Excerpts from the Writings and Lectures

of Karlheinz Stockhausen

Redefinition

Do you agree that the definition of what we have hitherto called music
needs to be reformulated, particularly so as to take your music into
account?

Certainly. I was educated at the College if Music to talk about music

as a rational product but scarcely to mention its intuitive sources.
People may have briefly touched on intuition but they didn't really
know what was meant by that. So my practical training in all musical
disciplines was always entirely rational. That's also true of the
procedures I employed during the first ten years of composing. I was
constantly aware of the thought processes within the realm of musical
magnitudes. Then I time and again thought about the supra-
conscious. I attempted, from work to work, to reach decisions that
didn't follow any musical logic. A transformation became apparent in
the first pieces where I created space and time for intuitive playing in
the moment of performance – space and time where something
intuitive happened rather than some process explicable in rational
terms. That in no way involves irrationality, romanticism or stages of
the unconscious. What I mean is that, at the moment of composing
and playing, thinking is dedicated in a completely new way to service
of a higher inspiration. One must relativise all conceptual activity and
open oneself up to intuition. It is important to listen to what one is
oneself playing, and to what others are playing. Up to now that has
been reduced to a minimum in new music through over-valuation of
thought processes and complex transformations of thought into action.
Musicians increasingly became living tape recorders separated from
one another. I want to change that radically so as to infuse every note
with spiritual intention and thus attain maximum quality. I must
therefore also seek other qualitative prescriptions. That is why some
of my scores are reduced to a few sentences as a basis for music that
can last 30 minutes or longer.

The outcome seems to be completely indeterminate music. Under

such circumstances, when the composer is concerned with providing
stimuli for making music, what can he view as a valid outcome?

We know from tradition that composer's moments of intuitive

inspiration have constantly been seen as decisive. Viewed
intellectually, that is 'indeterminacy' in terms of tradition. From the
standpoint of intuition, however, which is also a human experience
albeit little utilized today, the outcome involves a highly specific
'determined' music. We must ask ourselves what force within human
beings primarily determines music – an intellectual or an intuitive
energy?

We must also ask ourselves what musicians are involved in a

particular performance, and what intuition can be released within their
particular disposition.

For the moment there are only a few such musicians, completely
dedicated to their work which they don't see just as a job – musicians
of extremely great sensitivity ready to follow intuitive inspiration. They
must also carry out specific preparatory spiritual exercises before they
play. Their entire way of life must be dedicated to this kind of intuitive
music. They can't drink a beer and then start playing five minutes
later, unaware of their responsibility.

That kind of behavior may once have been associated with the image
of orchestral musicians and choral singers – but not with the image of
a soloist whose task entailed individual interpretation of demanding
music.

Well, my music is utterly dependent on intuitive players capable of

working in a group. That is decisively something new. A traditional
string quartet doesn't offer any comparison since it plays rationally
determined music. Earlier examples, which could be seen as
precursors of what I am doing today, are only to be found in Free Jazz
and in other traditions, such as Indian music. In those traditions there
are, however, always rules, schemata etc., providing a framework for
'improvisation.' A group of musicians playing purely intuitively is an
innovation in all traditions. Intuitive music is no longer improvisation
either, it goes far beyond improvisation.

Should your public know anything about the background to and the
events surrounding the creation of your music?

I am convinced that we are on the threshold of a development

comparable with the leap forward from animal to man. Today, after a
long period when man increasingly developed as a thinker, we – and
to begin with, just a very few people – are in the process of making
the leap forward to a higher being. These new human beings will be
capable of experiencing telepathy, teletransportation,
telecommunication, multi-temporality, transformation of space and
time, and universal consciousness. They will be able to establish
conscious and purposeful contact with cosmic energies. The extolled
champion thinker, who can gradually replaced by a computer, will
decline in importance.

What is the significance of communication between musicians and

public in your works?

If one sense that hostile, intellectually critical, i.e. destructive waves

emanate from the public, intuitive music is much less successful than
if musicians feel sympathetic energies. Musicians need
consciousness of the fact that someone thinks it important to listen to
them. The public must transmit its gratitude for the musicians' playing.
Only that makes possible our establishing contact with the spiritual
realms of intuition or even enlightenment.

We know similar phenomena from the sphere of traditional music. A

lonely pianist on a platform is dependent on his audience's tranquility
and attentiveness. You're obviously thinking, however, of much more
specific reactions. How should your musicians derive intuition from
the public's response, and how can such energy currents become
perceptible?

That occurs when a considerable number of people (or even

individuals) in the hall meditate and are involved in a transformation of
their lives, beyond improved thinking and physical training, entailing
intense contact with spiritual realms. That happened to me several
times in San Francisco where there are very many young people with
very different life-styles to most adults here. You feel there that
human beings can be capable of emitting currents of intuitive energy.
If, however, the public is very heterogeneous, things can easily go
wrong. In my opinion, the celebrated 'democratic' public, aimlessly
thrown together by chance, is only a transitional phenomenon.

So you are virtually demanding a special public, and will therefore

always only reach a specific group.

There's no point in getting hold of or attracting people who don't fit

together. Our problem is to speak to human beings who are spiritually
inclined or seeking, or who want to turn their backs on lust for
possessions or have already done so. Those who have said farewell
to today's predominantly materialistic and physical existence live most
spiritually. They make sufficient time during the day for meditation in
order to establish contact, by way of the inner senses, to tonal
vibrations, poetic words, and visions perceptible to the eye. That
leaves behind the hierarchical class society with its emphasis on
money or degree of intelligence. It instead involves levels of human
spirituality and the question of how far a person has proceeded
beyond his animal needs.

Do you then believe that a sociological restructuring of the concert

public may be possible in [the] future, and that people who at present
cannot afford to buy concert tickets will be reached one day?

A restructuring is taking place, slowly but surely. With today's

population explosion where, like rats, we multiply increasingly
destructively, a numerical increase in interest in the things which
concern me isn't necessarily progress. An increase in population will
in fact lead to a percentage decrease in spiritual interests.

To return to your works – what advantages do you see in scores

based merely on verbal directions?

In my Aus Den Sieben Tagen pieces, the musicians sometimes play

forty minutes on the basis of two or three sentences. The music
provides spiritual orientation derived from the text. The players are
much more relaxed than if I demanded that they rehearse for a week
when they would have to work much harder, physically and
intellectually, to decipher something that I encoded in the eye
language of musical notation. The written directives bring them into
more direct contact with intuition than paper covered with notation.

The concept of chance probably also plays a greater part here than in
your earlier precisely notated works.

That's exactly what's involved in intuition. Musicians establish a direct

link with intuition by way of my texts. In the years ahead I must
investigate whether, for instance, a specific written instruction leads to
a specifically archetypal music – as compared with another
instruction. How can we discover ways of regulating the process of
intuitive music-making? How can a specific directive put a group of
musicians in a state that will result in a specific kind of music,
developing itself genetically – and absolutely characteristically – into
an unlimited future? How many archetypal musical processes can we
discover, formulate, or, better still, stimulate? These are essential
questions for the progressive composer.

[Interview with Die Welt, 1969]

Archetypes
…...'Intuitive Music' is the name I have given to the outcome of
musicians' spiritual attunement to short texts. The word
'improvisation' no longer seems right for what we are playing since
that always involves some underlying schemata, formulae, or other
stylistic elements – entails some musical language even if so-called
'free improvisation' may for a while take us beyond the limits of such a
language.

I would like to make people aware that such music is the outcome of
intuition, which is qualitatively more among a group of attuned
musicians – because based upon reciprocal 'feedback' – than the sum
of individual 'inspirations.' Musicians' 'orientation,' which I also called
'attunement,' is not, however, either fortuitous or exclusive (shutting
out specific possibilities of musical thinking). It is always focused on a
text by me, which invites an absolutely specific intuitive response.

Even though every realization of a text is essentially different from

another, it has nevertheless become apparent that various realizations
of the same text had genetic musical characteristics in common. This
probably involves the discovery by way of the different texts of diverse
archetypal musical processes, each of which leads to its own
individual musical events.

