An incongruously larky footnote on Stockhausen
Dec 8th, 2007 by Paul Moor
This afternoon I actually started a bloggery, skimming the cream off the many times over the past half-century when Karlheinz Stockhausen’s path and mine crossed, but eventually I gave up on it for what I’d originally thought of as a casual stroll down Memory Lane unexpectedly touched off such an avalanche of recollections, from locations including (inevitably) not only Donaueschingen and Darmstadt but also Warsaw - that I finally simply threw in the towel, unexpectedly swamped by all those still vivid recollections.
But I do want to turn loose one nifty, primarily because it contrasts so strongly with the oh so serious way Karlheinz almost ostentatiously took himself - and I hasten to make clear that I in no way intend this as chipping away at the monument he took such an important part in erecting to himself as - unquestionably - one of the most influential, if least enjoyed and enjoyable, composers of his time (1924 - 2007).
During his early glory days, his activities focused upon the Rhineland metropolis Cologne, for more than one reason. He came from that region, as any aurally informed ear noticed as soon as he opened his mouth. Of all the Federal German regional radio/television centers, the affluent industrial Rhine-Ruhr area’s de facto capital Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk had the most money, and WDR pampered Karlheinz even during his early years like an especially favorite native son. If he suddenly one day (so to speak) r’ared back and proclaimed that for some new opus he had in mind he needed unprecedented electronic recording tape with not the customary two tracks but five - which automatically meant manufacturing such tape with an unprecedented width, not to mention the electro-mechanical apparatus necessary to record and play such tape back - Karlheinz got it. WDR established its pioneering Studio für ektronische Musik primarily for him, and he in turn made it world-famous, starting with his trail-blazing Gesang der Jünglinge im Feuerofen (Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace), which interpolated a single, sonically “white” boy soprano’s voice, bereft of overtones, with accompanying sounds otherwise exclusively electronically generated.
Cologne’s thriving avant-garde scene in those days included not only Karlheinz, as its uncrowned king, but also a collage artist named Mary Bauermeister, who from the beginning took an exceptional shine to him personally. Remember “Never underestimate the power of a woman”? Well, the first step towards her displacing his first wife Doris and becoming the second lawfully wedded Frau Stockhausen came when she cunningly asked whether she, the collage artiste, could study with him, the composer, actually take lessons from him.
During her premarital period she occupied a reportedly spacious studio that provided house-room for various sporadic avant-garde happenings (remember happenings?) of significant esoteric importance. I never attended one, but my favorite will live forever in my memory on the basis of several vivid conversational accounts, some of them first-hand. The serious artist of the evening in question had said the elaborate nature his happening necessitated an advance rehearsal, and one high point of that rehearsal came when he wound up and hurled an egg at the vast expanse of plane glass providing the studio’s primary daytime illumination, with the egg’s innards dribbling down the pane in fine serious-artistic fashion.
Like perhaps most serious artists, this gentleman had an evil-minded rival in the area, who got himself briefed about that rehearsal and then fiendishly set out to sabotage the main event, with the vicious intention of making a monkey out of the evening’s guest of honor. He somehow snuck in and snaffled the designated egg away, replacing it with a reasonably accurate facsimile he had carefully pre-boiled to stone-like consistency. The climactic moment for the scheduled hurling came . . . and Mary Bauermeister’s enormous plate-glass studio window shattered into a thousand shards - at a time when plate glass in Germany cost so much as to classify almost as a luxury item.
I never did manage to obtain any conscientious reporter’s obligatory confirmation that the serious artist reacted to the prevalent risibility greeting this development - mistaking it as part of the serious artist’s own planned happening - by turning upon the uncouth guffawers and denouncing them one and all as “Faschisten!“ I also can’t tell you whether Karlheinz himself attended that uniquely memorable event; I offer it here only as a peripheral descriptive footnote to the Stockhausen period in Cologne at that time.
(Incidentally, my eagle-eyed Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson has jogged my memory to remind me that during an earlier phase of this playpen I’d reported another serious artistic event - in the air over the German town of Braunschweig - that did indeed personally involve Karlheinz, and in his accustomed stellar role. Typing his surname into the Search window up at the very top of all this will lead you to those earlier bits of Stockhauseniana.)
