Karlheinz Stockhausen Quotes

Karlheinz Stockhausen's sly, provocative reflections on art and absurdity will catch readers who enjoy dark humor.

14 quotes

1. [The attacks of September 11 were] the greatest work of art in the cosmos : compared to that, we composers are nothing.

2. Sir Thomas Beecham was asked if he had ever conducted any Stockhausen. He said, 'No, but I once trod in some.'

3. Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public.

4. Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.

5. We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.

6. But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

7. I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.

8. Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

9. In particular what is most important to me is the transformation of a sound by slowing it down, sometimes extremely, so that the inner of sound becomes a conceivable rhythm.

10. Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.

11. Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears.

12. Schaeffer gave me permission to work in the studio with a technician, but I've never worked with him.

13. Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.

14. I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.