It is no longer enough to extend the musical work – the opus – into a

process, into something that unfolds, grows, and transforms itself in
the Here and Now. We have also experienced that the abundance of
discoverable processes points towards even more primal and higher
creative energies which really do derive from a supra-rational, intuitive
source. When you make intuitive music, all musical thinking serves
such supra-rationality. Thinking – deliberate shaping and reacting
inclusive of all 'learnt' abilities – is by no means excluded, but at every
moment it is absolutely consciously subordinated to an intuitively
unified inspiration. That happens in the present moment, directly,
unreflected (there is no time for thought in the moment of
performance), and non-dialectically. It is thus an instrument of the
intuition.
I am aware that, amid the contemporary apotheosis of the age of
thinking, such experiences can engender much misunderstanding if
only judged in intellectual and conceptual terms. They basically
demand a supra-logic which can probably only be experienced
spiritually but not thought up. That is why supra-rationality is so
bewilderingly confused with an irrationality to which we certainly don't
want to return; or supra-conscious intuitive music-making is mistaken
for pre-conscious, even unaware, and primarily emotional playing.
That is the reason for such negative and even malicious defamation
as 'romantic,' 'German romantic obscurantism,' 'dangerous
relativisation of progressive thinking,' and similar screams of fear.

Between 1950 and around 1965 we passed through many stages if a

primarily rational music whilst surveying a long tradition, and gradually
moved beyond the frontiers within which most music is still fabricated
today. The task now is constantly to expand experiences beyond
those frontiers, allowing them to influence the limited sphere of the
rational without development of a new dualism between the intuitive
and the rational, a state of affairs we know from the disruptive crises
of dialectical composition, which led (and continues to lead) some
exceptionally talented artists to the brink of silence and creative
paralysis, and even to art's total loss of meaning.

The age of cognitive absolutism is coming to and end, and thus also
the age of art products which – increasingly – primarily represented
the outcome of the human capacity for thought.

Viewed in that light, performance of the texts for Aus Den Sieben
Tagen signify much more than presentations of earlier works. These
really are moments of assessment, of self-renunciation, vibrating with
musicians' readiness, to the best of their ability, to be 'purely tuned
instruments' of intuition allowing IT to take place – the ineffable,
profoundly moving, and unquestionable.

What that signifies for our relationship with the public is obvious. If the
people present for such a performance are not disposed to anticipate
the occurrence of IT, if they do not emanate 'good vibes' which unite
with, support and uphold the sound waves, and if they do not
participate in the spirit, 'things go wrong.'

True participation is foreshadowed by some today, and

miscomprehended by many others. This doesn't mean yelling,
screeching, screaming, having your say, gesticulating, and
participating physically as if this were some sport or party game.
Meaningful participation can only be expected from highly cultivated
musicians, and such spiritual involvement entails the greatest
concentration on the transmission of waves of 'sympathy' which can
become mouthpieces for the universal cosmic spirit if we do not block
ourselves and the 'public' wants to yield to this spirit.

Musical meditation is not mawkishness. It is super-alertness and – in

the most lucid moments – creative energy.

from The Seven Days

For many years I have said it innumerable times

and sometimes written it: that
I do not make my music, but
only relay the vibrations I receive;
that I function as a translator,
that I am a radio. When I composed in the right way,
in the right state of mind,
my self no longer existed.

Now I am trying to reach the next stage,

to connect you, the player,
to the currents which flow through me,
to which I am connected.
I am not trying to make a composer of you in the old sense,
but rather to gain a completely new confidence in your abilities:
so that through me you will be connected
 to the inexhaustible source
that pours out through us in the form of musical vibrations.

Do not try to grasp it with your mind,

you will only disturb it all and make it impossible.
You must gain the confidence that you can do it.
I have had it from the beginning.
It is only because of this that I am a short step ahead of you.
But you must gain it too, otherwise everything that I have received
and want to transmit through you
will be false and distorted.

You may have neither the time nor the patience

To concentrate consistently and increasingly better
in allowing whatever must go through us
to sound as undistorted as possible.
That is why I am doing it for you
as long as you cannot do it for yourself.
It will tune you in like a reciever,
but whether or not you sound clear, depends on you.

My last experience was Kurzwellen;

I came as close as I could to you
and to what there is of music in the air.
Now comes the difficult leap:
no longer to transmit man-made signals,
music, tintinnabulation,
but rather vibrations which come
from a higher sphere, directly effective;
not higher above us, outside of us,
but higher in us and outside.

Arrival

Give up everything, we were on the wrong track.

Begin with yourself:
 you are a musician.
You can transform all the vibrations of the world into sounds.
If you firmly believe this and from now on never doubt it,
begin with the simplest exercises.

Become quite still, until you no longer think, want, feel anything.
Sense your soul, a little below your chest
Let its radiance slowly permeate your whole body
both upwards and downwards at the same time.
Open your head on top in the centre, a little toward the back,
and let the current that hovers about you there, like a dense sphere,
enter into you.
Let the current slowly fill you from head to foot
and continue flowing.
Quietly take your instrument and play, even written
music of any sort, begin only
when you have done what I have recommended.

You will experience everything on your own.

Before you play, you may let your thoughts
run free, you may train the muscles
of your fingers, of your larynx. etc.
But now you know what you think and train for,
and even the thinking and training
will be completely new, completely different from before.
Nothing is as it used to be.

As long as you retain this consciousness,

everything you do will be right and good.

from the score, copyright Universal Edition, Vienna 1968

Either / Or?

…...through-composed and intuitive music runs along parallel lines for

me. I don't yet know how I can bring them together. On the one hand
are projects for large orchestras or for big vocal and instrumental
groups, and, on the other, for small ensembles and individual
musicians who have a particular talent for intuitive playing. I find it
very difficult to unite the two strands. I don't as yet see any good
solution. So I produce both intuitive music where the musicians are
given almost nothing, and through-composed music where practically
everything is laid down. We'll have to see how that will be brought
together. Even though I want to move from one to the other, in purely
practical terms a huge problem is involved when in one and the same
work you have to switch over from reading music at certain times to
playing intuitively at others. Reading notes takes place by way of the
intellect. You must read the music and move the body accordingly.
That's a fairly complicated process: reading, understanding, moving
the muscles, listening, moving the muscles again, and producing
vibrations. The ear hears the vibrations, and the brain checks
whether what you do corresponds to what you read. If you play
intuitively, you're simply empty, open. You only listen, like a giant ear.
You play almost like in automatic writing. It plays of its own accord.

Excerpt from a conversation with a Dutch cultural circle, Kurten, 2 – 6

– 1973

Manifesto for the Young

Once again we are revolutionizing – but throughout the entire world

this time. We are now setting ourselves the highest possible goal: a
development of consciousness where the whole of humanity is at
stake.

There was once a time when consciousness became so strong in

certain animals that they finally became human beings. Now we are
passing through an age when in some people supra-consciousness is
becoming so strong that they are close to becoming higher beings.
Here, on this earth. Only a few will achieve that for the moment. But
every human being longs, to a greater or lesser extent, to reach
beyond him or her self, achieving higher consciousness. Hence the
crises we are experiencing throughout the world whose nadir still
awaits us this century. Everywhere in the world people sense
pressure and panic about some imminent development comparable
only with the first appearance of plant life out of lifeless matter, with
the emergence of the first animal out of the plant kingdom, and with
the rise of the first man out of the animals: a new step in the
development of consciousness. No matter how strong man's longing
for the next stage of being may be, his fear of and resistance to
opening up to this consciousness are equally violent. Individuals,
groups, political parties and nations believe that they have primacy by
right, and can suppress and literally devour others. We are after all
unequal in terms of intelligence and power, and we know that only a
few will manage, on the basis of their inner resources, to achieve
freedom and supra-consciousness – just as only individual animals
succeeded in becoming human beings.

One can only become a higher being by surmounting egocentricity

and the fear of losing oneself in the process.

Let us not try to erect new systems against those we want to do away
with because they are too restricted, aiming at excluding, suppressing,
and eliminating too much alternative thinking. Our concept must be
so broad that we see ourselves and the whole world from above,
allowing old systems to run down without replacing them by
something new claiming exclusivity.

Systems are the products of the reason that our forefathers made the
absolute ruler of the body. The soul thus becomes the prisoner by
handing over all power to its former servant, reason. Let us realize
that if reason is not constantly supplied with higher impulses from the
supra-rational, it constantly recombines everything stored up within
itself, and can at any time assert both anything it likes and its
opposite. Reason can be utilized for anything. It represents any
opinion, and can justify, support and refute anything. And if one has
not learnt to switch it on and off, it races on without interruption.
Reason is neither more or less than a useful instrument: a model
computer. But who uses it, and for what?

The higher self should provide reason with something to think about,
receiving its impulse from the intuitive consciousness, linking every
individual consciousness with supra-personal cosmic consciousness.

Why am I saying this when I'm a musician, not a philosopher or

something like that? Because we musicians should as far as possible
live entirely by intuition. Because I have learnt that everything new
begins when one attains this consciousness and strives to rise ever
higher. One is only secondarily a musician, a specialist, a human
being with a profession. One is primarily an individual spirit that must
first establish contact with the universal spirit before communicating
anything essential to other spirits, going beyond what is individual and
to some extent involving every other spirit.

