• involve the composition of sounds themselves was no

longer sel�-evi�ent. It was revived as a result, .:..e might

• say, of a h1stoncal development. The Viennese School of
Schoenberg, Berg and Webern had reduced their musical
♦ �hemes and motifs to entities of only two sounds, to
mtervals. Webern in particular, Anton von Webern. And
♦ when I started to compose music, I was certainly a child of
♦ the first half of the century, continuing and expanding
�hat the composers of the first half had prepared. It took a
· FOUR CRITERIA OF ♦ httle le�� forwa�d to reach the idea of composing, or

ELECTRONIC MUSIC ♦ synthes1zmg, the mdividual sound.

I should say immediately that it was a second thought,
because I started first of all by analyzing all sorts of
•
From the lecture FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
filmed by Allied Artists, London 1971
soun?s. I �as twen�y-three and working at the musique
.
concrete stud10s m Pans. I recorded sounds in the Musee de
!'Homme, where you can find exotic instruments of all ·
kinds: inst�uments of wood, of stone, of metal; instru­
·f
ments of different cultures and historical periods. I also
t �nalyzed sounds and noises which I recorded from daily
hfe, and began to study books in which you can find
Four criteria of electronic music. The first criterion is the spectral analyses of the sounds of classical musical
unified time structuring. The second criterion is the ins�r�me�ts. Bit �y bit, not having had any proper
splitting of the sound. The third, the multi-layered spatial tramm� m acoustics at the music conservatory or at
composition. The fourth, the equality of sound and noise _
umvers1ty, I became aware that sound is more than just
- or better, of tone and noise. an experience. I became very interested in the differences
New means change the method; new methods change between sounds: what _is the difference between a piano
the experience, and new experiences change man. sound and a vowel aaah and the sound of the wind- shhh
Whenever we hear sounds we are changed: we are no or whsss. It was after analyzing a lot of sounds that this
longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is second thought came up (it was always implied): j.f I can
the more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds analyze sounds which exist already and I have recorded
organized by another human being: music,
why can I not try to synthesize sound in order to find ne;
Until around 1950 the idea of music as sound was
sounds, if possible.
largely ignored. That composing with sounds could also
 ...
STOCKHAUSEN ON MUSIC
90
-- FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
91

•
At that time the only instruments available which tried
to imitate classical instruments were those you found in • changing from 33 to 45 or vice versa. Well, we have been

•
able since the late forties to change the speed of a tape
nightclubs, not in the symphony orchestra, wh�ch ev�n recorder continuously, not just in steps, and so to
now is still a fairly closed sound world because of its social
composition. You won't find, for example, electric organs • transform sounds by speeding them up or down. This is
very important. Let's immediately jump to the extreme,
of the modern type in the normal lineup of a symphony
• and then we come to the first criterion.
•
orchestra. On the other hand, pop music makes use of a
range of specially manufactured keyboard instruments
with registers to imitate trumpets, flutes, clarinets and so l THE UNIFIED TIME STRUCTURING
forth. Today all sorts of gimmicks have been added to
transform these sounds; then there were fewer gimmicks, Suppose you take a recording of a Beethoven symphony
nevertheless there was a certain variety of synthetic on tape and speed it up, but in such a way that you do not
timbres which the composer might choose, like a painter at the same time transpose the pitch. And you speed it up
choosing colours to mix from. Classical orchestration is until it lasts just one second. Then you get a sound that
•
traditionally an art of mixing. has a particular colour or timbre, a particular shape or
To synthesize a sound you have to start with something dynamic evolution, and an inner life which is what
more basic, more simple, than the sounds you encounter
f Beethoven has composed, highly compressed in time. And
in daily life. I started looking in acoustic laboratories for it is a very characteristic sound, compared let's say to a
sources of the simplest forms of sound wave, for example piece of Gagaku music from Japan if it were similarly
sine wave generators, which are used for measurement. compressed. On the other hand, if we were to take any

