Sound Pocket

Stockhausen, Lectures and Interviews compiled by Robin Maconie, 2000, London: Marion Books
reviewed by Yeung Yang

In the documentary film Modulations directed by Lara Lee, Karlheinz Stockhausen spoke briefly about his works that explore, in his words, the “micro-world of the acoustic vibrations” (p.87) with the tam-tam (commonly known as the gong). The film led me to this book, among many others - how musical instruments may also be understood as sound machines, how music may also be understood as a particular organization of sound, how players and performers give shape to sound with their bodies. As a concerned outsider to music and sound and whatever they can mean, I find myself initiated to a new wide world.

Stockhausen speaks with honesty and a sense of humor, and at times, with the voice of an advocate who would like to see a few changes in our ways of listening urgently. It is not new to say that “We are no longer, have long ceased to be in fact, an aural society, one which communicates mainly by hearing. Our entire system of values, of the things we accept to be true, is based on the visual sense. You have to sign a paper because your word is not enough to be trusted.” (p.26) It is however timely and thought-provoking to sound the warning of how “acoustically deaf”, how “incapable [we are] of noticing the acoustic pollution of the world”, if yet again. And Stockhausen isn’t just presenting a problem. He takes it up as his own, as a task with profound implications for the future. One example is his encounter with Theodor Adorno and the insight he gained from it. He recounts in the book how he was playing Messiaen’s Sonata to Adorno, who “couldn’t understand it at all”. I am not familiar with Messiaen’s work, but I know Adorno as a philosopher who had lamented on the “regression of listening” since music became reproducible on a mass scale. Stockhausen recalled how he reacted, “So I stood there on the stage in short pants, looking like a schoolboy, and defended this piece…I said, but Professor [Adorno], you are looking for a chicken in an abstract painting. That’s when I began to have my doubts about intellectuals and so-called specialists, even among the avant-garde. It showed that even though Adorno had been a student of Alban Berg and had composed a great deal…he was not basically a creative person. A creative person is always most excited when something happens that he cannot explain, something mysterious or miraculous…” (p.36) In the current social environment where being “creative” has become such a hype and slanted towards the making, making and more making of things (so that they sell?) without being clear on the references and inheritance of making (eg. patterns of nature as the reference of creativity, curiosity itself etc.), Stockhausen’s little story ought to remind us of a few things more primary.

His calls for composers to spend time in a recording studio, for performers to not just play their own instruments but listen to others, and for anyone to “Play anything” to “discover the micro-world of the acoustic vibrations, amplify it and transform it electronically” (p.87) are small steps we could all take to get in touch with that which could only be revealed and not made.

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“the heap of one’s own echo” - Yasmina Reza, Hammerklavier, faber&faber, 2000
reviewed by Yeung Yang

Books sitting on the shelf are not static stuff. They groove and dance, until they are noticed, but never fully - that would have been Too Much, the title of one story in Reza’s book.
I share with you the mere and the overflown: “The world is ‘uncountable’, filled up with things and books, and books about things, the world accumulates and books accumulate what the world accumulates and seeing on one’s table books and more books of photographs, about art and books about other books and getting ready in one’s turn to fit the world onto a page, that vile accumulation of babbling, to add to the heap of one’s own echo…”
Sometimes, forgetting to breathe helps.

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