Music should not be merely a form of body massage, an aural

psychogram, or a thought program in sound. It should principally be a
current of supra-conscious electricity transposed into sound.

Most practicing musicians today act automatically and without

awareness. They have lost the enthusiasm they perhaps once briefly
had during early youth when they decided to become professional
musicians. We must start again right from the beginning,
reawakening that original enthusiasm within ourselves, or give up
being professional musicians. That is why all orchestras and all choirs
should disband for a considerable time, allowing each musician an
opportunity to reflect, meditate, and discover why he or she is alive at
all, why he or she makes music, and whether that is an absolute
necessity. We would see that most musicians – who have been at
work for many years and expect things to continue in the same way
until their death or retirement without anything essential changing in
their lives any longer – would give up and do something else.
Perhaps they would do nothing for quite a while – if they continued to
be paid and thus had no material reasons for working, which could be
wonderfully fruitful. The usual reasons for earning money – keeping
oneself alive or satisfying established demands – are just feeble
excuses.

In India on a country road between Agra and Jaipur I met a musician

who played a small string instrument he himself had made and also
sang. He was one of the very few absolutely marvelous musicians I
have ever encountered. He owned absolutely nothing; and when I
asked him if he would sell me his instrument for twenty dollars (and
my Indian driver told me that this musician earned at most ten cents a
day with his playing), he looked at me with complete
incomprehension. Tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head.
I felt utterly ashamed.

Those who want to be musicians, following their higher voice, must

start with the simplest meditative exercises, at first just for themselves.
'Play a sound with the certainty that you have as much time and space
as you want' – and so on. First, however, they must achieve
awareness of what they are living for, what we are all living for: to
attain a higher life, allowing the vibrations of the universe to penetrate
our human existence. Musicians must prepare the way for the higher
human being concealed within ourselves, setting in motion the entire
body right down to the least part so that everything becomes relaxed
and receptive to the vibrations of the highest consciousness.

I sense un advance your disapproval of this 'Manifesto.' That doesn't

upset me. The situation would, however, be bad if you are not
inspired by intuition in your best moments, accompanied by some
inner presentiment of the possibility of a higher existence keeping you
vital and alive. You shouldn't want to carry on leading a hollow
existence. You should achieve certainty. Become aware of where
you're heading and why. And you should know that our incapacity and
imperfection are only a sing of our being drawn upward, and of the
future within ourselves – which is supra-consciousness – endlessly
raising us upward, ever higher.

Great power is given to us musicians. Our sounds can kindle in other

human beings the fire of longing to rise above themselves. We must
not abuse this power. More is at issue than individual musicians
vibrating in the heights. The vibratory field around them must also
become so strong, so supercharged, that anyone entering into this
field will vibrate in sympathy.

Let us therefore participate in humanity's great revolution since we

know what we want. It is worth staking our lives when everything is at
issue. That is no longer the case for partial truths, or for private,
group, national and unilaterally political problems. Let us cease
getting caught up in a French, Vietnamese, Czech, Russian,
African......revolution. This is the revolution of world youth on behalf of
the higher human being. Such a higher human being will not be born
out of destruction, splitting the atom, or the closing of frontiers. This
higher being will emerge from the growing consciousness that
humanity is a single body, which remains sick and incapable so long
as just one of its parts is beaten, kicked, oppressed and violated.

The struggle – and struggle is unavoidable – will be hard. Holders of

power have lost faith in humanity. They believe themselves to be the
elect because they possess means of physical power; because they
dispose over moral, political and religious systems and dogmas which
exclude rather than promote life; and because they can order around
the weak and use them as they wish. But they are prisoners of their
own reason, which dismembers everything so as to 'understand' it and
perpetuate their rule - of the reason that recklessly penetrates the
unconscious without awareness of the higher awareness whose
supremacy should first be acknowledged.

The rationalists will ultimately lose their holy wars because they are
ossified and lack the higher being's supra-consciousness. We are
ruled by generals, business magnates, statisticians, political
functionaries, religious fanatics, trade union leaders and specialists in
administration - but what else can we expect?

Let us begin with ourselves. Only when we have attained higher

consciousness will we no longer need to be 'ruled,' and we will seek
advice from saints - not ecclesiastical saints but spirits who serve the
whole of humanity, who have achieved universal consciousness
extending beyond differences of religion and race, and who no longer
confuse universality with uniformity.

What has all this to do with music? Totality is at issue here. If we

comprehend that, we will also produce the right music, making people
aware of the whole.

written for the Journal Musical, Paris, 16.6.1968

Self-Discovery

It's obvious that music is a means of self-education, that everyone

uses music to discover themselves, in order to become a being aware
of itself. Only after you've become conscious of who you are, can you
five something to another, can you know what you have to offer the
other, and what you can do for him or her. You must use the most
subtle of methods for developing your talent as far as it can possibly
go. And I think that music is the most subtle way of developing
oneself spiritually.

That first entails listening to music. You don't even need another
person for that. There's music everywhere. Today you can make use
of headphones and a gramophone record, a good gramophone
record, for trying out what effect that has on you.

You thus start to be selective. You reject the music you don't want,
that you don't like at present, because you're either on a higher or a
lower level than that music. But all music serves someone or other at
every moment. Every individual must select a piece of music for a
specific moment so as to study its impact and how he or she can
vibrate with it. Everyone has a resonance, like a piano which
oscillates when I play. When a certain piece of music penetrates a
person, a resonance is set in motion and an inner voice says: "I like
this resonance. It elevates me. It develops hitherto unknown
possibilities in me. I don't recognize myself. This is very interesting!"
Or you reject some music because you tell yourself: "This is dragging
me down. I'm becoming very depressed. I'm getting sad (or
something similar).

It's an enormously positive development that today we've found the

means for helping everyone make a start on self-education, so that
they don't have to wait until parents, or a teacher, or whoever, says
you should do this or that. Today, for the first time ever, everyone, no
matter what age they may be, has a chance of selecting and listening
to music.

So why doesn't everyone choose, and why doesn't everyone listen?

Why are there so few people who do that?

Why aren't all animals birds? That's absolutely normal. There are a
large number of people who aren't born for music. For them music is
something completely unimportant. They don't even know if a melody
is rising or falling.

If I've understood you properly, part of humanity is born for music, and
part not - and the latter will never show any interest.

That's not quite the case. Things aren't ever so clear-cut in life. Some
people discover, sooner or later, that music can serve them. But at
every moment there are also a large number of people who are only
superficially or not really interested in music. For them music is
mainly a means of moving their limbs - absolutely physical - or a
means of sensual excitement. For them it's another kind of drug.

So there shouldn't be any general teaching of music?

In small groups and transmitted by enlightened spirits, which means

by people completely in love with a specific kind of music, who are
selected by others no matter what their age may be. I could, for
instance, be selected by someone who is 80, or 30 or 10 if he really
likes both me and what I enjoy. I could then transmit to them my love
of a certain kind of music. In my opinion nothing else is of any use.

So groups sharing likings and choosing one of their number to run

things?

In this life you must choose a spiritual guide - at every level. And this
guide is another kind of being. He or she can be older or younger.
But one must choose for oneself.

Even the youngest must be taught: choose someone you love. You
will thus love someone who has already fallen in love with something -
such as a certain kind of music.

If I'm doing something and someone says: 'What are you up to

there?,' I reply: 'Don't disturb me. Come and listen!' If such a person
spends several weeks, several months with me, he begins to discover
things. He'll discover the same as me. It is only on that level that I
see a relationship between beings on this planet. Everything else
remains superficial.

And systematic school teaching and all the miraculous methods -

none of that exists for teaching music?

It exists, but I'm suggesting a completely new way of helping one

another.

School - as it is today - in my opinion destroys the human being,

destroys the soul, and you become just a number. That isn't right.
We are all different, and it's absolutely necessary that this difference
should have a chance - at every moment.

This world isn't yet paradise, and certainly not a musical paradise. On
that context I can make a contribution. I really wouldn't like to be
responsible for this planet, particularly not for the acoustic realm. I
can only suggest that people should quickly liberate themselves from
the rather medieval acoustic environment where not a single sound-
object, not a single place, has been shaped by the culture long
employed for forming the entire visual world. Look at all the objects
we use. Visually they're carefully designed. Everything the eye has
developed for over 2000 years was shaped by the human mind with a
high degree of awareness. In the realm of the audible, however, we
haven't even started endowing sound-producing objects with artistic
form. Just compare the visual and acoustic design of a telephone - or
think of the elegant and refined form for a lavoratory as opposed to
the noise made. The sounds are all still at the stage of acoustic raw
material, unprocessed and unshaped. People haven't yet started
cultivating the sound-world within our technical existence.

