>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Nicholas A. Brown: Good
evening ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the Library of Congress.
My name is Nick and I am
one of the music specialists
and concert producers here.
Very pleased to see you all tonight.
We have a very exciting
pre-concert talk
and then performance this evening.
We're very welcomed,
we're very excited
to welcome distinguished scholar and
performer Paul Miller to the Library
of Congress for this
evening's pre-concert
and his writing is also
featured in the program booklet
that you'll receive later on.
Paul is both a performer
and scholar.
He's an avid interpreter of baroque
music and has performed recently
with the Washington Bach Consort,
the Bethlehem Bach Festival
and the New York State Baroque,
as well as many other ensembles.
He recently had the privilege
of performing on the Library
of Congress' Gagliano
"Viola d'Amore"
for the Bach St. John Passion
at the National Cathedral
this past Palm Sunday.
Paul serves on the faculty of the
Rocky Ridge Early Music Festival
in Colorado as well as at the
Hawaii Performing Arts Festival
on the Big Island.
He is also the director
of the Cornell University Baroque
Orchestra, which has doubled
in its size since he took over
and he is currently finishing a
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship
at Cornell.
His research focuses on the
Ornamentation and Improv
in Italian baroque music as well
as rhetoric and gesture in the work
of Stockhausen with whom
he had the privilege
of studying for six summers.
So we're very lucky to have someone
with his background speaking
tonight about "Mantra."
Of note Paul premiered Stockhausen's
solo piece "In Freundschaft"
which is for viola, and his
dissertation which was completed
at Eastman pioneered methods
for analyzing spatial motion
in Stockhausen's later works.
Paul plans to relocate
to D.C. shortly
so hopefully you'll all be able
to see him regularly in the future
if you're really into
Stockhausen and other things
in baroque performance, so without
further ado welcome Paul Miller.
[ Applause ]
>> Paul Miller: Well thank you
Nick and thank you David Plylar
who have done so much to
make this concert happen.
These guys worked tirelessly
to get things right
and they almost always
do get things right
and sometimes better than right.
Okay, in the early 1970s it might
have seemed to the casual observer
that the avant-garde movement
in music was on the threshold
of gaining a permanent foothold.
Its roots extended from West
Coast American experimentalists
of the 1920s and '30s like
Henry Cowell and Harry Partch
to the European serialists of
the 1950s Darmstadt generation.
The Parisian School of
Messiaen and various Fluxus
and Neo-Dadaist movements in
New York City and Cologne.
When Pierre Boulez took the reins
of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1970
to '72 subsequently leading the
New York Philharmonic from 1971
to '75 one of the most
prominent composers
of new music positioned
himself at the forefront
of American musical life.
During the summer months of 1970
Stockhausen's marathon concerts
in Osaka, Japan which lasted for
five and a half hours every day
for 183 days consecutively were
heard by over a million visitors.
Even in his twilight years
Stravinsky experimented
with serialism and twelve
tone rows suddenly appeared
in the last works of Aaron Copland.
But his sense of historical
inevitability was not
felt universally.
While critics such as
Claude Levi Strauss
and Nicholas Ruwet
expressed serious skepticism
about the entire aesthetic validity
of abstract serialism
performers lodged complaints
about the impenetrability
of modernist scores,
while audiences sometimes
expressed displeasure by walking
out of concerts at the same
time that a younger generation
of composers such as Terry Riley
and Steve Reich reacted to 1950s
and '60s aesthetic in
their own composing.
Carter and Stockhausen
who essentially located
within avant-garde circles
developed imaginative strategies
to make the elements and processes
of their art more audible.
These hooks allowed the old guard to
reach out to more casual listeners
who might have an intuitive
but not specialized knowledge
of music while holding on to the
intellectual rigor of their craft.
But the two works on tonight's
concert actually go much further
than just extending an olive
branch to the listener.
Both probe deeply into the
question of musical gesture
and identity consequently,
they resonant with many
questions currently circulating
around the humanities
and social sciences.
