The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 9

THE OBSERVE. 15 APRIL 1971 THE WIFE of a French composer found herself sitting next to Stravinsky. on one of his last visits to Paris. 'Do -you know much Stockhausen he inquired. The composer's wife confessed she did not.

The old already in his late eighties, gently placed a hand on her arm. In a conspiratorial whisper fie murmured, 'You should, my dear, you should It was a tribute of the old world to the new. No man has used the pitched notes on which Western music has been based since the Dark Ages with more exquisite precision than Stravinsky. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who this week is giving a series of concerts in London (see Briefing, page 27), is the prophet of a new world of sound that today threatens to engulf that old order. notion of music as the aural manifestation of a spiritual order is not in tune with present-day ernpiricism.

But it has an intellectual pedigree that stretches back through a composer as earthy as Hindemitih to Kepler, Boethius and St Augustine. In recent years Stockhausen has been trying to connect the performer to the streams which flow through me to the, inexhaustible source that flows through us in musical vibrations." (That may sound farfetched, but one clarinettist recently told me that Stockhausen enabled him to draw sounds from has instrument he didn't know it could yield.) Hence the increasing' role' allotted to improvisation, and hence, too, the formation of a special performing group'. But Stockbajtfsen has his own, highly personal interpretation of what is and is not worthwhile His group undergo lengthy- rehearsals before, they appear in public. He himself sits at the electronic controls and when any idea he considers inappropriate is produced, he promptly phases" it out by the twist of a knob. Not surprisingly, this has sometimes caused resentment, which reached ex-posion point last year at Darmstadt.

Several of his players parted company with him and Stockhausen confessed himself surprised and deeply hurt. There is clearly an unresolved conflict between bis role as the apostle of what he calls intuitive music and his own highly authoritarian personality. Yet without his presence, performances of his recent works are liable simply to fall apart one -reason why they have until now made little impact in Britain, where his visits have been rare. That is. perhaps one reason why in his most recent work he has returned to notes, which are more amenable to control than human beings.

Stockhausen has his critics, and not only among the old and conservative. In particular, the politically committed young do not approve of his mysticism, and this was one reason why in 969. concert in Amsterdam broke up in disorder. His willingness to grtace presidential soirees, add a recent visit to South Africa are aJso held against him. Ironically, it is Hans Werner Henze, tie leading traditionalist composer of their generation, who has nailed his colours to the Revolution.

But Stockhausen's early experience of the Nazis has left faim with a deep suspicion of ideology. As he puts it, I would never let myself become a horse for one group of Yet it would be a mistake to suppose' that Stockhausen's. music is eflitist. On the contrary, 'in. recent years it has shown its power of attracting the sort of audience that has eluded most avant garde twentieth century music.

Nor is he remote from other streams, though he rends to consider them only in so far as they relate to himself. The improvisatory element in free jazz appeals to'him, though it is often full of- unconscious citations of idioms I would rather get rid of." He also feels that it tends to misuse freedom. But that's what happens whenever people say, let's be free it produces chaos and destruction because they have never learned to use freedom as a means of restricting oneself so that others may be free. Stockhausen is not unsympathetic to pop and some pieces have been dedicated to him. But he feds that it often tries to make use of the sound combinations he has pioneered without properly understanding them.

He is also mistrustful of what he calls its militaristic beat. "It makes people -march without knowing it That was exactly theway the Nazis tuned in the whole population. Whether it's marching, music, pop or even a rock beat, I don't like it I prefer BaUnese music, where you feel a basic rhythm, but the individual players are floating Even' Stockhausen's severest critics do not contest his outstanding stature as a musician. However wild or extreme his ideas 'may seem, they have an undoubted inner consistency and the succession of works he has produced in the past two decades reveals a sense of direction quite lacking in Cage's anarchisi tic Dadaism. Whether, he and his followers prove a last chapter in the disintegration of Western music or a first chapter in a music that is in every sense new remains to be seen.

Stockhausen himself belieyes that a composer, if he is not a mere entertainer, is a visionary. 'That visionary power in his music should prepare people for what is. And he is in no doubt that that is a period of disasters and destruction. Rebirth can. only happen when there is death.