That is why I always say that we musicians have a dual role today.
We don't only have to create new music, projecting it into the stillness.
Our primary task is to exert an influence on other people so that this
stillness, this empty acoustic space, can be created. Only then is it
possible to begin making music with a new meaning and a new
sound, which can be heard. We must bring stillness into being!

Even in my most private surroundings I've been involved for many

years in the most intractable of disputes, endeavoring to attain silence
- whether it be protracted legal altercations with neighbors who take
for granted the right to breed screaming, bellowing, bleating, howling
animals; or innumerable disputes with the Ministry of Defence which
insists on allowing chains of jet bombers to thunder as low as 150
metres above the local population, thereby paralyzing concentration of
processes that can only be registered out of absolute silence; or
fighting against the imposition of musical banalities transmitted by
loudspeaker in means of public transportation. You become aware
everywhere that the acoustic environment is completely chaotic and
treated without awareness.

Over the years I've made suggestions for technical inventions aimed
at creating silence. For instance I had proposed a that a sort of
sound-disposal unit for eliminating urban noise should be created so
as to produce stillness in certain parts of a city. Someone has to
invent equipment that would obliterate all sounds so that not even
passers-by who entered such silent zones could produce any more
noise. For those who absolutely needed it, there could be a kind of
acoustic public convenience where anyone could talk and scream and
shout and whistle to his heart's content - where you could relieve
yourself acoustically if you have an absolute need to do that from time
to time.

What seems much more important to me is the establishment of

gardens of silence where sound doesn't carry. Anyone who enters
must be absolutely sure that he or she will find stillness there. This is
absolutely necessary. Only then can one really begin anew to project
musical events into this emptiness.

So help us establish this stillness everywhere. Help us, the people

who create music, to spread awareness of the criminality or
unthinkingly producing any old sounds of whatever loudness wherever
you may be. If you disturb someone's peace and quiet, that's like a
burglar breaking into the private sphere. It's just as unfair when you
hit someone - only the blow is acoustic, which is worse because
there's no defence against it.

Everyone must become aware that you should only talk, or produce
sounds in general, in the presence of another if you have their explicit
permission and want to present them with a gift. Otherwise there
should be nothing else - silence......

When I listen to music, an entire individual universe opens up. I have

the most incredible images, dreams and visions. I can develop the
angel within myself, the angel that has fortunately never felt the
necessity of agreeing with everything even my best friend has to say.
After all, I have an inner experience, a vision, and all I can say - but I
can't describe it - is: 'You must listen to this. You absolutely must
hear how this passage rises etc,' - and the other replies: 'Yes, alright,
but this is too complicated for me. Let me listen alone.' So he
experiences something else.

Specific music awakens - not in general but for certain people,

responsiveness to the vibrations - that higher being within ourselves
one would constantly like to be. After all, one always wants to
become someone better than one is at the present moment, otherwise
life would be meaningless. So I want to rise, I want to become
someone more developed, capable of doing more every day. Music is
a means to that end, a highly personal means. I want to have my
music; I want to unfold my intuition, my creative capacity, which
transforms myself in action and implementation. And then I do
something unprecedented because the music has freed me. The
music is a means suddenly enabling you to fly.

Of course there are other possibilities. Contemplating nature is

similar, but there we assume that nature was created by higher
beings, much more developed than ourselves. Music is till made by
people we call human beings. It is a means of mutual
comprehension. One says: 'You love music. I love music.' - and that
creates something in common, and people communicate. I don't
know of any other method permitting such a high degree of absolutely
personal education.

I view the intended purpose of life on this planet as mainly involving

developing to perfection all the talents one has been given within the
few years of a human life - and then to achieve a higher form of
productivity. You can give others something through such inner
tranquility and such activity. To begin with you simply give. You don't
force yourself on anyone. You wait to see is people are interested in
what you are doing. If that is the case, you can be very happy.

You don't after all only exist for yourself. It's a great joy to have a
response. Anyone can bring about such a response to a certain
extent. But you must first become someone who has something to
contribute. Everyone can contribute something, but he or she must
first awaken.

That is the most immediate purpose of life involved in being on this

planet. The great objective is of course much more remote - in the
realm of the infinite.

Our life here is a school, a kindergarten.

But you say that everyone should find their own music, their own
musical way. Does that mean that all music is valid for you?

Yes, of course since - as Schweitzer said - human beings range from

apes to saints. The people on this incredible ladder are so different
that each one can find his or her own musical nourishment.

There exists music for all moments and opportunities. I too meed a
large range of music. If I want to dance, I select a different kind of
music to what I would choose if I wish to meditate or concentrate on
the vibrations of sound. Sometimes I want to hear densely
constructed music, and so on.

The existence today of beings with a very wide range of experience

constitutes a difficulty. They dance to and whistle what is termed
'simple' music, but also listen to extremely outlandish, often
inexplicable, and strongly visionary music - a music that pulls people
by the hair into the future and disturbs them......

Is the music that pills us by the hair into the future what is termed
'contemporary music?'

No. Who said - I think it was Whitehead - it isn't fair always to

compare unavoidably average contemporary standards with the
masterpieces of the past? Any contemporary period inevitably
produces a majority of average works because people are searching
for something. Future generations make a more accurate choice
since their perspective is completely different to a selection made
under the impact of shock, surprise and what is generally termed
'fashion.'

The music that took people furthest, pulling them onto the future - and
you've understood that music can be several centuries in advance of
its time - will then be termed more important than something which
only exerted an influence for thirty years. The choice is finally made in
favor of those creators who dominated spiritually over longer periods,
the people whose work thus influenced the majority of humanity over
the long term.

During his lifetime Schoenberg was generally thought to be of

absolutely no significance. Even the most advanced musicians, those
the public viewed as such, and official administrators of musical life
thought Schoenberg a sick man and an idiot. People are now starting
to discover what a great musical prophet he was, mainly as a result of
the spiritual content of his work, which will exert an influence far into
the future.

Contemporary music is always everything that human beings who

compose can themselves be and initiate. So that always involves the
entire range of music from the most elementary or physical products,
animalistic in their links with the human body and aimed at exciting
muscles and nerves, to the most spiritual music whose unprecedented
aspects proclaim a new being capable of vibrating with it.

From time to time there appears a composer who is not just a

specialist but completely universal, a composer who deploys all the
octaves of expressiveness, inventiveness and discovery. In that very
rare instance one can find in a single composer compositions in
absolute harmony with elemental nature and pieces that are totally
spiritual. Such a composer doesn't always exist on the same level of
spirituality. He is everything between an animal and the gods......

Excerpts from 'Music and the Child,' a conversation with Maurice

Fleuret, Paris, 22.8.1975
 Vibrations

......as you know, each of us is a person with many levels. Entire

cultures have made distinctions. I have a sexual centre, three vital
centres, two mental centres and a supra-personal centre. If I can
perceive that, I have become capable of awakening seven different
centres in myself. I can start each centre vibrating by deploying
something different. I can thus start my sexual centre vibrating my
way of a certain kind of music. Another kind of music will affect my
supra-natural centre. What I want to say is: have you perhaps already
got as far as discovering what passages of music, or which pieces of
music, are particularly effective in setting which of your centres in
vibration?

There also exists music which penetrates all of the centres - with
moments when the appeal is absolutely holy, absolutely religious, and
times when the appeal is totally sensuous, totally erotic. That is pretty
daring music. You must be very strong to be able to experience it
completely. Above all, the music must be exceptionally well balanced,
and fantastically composed. If that is lacking, there are overloadings,
and after listening to the music you are over-excited in a specific way
and thrown off balance.

It is of course better if you listen to music that draws you up higher

than your everyday nature. After all, we're mostly fairly physical
'sacks,' aren't we - every one of us? Most of us spend mist of our time
feeding ourselves, providing for clothing and shelter, copulating and
sleeping, primarily satisfying bodily desires. Now and again we also
remember: 'we are spirits, and spirits should establish a link with the
supra-human, with the cosmos, with God.' Some music also serves
that function. But such music is very rare today, very rare. Most
music is only physical, speaking to centres within ourselves belonging
to the animal realm rather than the supra-human - that which we are
as spirits when liberated from flesh and bones.

The most important thing now is that each person should gradually
become conscious as to choose specific music and say: 'I like what
this music makes vibrate within myself.