But before we get deeply into
this I'll first speak a little bit
about how these intricate
works are constructed
and suggest some possible
strategies for listening.
Now for anybody following
Stockhausen's "Courier"
in the late 1960s, "Mantra" scored
for two pianos came as a big shock
because it was his first
conventionally notated piece
in almost ten years.
Considering that Stockhausen had
already exploded most conventional
notions of what music could be
in the 1950s and '60s this return
to more orthodox means of notating
music was viewed at the time by many
as a stylistic break with the past.
Some even went so far as
to call it a betrayal.
The works from the late 1960s
by Stockhausen could be read
as a progressive withdrawal from
the arena traditionally occupied
by the composer in the West.
This was a view of composition
primarily as an activity that is
to say from the 1960s Stockhausen's
view was composition was primarily
as an activity, I would argue
or in other words an exploration
of indeterminate and
self-regulating forms
of communal composition enabled
by tightly knit ensembles
of collaborative improvisers.
Here's a score from the
mid-late '60s of Stockhausen's
and "Prozession" a
representative score
from the period immediately
before "Mantra."
The notation consists primarily
of plus, minus and equal signs
which indicate processes.
For example, the instrumentalists
make increases in loudness
or articulate more formal
segments or do less change
in rhythmic diversity
or etcetera, etcetera.
But even this minimal
symbolic language disappeared
in Stockhausen's text pieces
from a 1968 collection
"Aus den sieben Tagen" which
means "from the seven days"
because Stockhausen went into a kind
of self-imposed exile
for seven days in 1968.
These enigmatic texts
provide the material
in which musicians are
just spontaneously create
intuitive music.
So what drove is Stockhausen
back to conventional notation?
I think this has to do with
the basic idea for "Mantra"
which the composer explained himself
and here I'll quote from a lecture
that Stockhausen gave in 1991.
"I considered a number
of different titles.
I couldn't find any
word in our language
to describe the following process.
The composition of a
Gestalt and the construction
of a large forum derived
exclusively from this Gestalt.
I wanted to avoid using the words
theme, row or subject as in a fugue.
For this reason I chose a word
that has a similar meaning
but more in a spiritual sense.
In general, mantra refers to
a series of tones or syllables
that are constantly
repeated in different tempi
with varying dynamics in a way
that is both acoustically
audible and inwardly mediated.
Through concentration
on such a series
of tones the listener
enters a higher state
of receptiveness and consciousness.
Through concentration I've become
purified and fully conscious."
So okay, the "Mantra" is a
basic musical shape or Gestalt
that constantly undergoes
transformation throughout the work.
In fact, this Gestalt pretty
much forms the entire content
of the work in one way or another.
Moreover, Stockhausen
expresses the hope
that the various mantras
will actually be audible.
Finally there is a scarcely
disguised spiritual element
which actually derives from the
composer's intense encounter
with the writings of
the one Sri Aurobindo
who is an early 20th century Indian
nationalist, a yogi and a guru.
But practically speaking what
is this "Mantra" musically?
Okay, so not counting the grace
notes, the part for the right hand
of the piano is a twelve tone row
with one note A serving double duty
as both the first and
the last element.
The left hand part is
nearly a twelve tone row.
The entire mantra has four
sections each lasting ten, six, 15,
or 12 quarter notes
that's labeled here.
The sections or as Stockhausen
liked to call them limbs,
a bodily metaphor which we'll come
back to maybe later in the talk
for a moment, these limbs, these
four limbs are separated by rests
of different durations first
three-quarter notes then two,
then one and finally four.
You might also notice that the
left hand part has a permutational
or an inversional relationship
to the top part.
That is to say that the first limb
of the left hand that's
right here, okay?
Well, that's right here, excuse me.
The first limb of the left hand part
is the inversion of the second limb
of the top part and so also here the
second limb of the left part is kind
of the inversion of that and so
these two parts down here are sort
of in the same relationship.