'
And I started very primitively to synthesize individual t
I given sound and stretch it out in time to such an extent
sounds by superimposing sine waves in harmonic spectra, that it lasted twenty minutes instead of one second, then
in order to make sounds like vowels, aaah, oooh, eeeh etc., '
what we have is a musical piece whose large-scale form in
then gradually I found how to use white noise generat?rs time is the expansion of the micro-acoustic time-structure
_
and electric filters to produce coloured noise, hke of the original sound.
consonants: ssss, sssh, ffih, etc. And when I pulsed them it . I started to compose sounds in a new way around 1956.
sounded like water dripping. I recorded individual pulses from an impulse ge11erator,
From these primitive beginnings I began, as many and spliced them together in a particular rhythm. Then I
others were then doing in the musique concrete studios, to made a tape loop of this rhythm, let's say it is tac-tac, tac,
transform recorded sounds with electric devices. For a very simple rhythm-and then I speed it up, tarac-tac,
example, to speed up sounds: everybody who has a record tarac-tac, tarac-tac, tarac-tac, and so on. After a while the
player knows how to speed the music up or down just by rhythm becomes continuous, and when I speed it up still
 -, -. ~·-
.....

-
STOCKHAUSEN ON MUSIC FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
92 93

more, you begin to hear a low tone rising in pitch. That

• little slower, or to be more precise, make the duration of
means this little period tarac-tac, tarac-tac, which lasted each period a little shorter or a little longer, then the sound
about a second, is now lasting less than one-sixteenth of a
second, because a frequency of around 16 cycles per
• starts oscillating around a certain middle frequency, and
all the half vowel or half consonant components, which
second is the lower limit of the perception of pitch, and a • are already fairly broad-band, begin to break up. So the
sound vibrating at 16 cycles per second corresponds to a • continuum between sound of fixed pitch and noise is
very low fundamental pitch on the organ. The timbre of ! nothing more than that between a more and a less stable
this sound is also an effect of the original rhythm being
tarac-tac rather than, say, tacato-tarot, tacato-tarot,
•
.. I
periodicity: the noisiest noise being the most aperiodic.
This discovery of a continuum between sound and noise
which would give a different tone colour. You don't I
the fourth criterion of electronic music, was extremely'
actually hear the rhythm any more, only a specific timbre, important, because once such a continuum becomes
a spectrum, which is determined by the composition of its available, you can control it, you can compose it, you can
components. organize it.
Now imagine speeding up the original one-second + If now we slow down the speed of a given rhythm we
rhythm one thousand times, so that each cycle now lasts come into the realm of form. What is form in music? Well,
one-thousandth of a second: that will give you a sound in we usually say a musical structure of between the one or
the middle range of audibility, of a constant pitch about + two minutes of a piece of entertainment music, and the
two octaves above middle C on the piano. A frequency of hour and a halfofa Mahler symphony, which is about the
1000 cycles per second, and a particular timbre. I made a longest we encounter in music of the western tradition.
lot of experiments with different rhythms in order to see (There are a few operas from the end of the nineteenth
what they would give as differences in timbre. What we century which last longer, and which introduced some
perceive as rhythm from a certain perspective, is very important expansions of musical time, but there is
perceived at a faster time of perception as pitch, with its nothing in our tradition like the Omizutori ceremonv of
melodic implications. You can build melodies by Japan, in the Temple of Nara, which lasts three days ;nd
changing the basic periodicity, making it faster or slower t' three nights without any break, or like certain tribal
for the sound to go up or down in pitch respectively. rituals still to be found in Ceylon or parts of Africa.) So,
Within the basic period which determines the fun- · according to the fixed perspective of our tradition form
damental pitch, there are what I call the partials, which varies between dimensions of around one minute and
are subdivisions of the basic periodicity, and they are ninety minutes. This corresponds to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16,~2, 64,
represented here by the inner divisions making up the f
128 - a range of around seven octaves. Amazingly
original rhythm. These are perceived as the timbre. enough, we find a similar seven-octave range within the
If! change the periodicity of the sound: a little faster, a traditional formal subdivisions of music, from the length
 STOCKHAUSENON MUSIC
94 -- FOURCRITERIAOF ELECTRONICM,USIC
95