My composition Stimmung, for instance belongs in a completely

different category to Hymnen. Two parts of Hymnen are like
Stimmung, but other sections are very earthy - nothing but 'flesh and
blood,' and sometimes even chaotic and destructive. Zyklus for single
percussionist inclines toward being a mental piece, especially for
someone who lacks subtlety of response to the spirit contained in the
African slit-drum which must be felt within oneself. Zeitmasze is a
more cantabile piece, very sparkling and dance-like.

Those are all different aspects. You must find out which piece by
which composer speaks most to which centre. That's the essential
thing. It's not that you simply say: 'I am what I like.' That's not at all
true. I love many things - and I can be really holy or I can be dragged
down, depending on how someone appeals to me. That
depends......for every one of us, myself included - that absolutely
depends on the influence you're subject to at the moment. You must
be incredibly alert. Music can take you downward, upward, sideways,
lengthways - in any direction. Saying 'I love this music' doesn't mean
anything at all.

What do I love in myself when music pleases me? That is the

decisive question. What part of me, or what centre within myself, do I
particularly love when I am listening to a piece of music? A single
one, several, or all.....?

Intuition is after all supra-rational. Rationality is something associated

with our body: the capacity to think, the ability to order something and
bring it into a relationship - impelled by the intellect. Intuition in the
narrower sense (as I mean it) is a realm beyond the human sphere,
which exerts an influence by way of the vibrations constantly
bombarding us. Some of these vibrations are also highly precisely
constituted, leading us to carry out specific actions. If you achieve a
state where you are not so preoccupied with yourself, you are more
receptive to such supra-personal vibrations. If you have had a great
deal of practice in transposing these vibrations into actions, you can
also make music from them. That, however, is only possible for a very
specific category of musician. Most can't do that; it's too difficult for
them.

When you're listening to music and feel that you've been freed and
have attained tranquility, does that mean you've reached a higher
sphere?

Yes, you'll notice the difference to pop music which never takes me
there. That confirms my bodily sphere - and even then only when the
intellect accepts the language involved, the rhythmic and melodic
language, so that I don't think: 'Those are only cliches. It's rubbish.'
The intellect is constantly active, filtering out the banal, because I
don't want to have such things around. I don't accept every piece of
furniture, and I don't except everything in music either. You don't put
up with any old rubbish in your home - and my view of rubbish is of
course highly subjective. If I can say 'that's good pop music,' it
doesn't of course speak to the angel in me. It usually only appeals to
the body centre. The decisive difference is whether music elevates
you or not.

But there are parallel developments in music - classical music, pop,

and jazz. If you teach music, then for me that involves having to talk
about the history of these diverse forms of music. As far as I'm
concerned, you can also start with pop music, showing its
development, and then move on to another kind of music.

But no! That's precisely the point. There exists so-called 'new music'
or 'experimental music,' which appeals to exactly the same sphere in
human beings as pop music. That is completely physical, or kitschy,
or aggressive, or destructive. That isn't just a matter of the label given
to the music. We're not talking about style, but about the spirit
impelling the notes, about the specific kind of vibrations: about
whether the appeal is to your alpha waves or your vital vibrations,
whether you're lead to want to do something physical, whether you
become terribly excited, agitated or fearful - or whether you become
peaceful, purified, inspired, blissful, loving, refreshed and cheered up.

Let's stay with the vital sphere for a moment. It doesn’t matter
whether it's stimulated by pop, classical or new music. So you
shouldn't say this is inferior pop music and that is better because it is
new music. There are many different degrees of pop music,
depending on who is producing it. Of course it is significant whether
someone writes nothing but syrupy chords or harmonic combinations
integrating all chords. What is important is which centres are
stimulated. It's usually the case that music containing hardly any
more sweetish chords and few periodic rhythms - in general few
elements that are already familiar - makes people very much more
alert. That's similar to traveling to a country you've never seen before,
which is terribly exciting. In unfamiliar surroundings you're much more
interested in yourself than is the case in a familiar environment: "How
do I act now? and now? and now?" Pop music soothes its fans like
people who always take their holidays in the same place, doesn't it?
Things aren't supposed to be exactly the same as last time but not too
different either - and certainly not too unfamiliar, which would be much
too exhausting......and why would we want that?

The great difficulty in music, which also constitutes its enormous

fascination and beauty, arises out of the fact that we exist today so
close to the border-line between two great world epochs. One great
world-age came to and end around 1950 and is now gradually fading
away. A new age has begun. I am an artist who must play his part at
this turning-point. Looking both ways entails a special task for a
musician. I grew out of the spirit of the passing age. I sensed the
great opportunities open to a mental music primarily formed through a
man's capacity for construction - and at the same time I see the end of
a music which used, in its best moments, to be religious music. I see
the end of individual religions. Now there are only very few people
who still really find complete fulfillment there. One now sees how the
earth is becoming unified. For me Buddha is as essential as other
founders of religions even though I think Christ is especially important.
Christ accomplished a phenomenal achievement, making the
individual aware of his indestructibility and of God's face in every
human being. That is a message of genius. Buddhism proclaims the
extinction of the individual. The ego should renounce itself, merging
in the whole - and Buddha is the totality. We - and particularly we
Europeans - very much feel: 'I am also something. I'm not just
nothing.' No one can persuade me that man's greatest wish is to be
nothing. I simply can't and don't want to accept that. I sense that my
innermost self finds great joy in being allowed to be myself and you
yourself. That's why I believe that Christianity is something unique -
even though I may no longer be an orthodox adherent of religion and
have left the Catholic Church.

What I want to say is this. One sees the end of traditional religions,
and everywhere in the world music used to be embedded on religion.
That was so in Europe, in the whole of Asia. In India that is still the
case today, even though there too music is being profaned and
emancipated from religion, increasingly becoming secularized and
utilitarian. Today people no longer really know what music is for. At
best they view it as a psychological medium for getting to know one's
self. So they choose a piece of music by Mozart or Stockhausen,
experiencing themselves as if in a mirror. They want to re-find
themselves in the music and vibrate with it. You can withdraw into
yourself with headphones, diving deep within when listening to music.
Then you don't need anyone else at all. When you have learnt that for
yourself, you can make your own musical discoveries, unveiling your
inner centre. You hear a new piece and explore your reactions. What
you say about that afterward is fairly inessential. You feel what's
happening within you. The inner voice says: 'not this music! no!
stop!' - sometimes even during the first bars, and you get increasingly
experienced. 'That isn't good for me now. It excites me too much. it
drags me down.' Then you must respond, 'no. I don't want that,' and
immediately put and end to it.

There are people who have a feeling for what is good or bad for them.
But everyone should learn to ask themselves, ' what will happen to me
if I listen to Stockhausen's Stimmung?' They would then sense: 'aha,
this music awakens my consciousness of something I otherwise
repress. I'm usually occupied with eating, drinking, moving around,
buying, repairing, talking, watching TV, sleeping......' When does
someone ask themselves: 'who am I? what am I living for? where do
I want to go? what happens when I die?'

Music should above all be a means of maintaining the soul's link with
the beyond. Through religion humanity long received the gift of music
as a spiritual atmosphere. Music was then gradually profaned and
increasingly became a means of cultivated distraction whose most
recent variant is the training of psychological self-knowledge.

Nowadays there is something new, music therapy, which is becoming

more and more popular. Music isn't just experienced as a mirror
telling me who I am. You learnt that music can heal. If you're ill -
agitated, anxious, aggressive or tired of life - such an affliction can be
healed with music. For the moment, however, there are only a few
people who know what is effective as a cure. They know how to
employ music therapeutically. The Greeks are believed to have had
such knowledge, and Indians makes use of mantra techniques.
Plato's writings indicate the uses of specific kinds of music. In Europe
that knowledge has, unfortunately, vanished because we have
become scientifically one-sided, principally viewing medicine as either
involving chemical treatment or surgery. We have no idea about what
musical therapy can do. Only now are we starting to rediscover that.
I know a music therapist who used to be a biologist and now tries to
help the mentally disturbed with music. Rather strangely, therapists
only start helping people when they are already afflicted. My music is
often used for therapy. Unfortunately that only happens when people
are hospitalized and already completely unbalanced. Only very few
people know that every single one of us basically needs music as a
means of self-healing. People usually drink coffee to regain vitality.
Just a few are clever enough to know exactly what music provides
inner refreshment and a feeling of dancing along. Only a few people
know that certain pieces by Stockhausen make their ideas come ten
times faster. Such listeners use music therapeutically so as to gain
vitality, become more creative, and so as to be able to talk about
interrelationships they would otherwise be completely unaware of.
They thus use music as a preferred source of spiritual nourishment.