Okay, now it gets more interesting.
Have a look back at the right hand.
It's maybe a little hard to see here
because it's so small but each note,
with one exception, is associated
with a different ornament.
The first indicated by
a circle number one is
"regelmaessiger Repetition,"
or regular repetition.
The second one okay
"Akzent am Ende," or accent
at the end that's the
accent at the end.
That's the sort of thing associated
with that second note of the mantra.
The third is normal which is simply
a note with nothing extra and so on.
So every principle mantra note
except this normal one gets
modulated by a kind of ornament
or as Stockhausen explicitly
said character.
We'll come back to these
characters in a moment.
Now that we have some idea of
what the mantra actually is
in "Mantra" how does
Stockhausen compose an entire work
out of this basic material?
First of all, each of
the 13 main notes of the
"Mantra" will be expanded
into its own section each
of several minutes duration.
But what material gets
poured into these sections?
Another sketch can help us out here.
Here this form plan is not uncommon
in Stockhausen's composition
and he was kind enough to
publish most all of them.
What it shows is that the "Mantra"
is to be temporally, excuse me,
stretched out or shrunk to short
of duration as three seconds
and as long a duration
as 212 seconds.
The bottom chart here, read from
left to right is kind of a plan
for ordering the appearances
and overlappings
of these different
temporally stretched
out or squished out mantra.
Up to three mantras
can be heard at once
and those denser moments present
particularly great challenges
for pianists and listeners alike.
As Australian musicologist
Richard Toop wrote the
"form scheme here is not necessarily
to make the music conform to it
but rather it might function more
as a way of focusing on the creation
of the music itself because this
was done before Stockhausen started
composing and he broke
his plan many times."
That's another question
for another talk.
Okay, so it's now clear that
Stockhausen devised this plan
for shrinking and expanding
his mantra temporally
but what about pitch?
Now, here's another sketch.
By altering musical intervals
of his mantra the melody can span
the entire keyboard, if desired.
So you heard the mantra before and
it was kind of in this narrow range.
So Stockhausen came up with
a way to make that grow,
the pitch intervals grow as well.
Okay, so what this shows is
that there's 12 different scales
that Stockhausen was
working with, okay?
So the top one is the ordinary
chromatic scales, okay?
So every single key on the
keyboard but on the bottom the one,
the bottom scale has many large gaps
of many thirds in between notes,
minor thirds and major
thirds so on and so forth.
So then he went along and took his
mantra, this is very hard to see
but you just can follow along.
He took his mantra and he applied
his crazy scales to the mantra
and at the bottom you have the
one that spans the entire keyboard
and you can see maybe it's not
so easy to see but it has a lot
of high and low notes in it.
So this is a sketch to sort of map
out the 12 different
expansions of the pitch content.
Okay, now returning
to the ornaments,
recall that a single ornament will
form the basic character of each
of the piece's 13 main sections.
Along the top of this next sketch,
okay each of these 13 large formal
sections is numbered with each
of the section's main
ornament also, okay.
Now in the left column in Roman
numerals it shows us the ways
that ornaments are kind of mapped on
to each pitch of the mantra, okay?
So in theory each section
of the piece has a different
characteristic sound related
to the governing ornament applied
to the main mantra as you can see,
in the top left corner of
this table the main character
of the first section the tremolo.
That's right here.
The following analysis here
shows the different presentations
of the mantra in that
tremolo section.
So E one and E three, etcetera
they indicate the degree
of pitch expansion.
So E 12 is a pretty
big pitch expansion.
The P identifies whether
it's piano one or two
and these other numbers kind of
give you the main rhythmic units.
Notice that very soon the pitch
expansion indicated at E 12,
right which refers to one
of the widely spaced scales.
The piece could simply progress
along those lines mechanically
cycling through the different
characters and expansions
but Stockhausen as usual throws a
few wrenches into the works and I'd
like to show you two of
the more interesting ones.
