Me, Myself, and I: Aesthetics and Self-Presentation in Stockhausen's <em>Trans</em>

Abstract

ME, MYSELF, AND I: AESTHETICS AND SELF-PRESENTATION IN STOCKHAUSEN’S TRANS ETHAN BRAUN ARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN (1928–2007) OCCUPIES a peculiar place amongst the post-1945 avant-garde. A highly influential composer, teacher, and author from the mid 1950s, his influence extended well beyond the community of contemporary classical music, his face was included on the cover of the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the likes of Miles Davis and Björk have counted both him and his work as a major influence. Stockhausen was an inspiration to some but a tyrant to others, collecting such accusations throughout his life as imperialist, eccentric, fascist, communist, authoritarian. Many one-time colleagues of his became dismissive or even hostile towards his person.1 This hostility was exacerbated by his notorious claim of coming from Sirius, a star within the Canis Major constellation. And yet it is precisely this revelation of extraterrestrial origin—around 1970 —that lies at the center of much of his work. Its influence was explicit in some cases, like Sirius (1975), but was often implicit, as with the piece of this study, Trans (1971).2 One of his more unrelenting, raucous pieces, Trans, dedicated to “my first child, Suja,” seems to attack the listener, who throughout the K Full-size versions of the images in this article may be found at www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx/. 36 Perspectives of New Music work’s approximately half-hour duration is besieged by a wall of forty string instruments sawing away at sprawling sonorities spanning six or more octaves.3 The musicians of the wall stare blankly forward as if in trance through a violet-red light akin to that seen “when flying over the North Pole.”4 Behind them four groups of brass, winds, some keyboards, and percussion seem to rage throughout much of the work, a large black screen obstructing them and their conductor from the audience’s view. The sound of a weaving-loom shuttling, what Stockhausen called the Zeitschlag (time-stroke), thwacks across the hall through surround-sound speakers approximately every twenty seconds. These, amidst the myriad theatrical curiosities of the work, make for a perplexing experience, one that intimates a sense of ritual carried out for some arcane purpose never revealed. In this study I qualify my hearing of Trans by reading certain aspects of the work in light of Stockhausen’s rhetoric surrounding the work, and his self-presentation broadly speaking. Stockhausen claimed that Trans came to him in a dream. He felt that the dream was a medium through which the work was transmitted in its completed form, and that he could not alter the work’s materials, but simply channel the work in its entirety. Shortly after completing Trans in 1971, Stockhausen had his revelation of alien origin while listening to his daughter Julika’s stomach.5 To what degree does his constructed identity manifest aesthetically in Trans, and how might one hear it? In other words, if “The Beyond” acts as an aesthetic category for Stockhausen’s persona, how might it help illuminate something of Trans? Beyond-ness as an aesthetic category originates in part in a mode of self-presentation that has many precedents in the earlier part of the twentieth century, but perhaps most importantly for Stockhausen were Arnold Schoenberg (1874– 1951) and Edgard Varèse (1883–1965). Additionally, similar concepts can be seen in the history of radio, a medium with which Stockhausen frequently worked throughout the 1960s and that, as I try to demonstrate in what follows, can be seen to be at work in Trans. Indeed radio, telecommunication more broadly speaking, and the techniques and mechanics of signal processing function for Stockhausen in various ways that can be traced by focused attention to select moments in his music and in his rhetoric. By the time of Trans’s composition, signal processing in the form of ring modulation had figured into such works as Mixtur for five orchestral groups, four sinusoid generators, and four ring modulators (1964–66); Mantra for two pianos, sine wave generators, ring modulators, percussion, and shortwave radio (1970); and Mikrophonie II, for choir, Hammond Me, Myself, and I: Aesthetics and Self...