Then of course comes the next step, originally also entailed in religion:
bringing us in contact through music with what we sense but cannot
grasp intellectually, with the supernatural giving life to the entire
universe - with God, the Spirit that holds everything together, all the
galaxies, solar systems and planets, also every single one of us on
our little planet. You can obviously establish contact with the
supernatural. There exists music providing a possibility of doing that.
That isn't just the music we normally call 'spiritual.' We have forgotten
that all composed music was originally spiritual. Today's great
problem is to make music which doesn't smell of the church
(immediately leading most people to say 'that's nothing for me') but is
unmistakenly experienced as spiritual music without being bound to
specific religious forms. The task is to find forms making it impossible
for someone to sit in a concert hall and respond to what is being
plated by saying 'that does nothing for me.' Or for someone to say as
if he were in a shop: 'I've paid for my ticket, and now I want
something I like.' The usual attitude is that you go to a concert hall
and buy what pleases you. You are thus often disappointed because
the program is put together by people you don't know and who don't
know you. Satisfaction perhaps functions for short stretches,
sometimes even for an entire piece, but then again it is totally lacking
for several concerts. Perhaps chance decrees your turn comes again,
but your taste remains ungratified.

People like you must gradually learn to be systematic about seeking

out the right spiritual nourishment rather than just consuming
everything put in front of you. You should decide for yourselves,
following your own taste rather than that of some manager. But how
is this done? It's very difficult with today's music industry as it is. That
is why a group like yours is very important. People with relatively
similar tastes come together, and the chief outcome is further
refinement of their tastes. This happens all the more as you penetrate
into, for instance, my music, as you 'mount up' with me. I would like to
make more and more music that is principally heard by religious
people; so religious that they would like their entire being - that
unbounded self permitting us to establish contact with the most
marvelous sensation of oneness embracing the entire universe - to
start vibrating. My difficulty involves always finding new ways of
making that absolutely clear, so that immediately people hear the title
of the work and then the music, they experience a spiritual
atmosphere and instantly sense: 'just a moment - something really
different is happening here.' Also so that listeners already realize this
from the way the musicians enter, the way that they are prepared, how
they perform the music, and how the notes sound, vibrating freely.
Judgment should no longer rest on whether a piece of music is
intelligent, refined, clever or skillfully made. This must be music where
the mental aspect remains in the background and the main emphasis
is on the vibrations, which mainly establish spiritual balance rather
than just bodily equilibrium. Vital vibrations can occur naturally as
well. I love the whole circle - traversing the entire human circle at
least once in every composition, making apparent at every instant
'that's coming into balance again' so that at the end you really have
the feeling of being in equilibrium, of having received a sense of
harmony. Best of all, of course, would be if someone heard a piece of
mine and then, out of sheer happiness, felt impelled to embrace a
stranger, saying how wonderful that person is. With every new piece I
work on making this supra-personal element in human beings, which
in the past was brought to life in the individual religions, vibrate ever
more precisely - and on remaining in that state while I'm composing,
even though when listening I concentrate on a specific composition.
The main thing is that I constantly move within this sphere so far as
possible. If I sometimes become a 'physical sack' and notice that, I
must make sure to returning to a higher level as quickly as I can.

That certainly involves considerable effort......

No, it's only a question of concentration. You must know techniques
for getting there again. You won't find a TV set in this house. I almost
never listen to the radio, and don't take a newspaper or magazines.
None the less I am sufficiently well informed. Well, I am in a plane
every now and again, I skim through the international press, and every
time I discover that basically nothing much has changed......

Excerpt from a conversation with a Dutch cultural circle, Kurten,

2.6.1973

Body and Spirit

......the musician's spirit is comparable to a car-driver. The 'vehicle' is

the musician's body. You have a different car to me.

We inherit that vehicle, don't we?

But I've changed a lot of things in my car.

Yes, that's clear, but......

I've run it in.

You only need look at father and mother Stockhausen to know how
true that is.

Those are the familiar inherited characteristics of my body, of my mind

- everything that one normally refers to as a 'human being.' What I
make out of this body is my affair; whether I leave it as is or somehow
extend it like people in a nuclear laboratory wearing gloves and using
an extended mechanical arm to move something; or like a cook using
a long spoon to stir a pot because she doesn't want to burn her fingers
- is secondary. Displacements of time and space are extensions of
the 'body.' There thus exists electrical equipment where I press on a
button here and a bell rings in New York.
Things are just the same with music. It may be three days before a
piece of music exerts an impact. No matter what I take up, all that
matters is that it gets something moving.

'Physicality' has very much changed over the course of thousands, of

millions of years. We have bicycles and all conceivable kinds of
things that extend our senses and limbs. You wear glasses, which is
something 'mechanical' as you would say. You do something with
your sense organs which you can't do of your own accord. You're
wearing apparatus for seeing. Such machines entail consequences.
We have to put these machines to vital use as quickly as possible. In
other words, we have to penetrate the molecular structure of
mechanical tools, artificial limbs, new organs, 'musical clocks,' etc.
You notice that a car you've been driving for a long time finally
becomes a part of yourself. As time passes I have a relationship to
my car similar to that with a horse. The car also does many things it
wouldn't do for others. That has been even more the case during my
many years of work with tape recorders, generators and filters. The
outcome is extensions and expansions of the body.

Some people experience doors opening on their own - just like in fairy
stories - without any electrical equipment being involved. Simply
because their surroundings have gradually adapted to them. And we
can then imagine the spiritual forces in a higher world where we would
be able to move objects without touching them with physical hands,
and things happen as we want. I won't need a car there but will fly. I
won't even need my body, at least not a human body.

Let us be precise. In every universe, every galaxy, and on every

planet, one needs other bodies, other 'instruments,' no matter whether
these utilize glass, gases, transistors or whatever. In other words,
when we utilize electronic equipment today, we always want to know
its range (I used glasses just now as exemplifying mechanical
apparatus) and degree of 'high fidelity,' thus doing what I wish, which
is to faithfully reproduce what I transmit and receive so that I get an
image which is not excessively distorted - but there is always some
distortion. My body terribly distorts my spiritual perception because
the body reduces that to earthly perception. I can only think what this
body thinks.

A tone is certainly a very complex phenomenon......

Vibrations of air......

Isn't it more than that? Tones have other components apart from the
physical vibration. You have developed the phenomenon of
compression and extension. If an entire symphony is compressed
into just a few seconds, you don't experience the same as the work
played at the original tempo, do you?

Of course not. The rhythm has a different resonance.

If you listen to Beethoven, Stockhausen, Mahler or a Benedictus, you

also respond spiritually - but it's not easy to comprehend what is
happening.

But yes. Those are rhythms. And we are electrical systems which are
synchronized with and modulated by these rhythms.

Aren't we more than that?

You're again confusing two different things. There is the driver who
directs his vehicle - the body. What you sense to be the soul is still a
part of the body. We must now make very precise distinctions here.
To my way of thinking, the immortal self, the divine spark that is in
being before the body and exists forever, is not identical to the
transient soul. We know from various traditions that a distinction is
made between layers of the soul, seven in all, up to the lightest which
can separate itself from the planet. All the others are erased and
vanish together with what they learnt and stored up.

I am acquainted with spirit and soul. My bodily soul is an electric

network, a system of vibrations, an electro-magnetic field that
oscillates so long as the body does. This is the electro-magnetic
oneness and vibratory reality of the body with all of its sense organs
both inner and outer. All that together constitutes a concert. This
concert is more or less harmonious, and these vibrations are co-
ordinated like polyphony with a certain number of parts. You can after
all imagine having a fourteen-part polyphony in your body with the
seven inner and the seven outer senses.

We have even more senses but can say little about them in words.
The fourteen are all synchronized at every moment of their existence,
and together form an image of what you can experience of the soul-
self in this body.

The immortal spirit makes use of the soul's life experience as a whole
as if it were a piece of music. It learns what is valid beyond the
confines of space and time, growing in spiritual greatness and
consciousness. Individual aspects bound up with an individual soul's
abilities become inessential when a life ends, and are more or less
extinguished.

At what stage does the sensuous encounter the spiritual - and is the
spiritual also material? Is there a dividing line?

You can't make such distinctions any longer.

Can the spiritual be perceived with the outer senses?

If it can't I make use of microphonics, a process of amplification, when

I am really eager to perceive something my body doesn't pick up. I
resort to a microscope, a telescope, glasses or a microphone. And if
a hundredfold amplification isn't enough, equipment guaranteeing a
thousandfold magnification will be constructed soon for perceiving
vibrations in the micro-molecular sphere or stellar rhythms. Then we'll
hear that too. We're in fact already hearing strange things. My work
Mikrophonie I is a prime (and hitherto unprecedented) example of a
composer attempting to make music with vibrations that were
previously completely inaccessible. That process is being pushed
ever further forward.