of a phrase, the smallest formal subdivision, say eight

• With sixteen attacks per second, we reach what we call
seconds, to the largest complete section, or 'movement', of • pitch; between eight and sixteen, there is another
about sixteen to seventeen minutes' duration (8- 16- 32- transitional region where it is difficult to know what the
•
64- 128 - 256 - 512 - 1024 seconds). So there is a range of sound really is. And as we know from the keyboard of the
about seven octaves for durations from eight seconds up to piano, there are seven and a half octaves in the range of
seventeen minutes. Between eight and sixteen seconds, fundamental pitches: from 16 to around 4000 cycles per
durations become less and less easy to remember. It has second. Above that we perceive only brilliance.
something to do with our perception: if I ask you to The ranges of perception are ranges of time, and the
compare a duration of 13 seconds with one of 15 seconds, time is subdivided by us, by the construction of our bodies
you hardly know the difference. If I ask you to compare a and by our organs of perception. And since these modern
sound of one second with a sound of three seconds' means have become available, to change the time of
duration, on the other hand, the same difference of two perception continuously, from one range to another, from
seconds appears enormous. Our perceptions are logarith- a rhythm into a pitch, or a tone or noise into a formal
mic, not arithmetic, and that is important. Rhythm has its structure, the composer can now work within a unified
own field of perception and between eight and sixteen · time domain. And that completely changes the traditional
seconds there is a transition between our perceptions of concept of how to compose and think music, because
rhythm and form.
t previously they were all in separate boxes: harmony and
t
I!l~J!)dy
·-· in one- box, rhythm and metre in another
---
·~ ' then
Rhythm and metre are organized in measures, i . . - ,. .
"

periods;•p 'hrasing, larger formal entities in another, while

traditionally to a fixed periodicity or tempo for a given i
movement, say fast, or medium fas~, or slow, because in the timbre field we had only names of instruments, no
everything was based on dancing or body actions, and unity of reference at all. (I sometirnes think we are
that's where the music came from. A periodicity of eight fortunate in having such a poor language .to describe
+ sounds, much poorer than the visual field. That's why, in
seconds is perceived as very slow: we are already entering
the region where form begins. Subdivide eight seconds, t the visual field, almost all perception has been rational-
and you have 8, 4, 2, 1, a half, a fourth, one-eighth, ized and no longer has any magic .)
one-sixteenth. One-eighth, eight attacks per second, is t . There is a very crucial moment in my compos1t10n
about the fastest we can play with our fingers: it is a limit J KONTAKTE for electronic sounds, beginning just before
I 17' 0,5" in the printed score. A translation of the title
determined by our muscles and bodily construction. I
could go faster perhaps, to twelve or fourteen, by rolling
i might be 'Contacts', and the contacts are also between
my hands in a special way, but no more. There again, you t different forms and speeds in different layers. The
see, the range is seven octaves (8-4- 2- 1- ½...:.¼- 1/s- moment begins with a tone of about 169 cycles per second,
1/16):it's very interesting. approximately F below middle C. Many of the various

-+
 FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC

-
•
97

sounds in KONTAKTE have been composed by determin-

ing specific rhythms and speeding them up se~e_ral
hundred or a thousand times or more, thereby obtammg
distinctive ·· timbres. What is interesting about this
-• 2 THESPLITTINGOFTHESOU ·n