Just before the midpoint of the work
there's a kind of minimalist passage
in which the mechanism of continual
transformation seems to get stuck.
After many repetitions
the tempo accelerates.
Then the first player plays a wrong
note and the other seems to respond
with what to me sounds
you like musical laughter.
Then the first pianist
plays another wrong note
but now the other pianist
gets rather annoyed
to which the first responds
with an even higher note
as if to rub it all in.
Finally, the second pianist
plays a graceful arabesque
up to the new high
note and the two kind
of reconcile their
differences, okay.
So there's one last important
thing to say about mantra.
You might have noticed some
odd other worldly sound.
This is because both of the pianos
are electronically ring modulated.
The electronic effect is so called
because its circuit diagram
looks like a ring of diodes.
Essentially, a ring and you can see
that the popular media has used,
has availed themselves of this
technology in many different ways
because the Daleks
are ring modulated.
Essentially a ring modulator what
it does is it takes two electronic
signals as input and returns
their sum and difference.
So that means it also returns, yeah,
you transform the timbre
essentially.
In "Mantra" one of the inputs is the
sound from the pianos and the others
which the audience doesn't hear
explicitly is a sine wave generator.
So you'll these boxes.
For each of the 13 sections of the
piece one sine wave generator is set
to a different mantra note.
So even if the original mantra
notes are not literally present
in a section they are still there
in a form of this ghostly input
which transforms and
distorts the musical surface.
Occasionally the pianists deviate
from their sine wave settings
at special junctures creating
special glissando effects.
If I have to sum up
the most important idea
in "Mantra" it would be that musical
transformations can be made audible
as Wolfgang Visser theorized in a
book Stockhausen read "The shape
of one species of fish
can approximately map
on to another simply through a
change in the coordinate system."
This is a little theoretical
but it's there.
An analogous thing happens musically
in "Mantra" familiarizing ourselves
with the basic tune makes it easier
to hear the relationships among
the distortions piled upon it.
Some might even cast the
experience in spiritual terms
as Stockhausen himself did.
Repeating Stockhausen's words from
earlier "Through concentration
on such a series of tones the
listener enters a higher state
of receptiveness and consciousness;
through concentration I become
purified and fully conscious."
Okay, while his pretensions
to attain spirituality
through sound might not have been
so explicit as Stockhausen's,
Elliott Carter's music of the
1970s is no less demanding
for the listener yet like
Stockhausen Carter composed the duo
for violin and piano
with listeners in mind.
Premiered in 1974 at the
Cooper Union in New York City
to standing room only the work
was commissioned by the McKim Fund
at the Library of Congress and we
have some very interesting letters
and correspondences out there
in the cases by the way.
You should check them out.
So the fund was created
in 1970 through a bequest
of Mrs. W. Duncan McKim a violinist.
Her husband was a well-known
doctor and an organist.
The fund continues to operate
today as a critical resource
for the creation of new music.
Here's the beginning of the score.
The basic premise of Carter's
piece is that the piano
and violin express extraordinarily
distinct musical characters.
As Carter wrote, "This is rooted
in the physical way each instrument
produces sound the composition's
basic character thus
derives 'from the contrast
between the sound's made by stroking
the violin with a bow and the sound
by streaking the piano.'"
Carter reflects this musically
in many ways.
The violin part is often jagged
with irregular rhythms so fused
with a hectic anxiety or expressive
intensity which is specified
by the many musical
directions always written
in Italian a particularly
expressive language.
For example,
"Ruvido, espressivo,
molto espressivo, tenero,
appassionato, cabtabile..."
On the other hand piano
projects a cool, calculating
and rational persona with its
predominantly calm, long tones.
But even when the piano
plays in areas
of thicker texture its rhythms are
usually steady while the violins are
most often unequal.
This confrontation between
personalities is audible
from the very beginning whereas
the violin spins forth an active
[foreign word] like
chatter, the piano withdraws
into passivity even going so far
as to depart into a netherworld
of shadowy resonance by
occasionally depressing a key
without actually striking the string
itself so it's resonance in a way
which is a kind of weird
analog to Stockhausen.