People are now starting to incorporate recordings of whales in music,

and in the same way one day, when we have giant microphones for
picking up cosmic energies, we shall also capture the music of the
spheres. We already have powerful transmitters enabling me to pick
up shortwaves from all over the world, and no-one knows whether all
that comes from earthly sources and what that really is. Those are,
however, regulated impulses and make musical sense because they
have clear rhythms and sequences.

When Stockausen dies and is buried, will there remain something

physical apart from the dust?

Everything that during my time here was transposed into things which
emerged from me, and bear my mark, is 'Stockhausen.' I am each of
my scores you pick up. That is shaped just as much as my body to
the extent that I was able to leave my imprint. Everything that I have
shaped - whether I planted and pruned trees, produced grammophone
records and their sleeves, or composed graphic texts and graphic
descriptions for scores - is also Stockhausen until it is at some time
destroyed.

What then is is that wanders between earth and stars from incarnation
to incarnation?

That is this eternal self, born of spirit, which has decided for a
multitude of reasons that I am not ready and wish to learn additional
spiritual aptitudes - wisdom, faithfulness, imagination,hearing skills
and architectural and organizational ability, etc - until I have the feeling
that there's nothing more for me to learn on this planet. Then I'll go
somewhere else.

But what is it that wanders around?

I said - the spirit.

Is that to be comprehended in spiritual terms?

Only when it has produced something.

Where is spirit between incarnations? Is that interim existence

material?

Not as this planet understands that. One is elsewhere......at a place

where one rests. There exist the most remarkable areas of
recuperation on other planets and stars. Sirius, for example, is a
wonderful place. One can fly to various parts of the universe, or - as
many do - remain in the earth's atmosphere and rush around like the
spirits which seek the next bay to be born, not wanting anything else
except to be incarnated once again.

Could you imagine that people would develop forms of perception

able to comprehend this eternal self?

Everyone has them already. You don't need to develop them. Every
child has them - and the younger the better. You must turn your
question round and ask how we can uncover that knowledge once
again.

We are living today at a turning-point. Behind us there is an age of

positivistic natural science which - as music critics also show - comes
nowhere near spirituality because of denying its existence.

That's understandable too since this planet has cut itself off for a long
time now. This process resulted in a phenomenal development of
material forms, and to the possibility of manipulating and changing
such forms. In other words, if anyone wants to be a really good miner,
he goes as long and as often as possible into the mine, seeing
nothing of the world. And that's how things are with earthlings on this
planet. If they were to become too transcendental, yearning
excessively for heaven, or in their consciousness were to remain up
there because of the strength of their longing for the beyond, then the
earth would look a terrible mess. So what is at present happening is
all to the good, contributing toward the establishment of a maximum of
human order on this planet in terms of gradual implementation if a
degree of reasonable administration of all these elementary forces
whirling around without restraint.

Pioneers came here, and gradually became wedded to the planet so

that they have little yearning to return home, which is a good state of
affairs. That is the destiny of a prison island where people have made
a virtue of a bad situation. All the 'materialists' that people get upset
about make a marvelous contribution to organization of this planet. As
long as they are here, one should not say (as many people do in
India): "It doesn't matter whether I'm sick or healthy. I won't be here
much longer anyway," or "Let the poor devil lie where he is. He'll
soon die," or "Why should I build a house or plant a garden when
everything passes away?"

But many critics write such rubbish because they don't want to know
anything about spiritual matters. That's why they don't understand
specific aspects of your music.

Ultimately, of course, they - like all little devils - are good servants.
They bring into action forces that absolutely have to be awoken of
they're not to continue sleeping......there are, however, also opponents
who attempt to obstruct this work or divert it in another direction. We
must now devote all our efforts to making people conscious once
again of ideas contributing toward evolution. That is only possible by
way of enlightenment......

Excerpt from an interview with Stockhausen's biographer, Michael

Kurtz, at Kurten, 22.9. 1980
 Supra-Humanization

......a musician is time and again confronted with the question of how
he should order sounds. He reflects in exactly the same way as life,
as the cosmos. If we think about the cosmos, we recognize that
arguing about how much is predetermined and how much is left to
chance is pretty stupid. Is a supernova left to chance or not? We
would certainly not say that the moon's circling around the earth, or
the planets around the sun in the solar system, are left to chance.
Otherwise there would be nothing but chaos, an entropic distribution
of particles.

So there we are. The degree to which a musician inclines one way or

the other depends upon the spirit incarnated in his person. If he is an
extremist, determinist, struggling with words, and perhaps even bodily,
against the aleatoric trend which was basically necessary as an
extension of the traditional concept of organization. If, in the other
hand, he makes aleatoric methods, the operations of chance, into an
absolute, leaving everything indeterminate, the situation where
nothing is of interest any longer, is quickly reached. Things simply
swim around - and the reality of the cosmos is no longer reflected. If a
composer is profoundly involved in reflecting and balancing the most
essential principles of cosmic energies within his works, he will find a
system that is relatively harmonious, a system in which all the different
energies may play together but attain a harmonious relationship
amongst the more important developments. I always say that the
larger-scale relationships must be ordered in a highly deterministic
fashion whilst aleatoric changes should be tolerated in lesser spheres.
Look at some beech leaves and compare them with the needles of a
fir tree. You will recognize that it's possible to change around the
positioning of a tree's leaves, and also that their number varies
considerably from tree to tree - and yet one knows quite clearly
whether this is a beech tree or a fir. So the distribution of leaves or
needles is fairly aleatoric as far as their individual positioning is
concerned - within certain limits of course. If you pull a thousand
leaves off a tree so that it is scarcely recognizable, it is still a beech.
So with regard to detail, the realm of lesser proportions, we can allow
a great deal of freedom for aleatoric, chance occurrences. Today we
should even determine the extent of chance from zero to a specific
maximum in certain organisms. So you see that a composer always
reflects a certain degree of consciousness.

You have very much stressed the analytical aspect of your music,
suggesting that we must develop our perception in order to be able to
follow your music.

Consciousness.

If I may draw a parallel with the music of past centuries, it seems to

me that I can either listen on an analytical level, following the work's
formal structure, and even individual intervals and relationships from
note to note - or, if I lack musical knowledge, simply lean back,
perceiving this music emotionally, and allowing it to influence m in that
way. To what extent are you interested in the technical aspect of what
you do, and how far are you aware of the emotional influence you
exert upon the listener?

I hope I haven't left the impression that we should express in words

our experiences whilst listening to music. In fact I hope that I have
conveyed that we should concentrate to an exceptional extent on the
process of listening itself - that I have not wasted many words on
describing what we hear. I attempted to make clear that we should
concentrate to the greatest possible degree on the sound itself. I
even said that we should become the sound. If the sound moves
upward I also move upward; of it moves downward, I go down too. If
it becomes quieter, so do I. If the sound divides in two, I follow too,
and meet myself when the sound reunites, etc. This means that one
is completely swallowed up in the process of listening, thereby
becoming aware that there is space. One may have previously
blocked that emotionally - as you said. Emotion isn't in fact the right
word. You probably mean that one allows oneself to be impressed -
so impressions instead of emotions.
I would like to make clear something else: that we simply open up
rather than create links between specific musical processes and
certain feelings or states of being - sadness, joy or wanting to dance.
When that opening happens, one is modulated unceasingly by the
music - whether one wants that or not. Whether we are aware of this
or not, we are modulated by a specific piece of music in a specific
way. We become this music up to a certain point, and we will never
be the same again once we have heard that music. I should like to
make people aware that they are even changed when they
unsuspectingly enter an aeroplane, opening a newspaper or looking
out of the window whilst music pours out of loudspeakers. Their
molecules are modulated by the vibrations. That changes their
electrical system and is never to be reversed. Everyone should be
aware of whether what passes through his or her body is acoustic junk
or something more refined. For that reason it is very good to develop
awareness of what really happens with sounds - even though that
cannot be expressed in words. If someone achieves the ideal of
being completely open, he or she doesn't need to talk. Everything is
completely open......

You say that art is a reflection of life, which in turn entails a specific
conjunction of cosmic forces or a network of relationships between
energies we all sense. Is it then also possible that the art we see
today could be the reflection of certain self-destructive cosmic forces,
could be the objectivization of those cosmic energies?