The same sound serves for another section of the

composition KO TAKTE, beginning approximately
moment is that if I were to play little bits of the passage • twenty-two minutes into the tape, which I use to clarify
one after another, like notes on the piano, nobody would what I call the splitting of the sound. If we understand
be able to hear the transition that takes place from one • that sounds can be composed, literally put together, not
field of time perception to another. The fact that I make • only stationary sounds which don't change, but also a
the transition continuously makes us conscious of it, and l sound like owww, which changes in the course of its
this effort of consciousness changes our whole attitude • duration; if we can compose these sounds, in the sense of
towards our acoustic environment. Every sound becom~s • the Latin componere meaning put together, then naturally
a very mysterious thing, it has its own time. Il we can also think in terms - note the quotation marks-
There is a very important observation which was made •I ofthe 'decomposition' of a sound. That means we split the
not so Tong ago by Vik tor von Weizsacker, a German sound, and this can be much more revealing in a certain
biologist who started in medicine, which says that the
• context than hearing a unified sound on its own terms,
traditional concept is that things are in time, whereas the • and comparing it to another which is happening at the
new concept is that time is in the things. This is quite
different from the traditional concept of an objective,
.. same time or immediately before or after it .
you hear this sound gradually revealing itself to be
astronomical time represented by our clock, which
measures everything according to the same units, and is
.. made up of a number of components which one by one,
very slowly leave the original frequency and glissando up
the same time for everything. Instead, the new concept and down: the order is down , up , down, up, up, down.
tells me as a musician that every sound has its own time, + The original sound is literally taken apart into its six
as every day has its own tin{e. This is new
·-rnmusical components, and each component in turn is decomposing
composition, fo think in terms ofan individual time-event , before our ears, into its individual rhythm of pulses. In the
which then takes its own time to be put together with other background one component of the original sound
sounds. continues to the end of the section . And whenever a
The end of the transition in KONTAKTE which I started + component leaves the original pitch, naturally the timbre
to describe is a sustained note, E below middle C, which of the sound changes .
when I reached it I worked on for another four minutes, • So what has this got to do with composing? What makes
making very small changes in pitch. Other sounds pass this more than ·just an example from a lecture by an
by, as if you are looking out of the window of a space acoustician or a physicist who says: 'Toda y I am speaking
vehicle, but the line of orientation remains. You hear it go i
right away into the distance, then come back. ..
i about the subject of sound decomposition and this is what
it sounds like'. If it were no more than that, music would
•
I
 STOCKHAUSENON MUSIC
- •
FOURCRITERIAOF ELECTRONICMUSIC
99
98 .,
•
• we can see, the widening of our perception. Having said
be reduced to a teaching aid - and the previous example
too. This is the point: whereas it is true that traditionally • that, I must say that most examples of this kind of art that
I see in galleries are absolutely vacuous: one look and
in music, and in art in general, the context, the ideas or
that 's it, you've got it. Or it makes your eyes flicker and
themes, were more or less descriptive, either psychologi-
you say well, okay, looking at such things makes your eyes
cally descriptive of inter-human relationships, or descrip- • flicker . One begins to feel like those animals in
tive of certain phenomena in the world , we now have a • experiments which have to respond in a certain way to a
situation where the composition or decomposition of a
ti particular stimulus. Much of modern art is like that. We
sound, or the passing of a sound through several time
are in a very important trar:isition from the traditional way
layers, may be the theme itself, granted that by theme we
of perceiving art to a new way of making and perce iving
mean the behaviour or life of the sound. And we live
art, and discovering new functions for ar t, that it is
through exactly the same transformation that the sound is
going through. The sound splits into six, and ifwe want to
follow all six, we have to become polyphonic, multilayered
'• j revelatory. It reveals our existence and ourselves, and
thereby changes us as human beings.
' This change in perception will bring about incompara-
beings. Or when the sound falls six and a half octaves, you • bl~ _changes in humanity in the next hundred years,
have to go with it, because if you stay put in your time
chair, as it were, you won't perceive it. That's why many .. spmtual and physiological. Don't imagine we remain the
same when our _perception i; cha;-ging so dr .;_ ;t ically ~o~
people get a strange feeling in the pit of the stomach when t- that our musical perspectives have ··become rei; ·tive
they hear the sound falling down. So there you have it: the
ins_tead oT absolute . Take · tim.1.ng:when I have to pass
,, theme of the music, ofKONTAK.TE itself, is the revealing of • qmckly through _the continuum of speeds and tempi in
\ such processes, and their composition. t music, I change completely, and am no longer compara-
L, Of course it could be done more or less intelligently. I I
ble to someone who is fixed in his time perspective of
mean, a physics professor would just have gone straight i metronome 70, his heartbeat, or metronome 20 or 30 , his
down six and a half octaves, and leave it at that. Someone .
+ breathmg, for whom everything that is faster is fast, and
else might just, well, vary it a little, make it a bit more
inventive. If the same process is composed by different
people and one is more imaginative than the other, then
.. I everything that is slower, slow . What we need , and what
we will become as individuals-some ofus- are beings
•' who are able to change their speed and direction of
that's all there is to say, about the process, and about the ' response very quickly, experience all these transforma-
difference between a physics professor and a composer in
•
this context.
There are many visual artists today who are mainly
con~n~ed ~ith the exploration of new ways of seeing.
.. tions, and yes, become the sounds .
As I say, people in general occupy a certain middle
position in time, from which they judge what is fast and
Seemg 1tself1s the theme: how to look at things and what • what slow, and this middle position is determined
•'I
•
•
..
 STOCKHAUSEN ON MUSIC FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
100
•
101