All right, so if the
fundamental contrast
between the two instruments is
apparent by their different styles
of playing Carter underscores
it with a very subtle
but not inaudible technique of pitch
deployment that can be found in many
of his other works of this time.
With few exceptions each
instrument expresses its own palette
of intervals.
The violin typically plays
minor seconds, major thirds
and perfect fifths, major
sixths and minor sevenths.
The piano's repertoire consists
of the remaining intervals
and the two share a
tri-tone in between them.
Moreover, Carter sometimes
freezes each instrument's pitches
in a formal section.
This means for example that
whenever the violin plays a note
in a particular octave say a
middle C the piano avoids playing
that specific note in that octave
and will only express it
in a different octave.
When this lock thaws out like we
are slowly doing in Ithaca right now
and the instruments share pitches
in the same register the timbrel
profile changes drastically making
formal boundaries audible
by shifting toward an iridescent
shimmering world of sound.
The game the musician's play by
alternatively sharing pitches
and then claiming them
for themselves allows them
to probe deeply into a
kind of bubbling cauldron
of social interplay and
dramatic interaction.
This is apparent in the sudden shift
of character around measure 84.
So this excerpt I think starts
here and when you see this big line
that means they're going to share
the notes and I've put little lines.
You can't really get all
this but you'll get the idea.
Yet for all its inter-intellectual
muscle the duo is a work
that appeals to the senses also.
It's central pointalistic section
contains moments of dead pan humor
at the same time as it pays homage
to a well-worn modernist style
dating back to one might say Webern
and avant-garde music of the
1950s by Boulez and Stockhausen.
And it's interesting to note
that Boulez himself introduced
to the premier of this piece
in '74 in New York City.
The duo's buildup to its enormous
final emotional climax involves some
of the most gymnastic and
acrobatic writing for violin
and piano conceivable,
pushing the limits not just
of the instrumental technique
but also the composer's ability
to express musical
ideas through notation.
This is as Buffalo composer
David Felder might put it,
linebacker music and that it
revels in the enormous gestures,
massive collisions and a kind
of intense chromatic fog.
Two deeper questions resonant
in our own time with this music.
The first goes something
like this I think.
Are we locked into expressing a
certain repertoire of gestures
or behaviors, hear intervals by
virtue of the physical construction
of our body or instruments?
This is a tough question, for
what is more natural or idiomatic
on the violin than
playing a perfect fifth?
You just have to play
the open strings.
Even though the violin and piano
occasionally play each other's
intervals they remain fairly locked
into their own intervalic
repertoire.
Second, what is the nature of the
claim instruments have on notes
in the registerally frozen sections?
Here I venture a slightly
more confident answer.
I understand the centrist music
that occurs when notes are shared
and lines intertwine as
an optimistic gesture one
that might even suggest an
oratic reading of the piece.
Still Carter's music metaphorically
expresses the great difficulty
of stepping beyond embodied norms
as we viscerally experience
the alternation
between violent confrontation
and qualified repose.
I'll conclude the talk and
then we'll have some questions
if there was still time.
I'll conclude by saying a
few last words about the idea
of musical character that as I've
argued permeates these two pieces.
It might be said that in its most
radical form the very abstract
serial music of the
1950s was an attempt
to leech character out of music.
It was after all an understandable
reaction, for if it were not
for the charismatic character
of certain fascist dictators
in the 1930s the world may not have
lurched towards a terrible conflict
costing millions of lives.
But by the 1970s composers clearly
felt more comfortable composing
musical shapes with more
pronounced characteristics
but this was not done blindly.
Both Carter and Stockhausen
maintained a critical distance
from the old emotional
triggers of pre-war days.
If a listener's reaction to common
practice music is conditionally
molded through a shared set
of responses then this music asks
the listener to formulate his
or her own unique aesthetic
criteria,
thereby empowering him or her.