A lot of death. Things cannot go on as they are. So they must die out and they Whether we like it or not -An apocalyptic age 7 No. Apocalypse means end. This will be an age of purification and re newaL What I.

am trying to do, so, far as I am aware of it, is to produce models of coming together, ff mutual love, that herald the stage after destruction to produce music that brings us to the essential. And that is going to be badly needed during the time of stiookB and disasters that is going to. Peter Hey worth VAN PARYS Karlhefnz Stockhausen A Wagnerian sense of his mission and his The musicians he has influenced range from Boulez to the Beatles (his picture appears in the-portrait gallery on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper). Though there have recently been occasional fumbles of dissent, a whole generation of composers on the Continent hang on every work and word (Stockhausen is a marathon talker 'last year at Darmstadt he lectured for six hours non-stop on his own music). Nor is he just the guru -of a small cult.

Guests at an evening party recency given by President Heinemann of West Germany were entertained, not by the usual string quartet, but by Stockhausen and bis chosen group of musicians. At' last year's Expo in Osaka a special auditorium was constructed in the German pavilion, and in it over four million visitors attended performances of his music. One work was given 72 times. Even the most, revolutionary artist never starts entirely from cratch and Stockhausen admits a debt to Webern, who first the assumption that music should be based on themes, and so holds a position in history comparable to the first abstract painters. But when in 1956 Stockhausen thundered out his basic creed, No neo- no repetition, no variation, no he was challenging the very foundations of Western music, and in each work he has subsequently produced he has moved deeper and deeper into uncharted territory with an uncanny sense of purpose and direction.

History may see the works he and Boulez composed in the early 1950s, in which every detail was determined in advance according to a rigid application of seriahsm. as a last desperate attempt to shore up a collapsing order. But even then both composers were preparing their from a water-logged craft. This took the form of allowing chance to play a part in how any given performance of a work turned out Boulez toon drew back from the implications of this step: his French rationalism was appalled at the prospect of the flood of dilettant- ism and imprecision it has un- leashed. But Stockhausen pressed ahead.

He believes that a period of intellectualism, whose origins go back to the ancient Greeks, ended in 1945, and that we are now moving into the Age of Aquarius, spiritual era in which we. must' concentrate' on the intuitive and the From notes he moved to symbols, and the area left undetermined in his music steadily grew until in 1968 he produced a score that reads like an anthology of meditative exercises. 'Night for instance, consists' of the following instructions Play a vibration in rhythm of the universe, play a vibration in the rhythm of the dream and transform it slowly into the rhythm of the Meanwhile Stockhausen had opened up a whole range of new palace built by Darius, King of the Medes and Persians in the sixth century bc, be regarded a carving of an eagle and then solemnly announced that it represented himself. Published 'excerpts from a diary announce -minute details, such as what he 'ate for lunch, as though they were matters of general interest. Inevitably, he is a lonely figure who talks about the importance of loving relationships yet finds difficulty in achieving them.

Boulez is perhaps the only living musician he regards as an equal (the compliment is returned) and last year the two men spent part of their, Christmas holidays together. As a result, he is surrounded by followers rather than friends. But over them and they include some outstandingly gifted young composers' and musicians he exerts the fascination of a prophet For Stockhausen this is only natural He regards the composer as a transmitter of spiritual powers. 'I am not making MY MUSIC," he has written, but transcribing the vibrations I receive I am a radio 'if I have composed correctly I no longer exist as This lisation he at first worked on the land and in the evenings, made a. little extra money by rehearsing an amateur operetta company.

It was only in 1946 that he was able to resume his education at grammar school. At university he studied philosophy as weU as music. During this period he supported himself by playing in a jazz group and accompanying an itinerant conjurer with piano improvisations. In those postwar, years Germany was only slowly resuming musical contacts with the outside world, and Stockhausen's knowledge of contemporary music barely extended beyond Schoenberg. It Was the impact of Messiaen's music at the Darmstadt summer schoolof 1951 that opened new horizons, and the following year he went to study with him in Paris.