• by a train , that can be_ extremely slow compared to a

basically by the body , by the breathing, the heartbeat, the
speed with which the limbs -including the fingers - can • cyclist coming from the opposite direction. If on the other
be moved, the tongue, lips , head and so on. All these limits hand I leave my car and go on an airplane, in my
determine a middle range of speed, and everytJ:iing·that is experience I am exchanging a very fast time for a slow
faster or slower we judge from this standpoint. The same .. time, because compared to being in a car, where the trees
is true for the voice, which has a natural middle register , go by very fast , the experience of being in an airplane is
and which for most people is fixed, from which we judge very slow.
sounds to be higher or lower. It's y~ry__ h~_rd , in a musical
composition oLa..more_mo.dern char<!Ct~r, to movetlie
• So ii:!_real life we may change time very gui~y, and
modern man has to change his time perspective just as
list;ner~ out of their middle region into another~lef s say • quickly, and if he doesn't he gets sick, or even dies ,
into a very fast region, for long enough for the fast to
become normal and everything that was medium before to
.. because the degree of change is just too much. The same
applies to space. Musical space has been fixed in the
appear slow. Or the other way around, to slow an .. western tradition, for as long as musicians gave up
audience down with music like Japanese Gagaku music, running through the woods for sitting on chairs on a stage .
which is very much slower than traditional western music, • The function of space has been neutralized in our western
so that having listened for a long time to this very slow .. music. Some conductors , for the sake of instrumental
music, everything medium in speed is perceived as fast.
That will give you an idea ?f the change of perspective
.. effect, make changes in the positions of players in an
orchestra, for instance putting the celli at the left side
which has come about from the enormous expansion of
musical timing. owadays ·a:·.
inoderr C ·composition
switches very fast from one time layer, ~~~ te111pq,to
•'
i
+
instead of the right, but such changes have no real
revealing function: it's still fixed, it doesn't move, all it
serves to clarify is the music being a static object in space.
anoifi'er~~ h~~~a;~-~~j -~~id before, in i:~~ditional music~~ •
It has something to do, I should add, with the fact that
find a slow movement, a fast movement, with a break in until very recently it has not been important to be able
between, then a minuet movement, then a very fast
movement, staying at a particular perspective long
• clearly to identify sounds which come from behind, say
270°, like a ship 's navigator, on a circle of 360°, or one
enough in each case for the listener to feel safe. Naturally, which comes from say north 15° with 45° of elevation, or
with the arrival of modern transport, our context of • south 170° from an angle of minus 40° or 50°. In the
experience has changed a lot: in everyday life we can concert hall we always have the same perspective, the one
experience many different time perspectives. If I am • seat as a point of reference, which is determined, or has
driving in a car, and I see some.one walking past, and there • been up to now, by how much we can pay .
is an airplane passing overhead, the airplane can be very
slow compared to the person walking; or if I am overtaken
-- Well , I discussed at length with my studio technicians
about 1953, whether it would be wise to put musicians in
 STOCKHAUSEN ON MUSIC FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
102 103