By challenging our senses in
unusual way this expressive works
from the early 1970s allow us
to hear a new and different kind
of sublime beauty, a beauty that
ultimately lies within ourselves.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]
>> Paul Miller: Okay, so if you've
got any questions and we have a mic.
Oh, my God, it's John Peterson.
Sorry, oh there is a hand up here.
>> Audience Member: You talked
about the electronic component here.
Is this something, I
remember reading months ago
that this was something
maybe recreated.
Is this some kind of
David Tudoresque thing
to create an analog device that's
no longer available commercially
or something?
>> Paul Miller: Well, yeah,
David Tudor was associated
with Stockhausen principally
in the 1950s and by the '60s
and '70s he had moved
on to other artists.
You know I believe
it was in the '60s
that the ring modulators were really
invented because they needed a lot
of solid state stuff going on.
Although, I could be wrong there but
at any rate this was a kind of thing
that was pioneered in sort
of as first a kind of a toy
but it became very interesting
because it sort of alienates people
from the sounds they're
familiar with.
Stockhausen used ring modulators
in the '60s in other works such as,
"Mikrophonie II," that
is "Microphone Number 2"
and in this way he actually like
makes this wash, pushes this wash
over the sound making
it kind of unclear
where the sound is coming from.
Is it a sound coming from the
singer or from an instrumentalist
or is it kind of intermodulation
of the two and so it kind
of estranges you from the
sound of its happening
and it's hard to get
used to at first.
I had a hard time getting used to
listening to ring modulated music
and so the people sitting there
at the controls have
a great responsibility
because they can mix more or less
of the ring modulated
sound into the output.
So you will probably see a sound
projectionist or a sort of engineer
on a board trying to mix
things together tonight
and that person actually
plays a big role in this piece
so be on the lookout for that.
Thanks for your question.
Yeah. Anybody else?
>> Audience Member: How often are
these pieces actually performed?
>> Paul Miller: Okay, well the
Carter duo is [having] kind
of a bit of a renaissance.
I mean at first only a
few people performed it.
One of the people I studied
with at Vassar College,
Linda Quan actually
performed it in the '70s
but recently it's gotten more play.
It's a tough piece to play
to put together but you know
in about two weeks a good
pair of, a good duo can do it
and do a pretty darn good job.
Now the Stockhausen
doesn't get done so often
because it actually requires
this extra electronic component
and it's a very long piece.
It's a tough and a challenging piece
and I won't put it any other way.
But it's a piece that
has a lot of rewards too.
It gets more play in Germany
than it does here in the States
because they have more of a
familiarity with it there.
They've heard it a lot more.
Stockhausen is something more of a--
people sort of vaguely know
who he was, many of them.
In Cologne the Rathaus ("City
Hall") plays Stockhausen's music
on the chimes during the day.
So they don't get performed
very often
which is why tonight is
such a special occasion.
Anybody else?
Thank you.
Yes, over here please.
And now I'm going to
make this poor guy here,
this guy deserves a lot of credit.
He's going to have to go all the way
back there for the next question.
Yes, sir.
>> Audience Member: Are we
are returning to the question
about development of
substitute electronic technology?
>> Paul Miller: Yes.
>> Audience Member: Is
that now standardized
for different performances in
different parts of the world
or is everybody experimenting with
a different way of translating?
>> Paul Miller: Yeah,
well there's a lot
of people doing electronic
transformation.
There's a lot more
technology available now.
A lot of it depends on the
kind of software you're using,
what sorts of things
that software makes easy.
There's everything from patches that
respond to notes the player performs
and triggers certain things.
You play a B flat and it throws
something in to other kinds
of technologies that sort of
sample the sounds coming out
and transform them in
different ways layering them,
playing them back, jumping back.
There's all kinds of
interesting technologies
that temporally transform the
stuff a player has played.
Ring modulation is kind of
one of the earliest attempts
to do something significant with
live electronic transformation.
