.
One highly placed IRCAMista remarked to me some years back:
"Don't tell anyone, but I think he's [Stockhausen is] out of his
mind."
A fitting epitaph for the dead fanatical musical ideology of
Schoenberg, Boulez, Babbitt, Stockhausen, et al. From now on,
let's check the Germans for box cutters before they board the
airplane called "modern music."
---------
As for 55-equal -- you might find it amusing to note that 55
equal, called "the musician's tuning," was championed loudly by
Telemann and Sorge and others during the 18th century. 12 out of
55 equal received wide praise among the elite musicians of
Central Germany. 55 got plenty of press probably because its
step-size approximates the syntonic comma (81/80) pretty well.
Around the same time 51 equal also got some good reviews, since
51 equal approximates the size of the Pythagorean comma pretty
well.
As a compromise twixt 51 and 55, 53-equal got considerable
attention from Sauveur and von Janko and others. 53 equal still
gets lots of adulation from fanatical 5-limit JI ideologues
nowadays. Of course, real composers in the real world recognize
that all of these tunings are simply heard as "a whole buncha
small intervals" by listeners and practicing composers alike.
Once you get past about 29 equal, hands-on experience composing
in these equal temperaments shows that there's no significant
audible musical difference between (say) 51 as opposed to 55 or
53, or 60 as opposed to 65.
Not many people have done anything with the full chromatic
set of 55 equal, or for that matter other nearby chromatic sets
like 60 equal or 65 equal. 72 has proven much more popular,
probably since it's relatively easy to get 72 by rolling a bunch
of harps next to one another (James Tenney) or pianos (Carrillo)
etc.
Robert Walker deserves praise for epxloring a relatively
exotic tuning system. How about trying some of the more notable
and beautiful but lesser-used equal divisions of the octave,
Robert? For example, 9 equal? Or 15 equal? Or 10 equal? Or 21
equal?
---------
One last issue -- LIME by Lipppold Haaken incorporates
microtonal accidentals. WHen you pair the LIME notation program
witht he FB-01, you get the ONLY *true* microtonal musical
notation in existence. LIME will actually send microtonal pitches
to the FB-01!
Why not try getting in touch with Lippold, Robert, and see if
you can get him to hook your FTS into LIME in some way?
Shouldn't be that hard. And if you and Lippold can do that,
you'd have a truly awesome microtonal notation program *that*
*actually* *sends* *microtonal* *pitches* *to* *the*
*sythesizer*!!!
---------
--mclaren

--- In crazy_music@y..., xed@e... wrote:

/crazy_music/topicId_1120.html#1120

Many thanks to Brian McLaren for his fascinating essay on Stockhausen
and "traditional" musical modernism. I was expecting no less, and
that's why I put the posts up on Stockhausen in the first place!

I have to admit, Brian, that although I was well aware of
Stockhausen's egomania and egocentrism and could easily see how that
could "inspire" his comments on the tragedy, I wasn't really all that
clear on the overall implications regarding traditional musical
modernism.

That's really interesting and, seemingly, true. I remember the
university music departments in the late '60's and the kind of
totalitarian determination of what music *must* be and *must not*
be... And, it is very true that, at that time, the human dimension
was totally driven out of music as a "trivial" or "saccharine"
element to be avoided...

I can certainly see how that world view would fit with Stockhausen's
comments. However, the relationship of this modernist art
and "sensational" visual art was also not entirely clear to me. The
idea of sensory shock or perception devoid of human connection in
modernism was something that, frankly, I never thought about.

Certainly that kind of sensational thinking links directly to the
Stockhausen comments, so there seems to really be a verifiable
connection there. Thanks for pointing that connection out to me.

And my surprise at all this? Well, I guess it's a little like
finding the terrorists. I understood *part* of the puzzle, but it
was difficult to put the entire picture together, so I *very* much
appreciate your help, BMCL, in facilitating this!

_______ ________ _________
Joseph Pehrson

>
> Many thanks to Brian McLaren for his fascinating essay on Stockhausen
> and "traditional" musical modernism. I was expecting no less, and
> that's why I put the posts up on Stockhausen in the first place!
>

Yes, I'll second that.

I have been reading more about the tyrrany of the music and
art exstablishments, though as someone who chose to pursue my art
without those establishments, I think their effects on me were more
subliminal. ("How can what I am doing be good if what they are doing
is good?").

Some of my recent reading was at Kyle Ganns website and that is
a good resource.

I do take exception with Brians lumping together of John Cage with
the matho-serial school. He was completely rejected by that school and
his music and ideas were much more embraced by the anti-establishment
camp. Whether one believes that the product of this camp was more
humanist-musical than that of the matho-serialists is up to ones
own taste.

In the words of Charlie Parker "its still gone music."

Regarding 55 ET (and referring a bit to something Brian said
along time ago). [Caveat, I am still mostly in 12 or 12-out-of
space]. I like structures. The fact that 12tet has 2, 3, 4 and 6
inside of it is very important to a lot of the things I use it
for. With that in mind, I thought 35, 55, and 77 would all be
good places to go exploring as they have interesting embedded
ets. Tuning up and listenning to some of these didn't quite
light my fire, oh well... (the comment from Brian, when I
talked about some et or other was "its too bad its prime". As
I wait for my 31et guitar I fiddle and diddle with potential
substructures which don't fill the octave in the hopes that
there will be some good directions there...)

BOb Valentine