chairs and swing them around, for example, and ·many space which are as meaningful as intervals in ~elody or
said they might object. So then we thought 1t would harmony. So from the time these means of m?vmg sound
perhaps be preferable to let them play into microphones have been available, I have been speakmg of and
and connect the microphones ta speakers and then swing composing and finding a notation for space melodi~, to
the speakers around, and then they would not object, but indicate movement up or down in space, or descnbe. a
they objected to that too. They said, oh no, you can't do particular configuration in a given space, at a certam
that with me: I'm here, and the sound has to come from •
speed. .
here. Well, we are not birds, that is the problem. If we • The culmination of this concept came about, happily
were birds, then naturally we would not argue that way, thanks to a lot of diplomacy, at the 1970 World Fair in
.•
but we are clumsy and would rather sit in one spot- in Osaka in Japan. I was given the chance to realize, in
fact, most of the audience can't even stand, let alone move • collaboration with an architect, a project I had first
during a concert, so our perspective of musical space is described in 1956. It was a spherical hall seating six
utterly frozen. And it has led to a music in which the hundred people on a platform in the middle, which is
movement and direction of sound in space has no sound-transparent. They entered by a moving stai~case
function.
• and sat down wherever they wished. There were cushions:
But the moment we have the means to move sound with • the Japanese like these. The platform was a i:netal grid,
any given speed in a given auditorium, or even in a given +
and there were speakers all around: seven circles from
space outdoqrs, there is no longer any reason for a fixed bottom to top, three below and four above the ~latform,
spatial perspective for music. In fact, that is the end of it,
with the introduction ofrelativity into the composition of
• arranged in ten vertical rows around the _audience. A
sound source, a singer, player or tape recording, could be
•
movement and speed of sound in space, as well as of the sent to any point in this pattern of speakers. Singers and
other parameters of music. And this movement in space of
music becomes as important as the composition of its
• soloists worked from six crow's nest balconies around and
above the central platform; their sound was picked up by
melodic lines, meaning changes in pitch , and as its • microphones and sent to a mixing desk where I or on~ of
rhythmic characteristics, meaning changes in durations. my assistants would be sitting. I had two soundm1lls
If I have a sound of constant spectrum, and the sound
• constructed, each having one input and ten outputs,
moves in a curve, then the movement gives the sound · a • allowing a chosen sound to be rotated b~ hand a_tsp~eds
particular character compared to another sound which
moves just in a straight line. Whether a sound moves
clockwise or counter-clockwise, is at the left back or at the
-- up to about five revolutions per second, m a~y d1re~t1on.
For example, I could decide to make a v~1ce go I? an

front, or alternating between left back and right front, or

any other combination, these are all configurations in
.. upward spiral movement for two or three m1~utes, either
clockwise or anticlockwise, while at the same _time another
player 's sound moved in a circle using the other

t
 afterwards. I tried to get it to Europe, it was not very
soundmill, ~nd a third crossed in a straight line, using just expensive, I must say. It was a geodesic construction with
two yotenuometers. So we were able to realize a free a plastic skin, very well made. And it worked acoustically:
sp~t1al composition. It could be improvised or predeter- everyone said a sphere never works well, you get sounds
mined, but we had a wonderful time improvising for six bouncing up and down, but the sound was wonderful,
and a half hours every day for 183 days. It was wonderful very good acoustics and good reverberation. One day I
playing with these things. will get it back. Certainly it was such an important
1:-nd the Japanese would come in and sit. They are very experience for the first time in history to have the sound
polite. Then I wo~ld start: the house lights would go out. moving in a controlled way around the listener, with the
It was very beautiful: wherever there was a speaker you listener at the centre. If you don't have good auditoriums,
could see a pattern of five little lights. It looked like a night the way I recommend to hear music where the movement
s~y, a very geometrically composed sky of stars. I would of sound is very important, is with earphones. That way
~1t down; then the players would appear, I would the sound moves within you and your head becomes -this
mtroduce_ the players in English, it would be translated by sphere, and with a little imagination you can expand this
a hostess mtojapanese, Mr So-and-so will now play a duo sphere to any size.
with Mrs So-and-so-and then we'd start. I could always
s~e the hall from the control desk. These were mostly
simple people, many with babies on their backs, and at the • 3 THEMULTI-LAYEREDSPATIALCOMPOSITION
first sound everyone would look round in astonishment
•
and try to follow it with their eyes. And after a session of Multi-layered spatial composition means the following:
fift~en to tw~nty minutes they would walk out turning that not only does the sound move around the listener at a
th_eir he_ad~hke geese and making spiralling movements constant distance, but it can also move as far away as we
with pomung fingers. So even if they had never heard new can imagine, and also come extremely close. These
mus~c before, it was still exotic stuff, as their music is • characteristics are distinctly different, so I'm being
exotic stuff to us. evertheless, new music or old music is cautious when I say that I have managed to superimpose
of li~tl~ ~portance: what is important is that they went • acoustically only six layers up to now, and that it is very
out 1m1taung the movements they had heard, and I was difficult to add more layers. At the end of the section in
very happy. lfyou discover something really new which
affects _human experience, I mean, there's no dis~ussion .. KO TAKTE where the sound is split into its separate
components , about twenty-four minutes into the tape,
~at's Just. the way it is. All the rest is minor talk abou~
httle details. But that was important, it was a new
experience.
-- there are dense, noisy sounds in the forefront, covering the
whole range of audibility. Nothing can pierce this wall of
sound, so to speak. Then all ofa sudden, at 24' 18,7" in the
It was a wonderful building: they destroyed it
-
r
 STOCKHAUSEN ON MUSIC
106 107