Previously, there were electronic
pieces but they had always more
or less many of them had been
pre-recorded and played back
which is not to say that it was
simply a business of pressing play
and then you just walk off
and let the audience sit there
but actually most sound engineers
would vary the levels during the
performance of the playback to
account for the unique acoustics
of each performance piece.
So going back, that's sort of where
if live electronic
stuff had some of--
you might trace one of
its sources to that.
But today of course there's really,
you know with the software
there's so much you can do.
In fact one of my advisees
when I used to teach
in Colorado devised software
to help link performers
from different parts of the world.
So we had a concert
in Boulder in Colorado
where there are actually four people
working on their laptops and one was
in London and one was in South
Africa and another was in California
and he was there sitting
there in Colorado
and they were all doing a quartet
and they were in all different parts
of the world so there's
all kinds of things.
I mean it's really going
through the roof nowadays.
The guy in the back here,
you had your hand up.
>> Audience Member: Often
when one hears a kind
of music one's never heard before--
>> Paul Miller: Yes
>> -- it doesn't make sense the
first time and you play with it.
I've had that with pieces
I've sung so not counting,
looking at the score
and the formalisms how many
times did you have to listen
to this piece before it
started to make sense to you?
>> Paul Miller: Okay,
that's a great question.
That's a really good question.
Of course me being a kind of sort
of having my one foot in performance
and one foot in academia more
or less, I tend to read a lot
about these pieces and sometimes I
read about them before I hear them
but for pieces like the Stockhausen
that I hear the first time,
I mean it really goes
from piece to piece.
I mean some of them actually have
a couple of these hooks in them
that are directly sort
of meaningful to me.
Like the passage where the whole
process sort of grinds to a halt
and there's this sort of
dialogue between the two pianists.
I mean that's something
that you can experience
without really much of anything.
In fact, I probably didn't
even have to tell you about it
but it was fun anyway, right?
There are other things that
you really only discover
through engaging with the score and
looking at it and reading the notes
that the composer writes at
the beginning of the score,
these sort of as they
say para-textual elements
that exist outside the score itself.
And then you know for those
among us who really want to get
down to business analyzing it
certainly has its own rewards
and pleasures which
are very distinct.
I would say it really has to vary
from piece to piece and I think one
of my favorite composers
is Haydn and I love Haydn
because not only did he have a kind
of fantastic command over the sort
of the expectations people had in
the sonato form and so he appeals
in a very intellectual way and
whole books have been written
about Haydn's bizarre way and
interesting and fantastic way
of writing sonata forms but he
also appeals in a very direct way
and I think that a few of
Stockhausen's pieces approach that.
And I think "Mantra" might almost
be one of-- he becomes pretty close.
There's a lot in this piece
that you're going to enjoy.
So I think that in a lot of
Stockhausen's pieces he does try
to throw those things out.
You know, I'll just conclude
answering your question
by saying the following.
He had something to me once
which went something like this
and I'll have to paraphrase.
He said, "You know a piece has
to have a memorable beginning.
It has to do a couple
memorable things in the middle
and it has to have a great ending."
And a lot of Stockhausen pieces
end really high up in the register
and you know I think that
he was in tune with this
because when he was a young
boy-- well, not a boy.
When he was in college actually
you know he lost both his parents
in the war and in order to put
himself through school he worked
as a parking attendant and he
also played an improvised piano
for a magician.
This magician his name was
Arion [assumed spelling]
and there's a photo of him playing,
of Stockhausen playing the piano
with Arion the magician and
I think that Stockhausen--
one of the things I like
a lot about Stockhausen is
that he had this sense of
the theatrical in almost all
of his pieces and there's always
like in some of his best pieces
like the totally absurd
and unexpected happens
and it's got this sort
of like-- what was that?
Are you kidding me?
It's like what?
So I think that there's kind of
interesting caste that he has
as a composer which I really
enjoy so yeah, great question.