The interesting thing is that nothing is excluded. Human beings are

nothing but incarnations of specific currents of spiritual forces. And
they are all involved in an unimaginable concert, playing with one
another and against one another. All possible energies take part.
These encounters occur in one and the same person, in one and the
same work. They liberate energy and set spirit free, like an atomic
explosion. I see in the disintegration of an atom the liberation of spirit,
which can reconstitute itself and take on forms of constant renewal.
Destructive force is thus absolutely necessary and meaningful in the
cosmic balance.
Don't you think that the total experience you spoke about remains
impossible so long as a visual analysis, comparable with your aural
analysis, is not viewed as being part of this, according with the sound
element?

Yes, that's right. I would say that 999 out of 1000 people in our
society are predominantly visually inclined, and that for them the only
way is to transpose all experiences and sense perceptions into visual
terms. It's true that only a few people descended from birds.
Someone told me today that most are descended from fish or worms.
Birds are a relatively rare species. The mammals, which have
incarnated in the form of human beings, predominate today. The
problem as I see it is that only one in a thousand is musical and has
the possibility of communicating directly with the world by way of
music. Of course everyone reacts through their skin, and to an even
greater extent their tympanic membrane, to the acoustic waves
constantly present in the environment. Very few, however, possess
such direct musicality that this acoustic environment signifies
something to them without being visualized or transposed into visual
forms. I have often said that is closely linked with so much of our
development being spent writing everything down so that things can
become what we can describe and we scarcely perceive anything else
any longer......

Do you believe in the existence of a human intellect that should be

separated from the senses - and if so, how much of your music
appeals to the intellect?

Well, I think the intellect is what we today call a 'computer.' A

computer is an autonomous brain, albeit at present fairly limited in
size. The intellect registers. It has storage capacity like a tape or
gramophone record, the so-called memory; it contains combinational
possibilities inclusive of certain aleatoric variations of hitherto
unforeseen combinations; and it disposes over a regulatory system

As you yourself indicated, our senses are our antennae, comparable

to those in a radio set. We have antennae for the various realms of
vibration. We use them for picking up news and information, which is
then stored and then circulated, especially when we are asleep.

I would therefore make a clear-cut distinction between the storage and

the combinatorial facilities and the antennae. It wouldn't be very wise
to confuse them. You should have expanded your question somewhat
and asked, 'What is intuition? Is it also a part of the brain?' And I
would have answered 'no' since the brain is an apparatus that is
influenced by other forces, such as the eyes, which in turn use it
although they can also sometimes be its prisoner too. Most
intellectuals identify themselves with their brain and thus become its
captive. Their person, the spirit which should really direct the vehicle
with assistance from the brain, is no longer in charge. It no longer
receives information from outside the closed system, and almost
everything one finds in such people is a permutation of stored
information and the combination of all kinds of recorded memory,
which in music we call the variation form. With 'intuition', however,
influence from the realms of the supra-conscious is transmitted
through antennae picking up higher hidden senses.

I'd like to return to a question already touched on - the question of

dehumanization in new music about which people talk so much,
especially with regard to electronic music. As you know, critics say
that the medium itself is pretty dehumanized, that things like sinus
waves are impoverished and sterile, lacking all the human
idiosyncrasy otherwise to be found in concert halls. The other
criticism is perhaps more profound, and involves the actual content.
Even though you don't separate sounds and form because you say
they are the form, there nevertheless exists a kind of content which
probably reflects a specific social phenomenon. The question is really
whether this phenomenon is itself so dehumanized that art will
perhaps die out fairly quickly. If art is unable to touch the most human
qualities such as love, hate and other things of that nature, can it exist
at all? Is it in any way valuable art?
There are two possible answers to what you say. The first is that it
would certainly be a mistake to view all human beings as the same.
As Albert Schweitzer once said, "there is an entire progression from
the ape to the saint." They all look more or less like human beings.
Some people say that each person is responsible for the face
presented to the world from the age of 23 onward. That implies that
very few of us constantly work on our degree of enlightenment and
expansion of consciousness. Our present condition involves man
multiplying at a great rate - but I doubt whether the most enlightened
beings are multiplying at the highest of speeds. That means that the
unconscious is exploding in a very necessary and healthy way - and I
stress: the unconscious, not the supra-conscious.

The second answer to your question is somewhat more esoteric. If

you have ever heard the name Aurobindo, you perhaps know he was
an Indian wise man who died in 1950 after predicting several
thousand years of human evolution, or 'involution' as he called it. He
essentially said that we are today faced with a situation comparable
with what is encountered, for instance, at the start of the film 2001 (of
course Aurobindo didn't make the direct comparison) where the first
so-called human beings emerged from the realm of those creatures
scientists term non-human - we would say 'animals,' even though a
great deal of controversy has flared up over whether human beings
might not have appeared as a separate species at a specific moment.
Be that as it may, in the film 2001 there comes a moment when an
ape takes a bone in its hand and kills another with it. A flash of
intelligence occurs, elevating this ape above the others even though it
is physically weaker. Aurobindo says that we are at the start of a new
terrestrial mutation where a few beings - initially very few - are
transforming themselves into something else, into a kind of super-
human being. What you call 'dehumanization' is in fact the fear of the
majority that they can no longer keep up. People call that
dehumanization, but what they really mean - without being able to put
it into words - is super-humanization, or even better, supra-
humanization; an enormous leap (like that from animals to man) from
man to a superhuman spirit or being.
As far as my personal experience is concerned, I think it is absolutely
certain that in the midst of humanity there exist beings who are far
superior in all respects to everything else - not just in the way that they
live and behave but also with regard to what they can really do. The
arts also certainly reflect this entire process, Of course this is a
moment of extreme crisis but at the same time it is a fruitful moment,
as very rarely occurs in the world's history, when everything is
changing to a new level - or more precisely, when consciousness is
attaining is new a new dimension (even though among a few people).
We could ask Aurobindo why not all animals have become human
beings. And the answer today would be that this has almost been
achieved. Battery farms may slow down the process a little, but what
we get to eat as chicken is more like cardboard than animal flesh.
What I am saying is that we have eaten up virtually all the remnants of
animal and plant life, transforming them into human flesh and bones,
and that his process will continue at enormous speed until the middle
of the next century or perhaps even further ahead when there may be
fifteen thousand million people on this planet, scratching nourishment
from the seabed or producing it artificially from chemicals. What we
eat is ultimately less important, provided it maintains bodily functioning
for the new tasks ahead. I believe that everything will finally be
transformed into human form, and that animals will then vanish
completely - apart from a few still to be seen in zoos and photographs.

The principle involved there was transformation of everything into

human form, so the next step will of course be: what will become of
human beings? At present we can still say that only very few people
are interested in that. The general fear, the worldwide crisis, simply
reflects this process. Most people feel within themselves an inner
clock that tells them where evolution is heading, and also that they
won't get so far in this life. That basic feeling engenders hate and
hostility and God knows what else: extermination, oppression and
enforced conformity in fascist, socialist and democratic systems,
which have in common their demand for 'single solutions' for all and
everything. Those are signs of humanity's death and rebirth.
Do you then write music for the super-human minority?

Well, if you want to belong to that minority, yes. I simply do not write
music for specific people. I write music because it must be written. It
enters me, and I must work very hard to compose it as accurately as
possible. And then you can do with it what you want.

If you devote so much time to producing and communicating your

music, doesn't it upset you that you don't communicate with a greater
number of people?

Oh no! If I'd wanted to, I would have been the Beatles' greatest
competitor! What they produced for just seven years, I would
probably have kept going a little longer since you can be sure I would
have never worked in such a quartet. No, whenever the great majority
follows a fashion, it pursues mediocrity and banality.

How do you suggest that we should distinguish between electronic

music and musical junk?

Most electronic music is junk. There's no doubt about that. The most
untalented composers have turned up in studios because they had no
chance of composing anywhere else. So they sit around there, telling
themselves, 'take a look at things, and try your luck.' They believe
more in the means available than in themselves, thinking that if they
employ modern methods the outcome will be interesting for that very
reason - which is a terrible mistake.

Do you think that listeners to your music must possess an appropriate

level of consciousness in order to be able even to perceive all the
sounds involved?

It would be marvelous if there were an increase in enlightenment and

consciousness, but as I've already said there are very many critical
frontiers which cannot easily be crossed. I have no illusions about the
future. As I previously said, people make whatever use they want of
my music anyway. If I were to break my neck in a car crash this
evening, that would basically be of very little significance for other
people. They would still carry on doing as they please with my music.
They are absolutely free. There shouldn't be any rules laying down
what people have to think about my music and how they should
experience it - because everyone is different. In that respect I am a
subjectivist and I suggest that everyone should make their own sense
of their life, the world and Stockhausen's music.

Excerpts from a Cambridge discussion after Stockhausen's 1973

lecture on The Four Criteria.