score, I stop the sound and you hear a second layer of several times before in the context of the music, in order to
sound behind it. You realize it was already there but you know how it sounds when closer and further away.
couldn't hear it. I cut it again, like with a knife, and you There is something very important now to be said about
hear another layer behind that one, then again. Building our concept of perception. Our concept o_fperc~p~on
spatial depth by superimposition of layers enables us to dates back, as we all know, to Gutenberg: smce prmtmg
compose perspectives in sound from close up to far away, we have become verticalized, and our perceptions have
analogous to the way we compose layers of melody and become dominated by the visual. Our conception of truth
harmony in the two-dimensional plane of traditional of perception is entirely built on the visual. It has led to the
music. This is really very important, and nothing new in incredible situation where nobody believes somebody else
human experience: I mean, it happens everywhere. It's ifhe can't see what it is. In every field of social life you find
important to be able to hear whether the car coming this need to establish everything in visual terms, because
towards me is still far away or not, because if I hear it's what you cannot see people do not believe. And this leads
just two feet away, I will behave differently. Well, some to the very strange response of most people listening to
people may think it doesn ' t matter in music, but beware: if this music , that when they hear the sounds in a given hall
the sound comes very close it can have the same impact on are moving very far away, and coming very close, they say
our own audioelectrical system. • well, that's an illusion.
Why should spatial perspective be typical only of We now have the means technically to make the sound
electronic music? Have we not already encountered it in a • appear as ifit were far away: 'as if, they say. A sound that
Mahler symphony where the composer says that trumpets
should sound outside the hall? aturally we have, but
• is coming from far away is broken up and reflected by the
leaves of the trees, by the walls and other surfaces, and
such examples are fairly primitive: there is more to spatial reaches my ear only indirectly. There is a factor of
perspective than playing loud and soft, with or without distortion and noise . aturally we are able to reproduce
_reverberation. Imagine, for example, that someone is these noise factors synthetically. On the other hand, a
whispering very softly in your ear, while a thunderstorm •
sound that is very close to my ear reaches my ear directly,
or a rocket taking off is going on ten miles away. You are without reflections, and the unreflected sound can also be
still aware that the whisper is very soft, but it's close, • produced artificially. Whether a sound appears 'as if far
whereas the rocket is very loud, but very far away. ow + away or very close, depends on a combination of intensity
two things are necessary for hearing spatial perspectives: and degree of distortion. The purer the sound, the closer lt
one, that we know what it is we are hearing, and two, that • is, and in an absolute sense the louder it is.
we know whether it is far away or close. When we have
• Now I come to my point: when they hear the layers
never heard a particular sound before, we don't always
know whether it is far or close. We have to have heard it -- revealed, one behind the other, in this new music, most
listeners cannot even perceive it because they say, well, the