Thanks a lot.
Do we have time for any more?
Maybe one or two more?
We'll go there and then
up here next please.
Yes, sir.
>> Audience Member: Thank
you very much for the talk.
>> Paul Miller: Most welcome.
>> Audience Member: I
enjoyed it very much.
You, at the beginning you
showed us these earlier scores
from Stockhausen that were
much more minimalist and kind
of gestural a bit and then you
said there was shock and surprise
when he returned and scored
"Mantra" much more conventionally.
>> Paul Miller: Yes.
>> Audience Member: And
then you showed that quote
from Stockhausen explaining
kind of his considerations
and his maybe spiritual
considerations in the piece.
Did he himself explain why
he decided to score "Mantra"
in a more conventional register?
>> Paul Miller: No, you, that's
great that you asked that question
because you see in order to get
the relationships among the mantra
and in order to stretch it out
in these ways he had to notate it
because it simply couldn't,
I suppose that in the abstract one
could theoretically memorize this
thing and memorize all the different
transformations but I mean it had
to sort of be written out because he
really was after expanding the thing
to a length of 212 seconds at the
maximum or compressing it to 3
and a half seconds and that's
a very wide perceptual range
and it would be very, very
hard for performers to do this.
Now they kind of did
things like this expansion,
contraction in different musical
parameters in these earlier pieces
from the '60s but it
wasn't, you know, it wasn't,
it couldn't have been quite
as explicit so I think
that Stockhausen was after a
greater explicitness in these pieces
and connected with that was a more
sort of firm push toward connecting
that with a kind of spiritual aspect
that one could get a spiritual
enlightenment in some way
by hearing these relationships,
hearing the unity.
And if I may digress for
just one brief moment,
some scholars have dated this to
the kind of Neo-Platonist theories
of the 3rd and 4th centuries,
like Plotinus who would look
at the one light, the
light as a kind
of unifying force in the universe.
And so Stockhausen really thought
of the universe as being a kind
of unified thing and this was
why serialism appealed to him
because serialism for him did not,
was not based upon a
dialectical relationship.
That is to say that black
for Stockhausen was simply
an extreme form of white
and so he constantly tried in his
writings he emphasized his desire
to eliminate the dialectical
oppositions among things and instead
to see the unifying elements
behind everything, the oneness.
And this has a very distinct
religious aspect for him
which as I say you can read more
about it if you read Plotinus
and some of the Platonic
dialogue I think.
Great. Thanks a lot for
asking that because that's one
of those questions where
I get to explain something
that I might have left out.
Somebody else?
We have time for one
or two, one more.
>> So this may be similar but
you talk about this evolution
of serialism in the West,
in America and West Germany.
What about the East?
Particularly, have you
studied that and looked at some
of the comparisons and contrasts
with Sylvestrov or
Gubaidulina or-- ?
>> Paul Miller: Oh, oh, gosh, well
of course I know those composers
but I'm afraid the field is so
vast that I haven't really gotten
to the Soviet composers or
Eastern Bloc composers although
that is a very fascinating subject
and I can say that this especially
in Poland in the '70s this got
out in Warsaw and Schaeffer,
a guy named Schaeffer
published this crazy book
that has all these
avant-garde scores in it.
And I mean the paper is like
toilet paper you know from the '70s
in Poland, but it's
a fascinating book.
I think his name was
Bohuslav Schaeffer.
This guy published this huge thick
compendium of all these scores,
the crazy scores by all these
modernist composers in the West
and some of the Eastern
Bloc countries were kind
of into it you know
because they were like, hey,
this is the proletariat
that's speaking.
This is against the high bourgeoisie
music and so on and so forth.
That is something that I'm
by no means an expert on
but it's a fascinating story.
Yeah, thanks for asking.
Yeah, all right, well,
I guess in conclusion
if you have any other questions
I'll be at the concert.
Come grab me and thank you
so much for your questions
which were awesome
and your attention.
Enjoy the show.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.