Transformations Through Music

Klavierstucke I-XI This music trains a new kind of human being, who the hearer not yet is and who has never existed before on this planet... (Listening to the piano pieces) one grows beyond oneself. Stockhausen (I) I have reached that future you told me about years earlier. You said, 'The Piano Pieces are musical time machines: they take the listener into his own future.' There was a learning curve designed for me to follow. There were moments for soul, and moments for body, opening into a new era of soul-body fusion, with times of silence carefully measured against moments of noise, and rising out of these timely events, an increased visionary capacity gradually unfolded within: I can hear the ground flake as the mole presses forward; I can hear the ruffle of the owl's feathers as she stirs in dappled sleep. I can hear the solitary passage of a worm through topsoil, so keen has my hearing become. I can even hear the creak high above in a cottonwood when winds part its tallest branches. (II) In Piano Piece V (we experience) the serialization of freedom... The last section of Piano Piece X emerges from the pitches of the hand cluster like a butterfly from the chrysalis. Jonathan Harvey The music, oh the music, overcame my doubts and pulled me into your circle of inspiration. I know, in some profound way, you see me, merely a listener, with no technical training, no musical gifts, as a co-creator. How can this be? The whirligig of performance took over and tossed me from sensation to sensation, each folding me deeper into the music, deeper into the sheer experience of being one with the Musical Vision: My eyes see into the infrared of distance; they are scorched by heat from a faraway fire; they fix on churning eddies, heaving waves, currents twisted into whirlpools; finally the still center... At that still center your presence informs me: I know what I need to know, and my interior life responds. (III) Listening within oneself: It is as if one makes contact with oneself as if with some unknown person, as if one wants to explore oneself as something that mirrors itself. Stockhausen In the whirligig of time we shall all get our revenges. Feste the Clown, TWELFTH NIGHT I am at this moment listening to my favorite of the KLAVIERSTUCKE, which is VI, written between 1954 and 1961, in four versions. Can we speak of a MOMENT of composition, spread over seven years? Is there ONE COMPOSITION among the four versions? What really am I listening to? Are these valid questions? Asking them has distracted me from listening. In a moment, I will begin from the beginning. But during this extended moment of silence, with no music for my hearing to focus on, my mind of music can appreciate VI as something precious something pure and alive, something I listened to late at night, just before surrendering to sleep, sprawled on my black couch, with only one dim light in the room, my eyes open only to the interior world, a barrier erected in my mind against all intrusive daylight thoughts, against desires and urges, against hopes and dreams, even against prayers, however necessary. The 24: 40 time frame of VI was, and is, a column of sounds, pure and living, connecting what must be connected. And that is sufficent.