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108 FOUR CRITERIA OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
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walls have not moved, so it is an illusion. I say to them, the might be the_ same for several noises , but their energy
fact that you say the walls have not moved is an illusion , distribution might be quite different. owadays we have
because · you have clearly heard that the sounds went various electronic filters ·and modulators available to
away, very far , and that is the truth. Whether the walls transform a steady sound into one that is more aleatoric in
have moved at all has nothing to do with this perception, its inner structure.
but with believing in what we hear as absolutely as we As it has become possible to define a continuum
formerly believed in what we see or saw. They open their between sounds and noises, completely new problems
eyes and they say, well now, aha, there are the walls, so have come up for when we compose or play intuitively,
that was an illusion, the sound has not really moved away. because we have no training whatsoever in balancing
What makes it so difficult for new music to be really tones and noises. Traditionally in western music noises
appreciated is this mental block in people, which makes have been taboo, and there are precise reasons for this. It
them say 'as if, or that they can ' t even perceive what they began from the time when staff notation was introduced,
hear. To hear a sound three miles away, they expect a and music could be notated in precise intervals for the first
person, a bird or a car to be three miles away: they identify time. Then it was mainly vocal music, sung predomi-
•
the sound with an object that must be at the given nantly with vowels rather than consonants. If I sing a
distance. That's what we are struggling with, and that's melody of consonants now, people would say it isn't
what will change mankind as gradually more and more music: we have no tradition of music composed in these
people perceive this music in its real terms.
sounds, and no notation for it. There you see how narrow
4 THEEQUALITYOFTO EAND OISE
• our concept of music is, from having excluded consonants,
then noises. Of course you find consonants in vocal music,
but only in order to make a word comprehensible: that's
The equality of tones and noises has already been made
clear in discussing the continuous transition from periodic • the function of consonants in our daily language, to clarify
meaning. But in a musical sense consonants have no
to more or less aperiodic waveforms. If the degree of
function, other than as accents: ss or t or p or k to start or
aperiodicity of any given sound can be controlled, and
• end a sound clearly.
controlled in a particular way, then any constant sound
The integration of noises of all kinds has only come
can be transformed into a noise. A noise is determined, as
about since the middle of this century, and I must say ,
we say , by a certain band-width, or band of frequencies ,
• mainly through the discovery of new methods of
the widest band-width covering the whole audible range
( though to spread a sound to that extent one needs to composing the continuum between tones and noises.
repeat the process several times ). In addition, there is the
• owadays any noise is musical material, and it is possible
to select a scale of degrees from sound to noise for a given
:listribution of energy to be considered. The band-width • composition, or choose an arbitrary scale, from the
•
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STOCKHAUSEN ON MUSIC 111
110

interval we can hear, namely the Pythagorean comma 80:

complete range. The balance between tones and noises is 81. That's not true at all. If I use sine waves, and make
not at all_a numerical one. When I was working on the little glissandi instead of stepwise changes, then I can
final sect10n of KONTAKTE, I wanted a situation where really feel that little change, going far beyond what people
tones and noises were in balance. I wanted to deal with the say about Chinese music , or in textbooks of physics or
whole scale o~timbres between aleatoric and periodic, and perception.
I could certamly not use as many noises as tones because But it all depends on the tone: you cannot just use any
no_ise~.tend to cover the tones, being so to sp~ak more tone in any interval relationship. We have discovered a
pnm1t 1ve. So, to establish a proper balance between the new law of relationship between the nature of the sound
two in a given section of music one has to be careful to and the scale on which it may be composed. Harmony and
reduce the number of noises extremely in relation to the melody are no longer abstract systems to be filled with any
number of tones. given sounds we may choose as material. There is a very
~rom ~his we discover more new principles of musical subtle relationship nowadays between form and material.
a:t1culat1on, for_exa~pl~ that I worked with forty-two I would even go so far as to say that form and material
different scales m this particular work. If you know the have to be considered as one and the same . I think it is
?ian~ has a half-tone scale, twelve steps to the octave, then perhaps the most important fact to come out in the
1magme forty-two different scales, where the octave is twentieth century , that in several fields material and form
divided into thirteen, fifteen, seventeen , twenty-three are no longer regarded as separate, in the sense that I take
steps, and so on. I have used a scale of scales where the this material and I put it into that form. Rather, a given
ratio of increase in the step size is constant fro:n one scale material determines its own best form according to its
to_the next, ~nd each particular scale is strictly associated inner nature. The old dialectic based on the antinomy -
':1th a particular family of tones and noises. Put at its or dichotomy - of form and matter has really vanished
s1_mplest,the noisier the sound, the larger the interval, the • since we have begun to produce electronic music, and
bigger the step size. The noisiest sounds in KONTAKTE have come to understand the nature and relativ ity of
are two octaves in width, and the scale for these noises is sound .
the largest and most simple scale in the whole work: a •
scale of perfect fifths. A step size of a fifth means that
twelve steps covers the whole audible range. The nar-
rower the band-width , on the other hand, and the more t-
~he sound approached a pure tone , the finer the scale: this
1s the principle I have applied. With the purest tones you •
can make the most subtle melodic gestures , much, much •
more refined than what the textbooks say is the smallest
•
•