Here he met JJoulez (who, though only three years older, was already an established composer), and made his first electronic experiments. He also learnt French which, like his mid-Atlantic English, he today speaks with formidable fluency and precision. He is a tall, well set-up man who looks younger than his 42 years. Only surprisingly delicate hands, silky brown hair Chat falls on to his jfliouldetts and huge, solemn eyes (foe does not laug easily, and least of ail atlhimseiO suggest someone out of i i musical material or what unbelievers would cail noise. He claims that in 1952 in Paris he was the first man to make music of syntheticnelectronic sounds, and he dearly considers that this alone places him, alongside men like Planck and Eipstein, among the great innovators of the twentieth century.

he penetrated further into micro-acoustical he blended the sound of instruments with the sound of those instruments electronically transfonmed, he married electronics and the human voice, which he has also used in highly unconventional (but much imitated) ways. Over the years he has grown less concerned with inventing new ideas in the sense of themes, and more with suggesting ways in which ideas might be treated. In a recent work, for instance, the soloist twiddles with a transistor radio and uses as his starting point any sounds that happen to take his fancy. Stockhausen has introduced the idea of music moving in space and he looks forward to an electronic instrument that will enable sound to be projected to a given point Not surprisingly, these new sound resources have led to Stockhausen 's growing impatience with the straitjacket of the nineteenth-century concert hall, designed for the purposes of a conventional symphony orchestra. As long ago as 1958 he sketched an ideal auditorium, and was able to put some of his ideas into effect in the concert hall of the German paviliop at the 1970 Expo.

He has also seized every opportunity to present his music in new settings. Hp ha nerformeri if in vast underground grottoes in the Lebanon. He has written music to be performed simultaneously in four rooms of a house. He sees space, which electronic sound now has the power to fill at will, as providing a new musical dimension, and next June the Berlin Tiergarten will resound to a work written specially for out-of-doors. Hand-in-hand with his mystical leanings goes an engineer's determination to exploit new technical resources and a strongly practical vein enabling him to put his most starring ideas into effect.

At each stage in his voyage of discovery Stockhausen has produced a barrage of theories and commentaries, which are regarded by a devoted band of followers as blueprints, for the future. No composer- since Schoenberg has commanded such near-veneration or exercised THROUGH THE MEAL NUN HStCHELSOHNE JT such authority on those around him. For better or for. worse, no composer has made so deep an impact on the evolution of music in the past 15 vears. Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in 1928 in a village Cologne.

Though his famHy was of peasant stock, his father, who was fciUed in the war, was a schoolmaster. When Karlheinz was four his mother was removed to a mental hospital and subsequently eliminated -by the Nazis as a useless member of society. His character has more than its share of German authoritarianism, but the accusations of fascist leanings that are sometimes levelled by his opponents (and which he returns "in identical coin) are unfair and overlook his early experience of National Socialism. It was partly as a reaction against it that he became a practising Catholic he recalls that at the State school he was sent to after his mother's death, prayer provided the only form of privacy. Today Stockhausen adheres to no specific theology.

But his cast of mind is essentially religious and mystical, and he is much preoccupied with rather windy notions of a universal religion in which' he would serve as high priest and spiritual guide. In the last stages of the war he was consoriptedand served as a stretcher-bearer. On demobi St Sauveur-en-Puisaye. IT WAS a' bit of a pilgrimage, spending the night here. I have read and "re-read for so many years Colette's supple, sensuous prose about her birthplace its people, passions, peculiarities, its woods, fields, wild things that I felt I too was brought up here.

Colette shares with the greatest of Russian writers that rare gift of making her own life-style so vivid you feel it was yours though nothing on earth could be more foreign. We drove through the village, which is bigger than I had imagined, and there was the steep' street she has enshrined in so many stories: the Rue.de l'Hospice When she lived on it, now named after its most famous resident, Rue Colette, the street signs in her own handwriting, followed by her dates, 1873-1954, a long life. By one of the-town fountains it has many I see a 10-year-old girl with long flowing hair, her, mother's pride certainly. That bit hasn't changed. Colette's long golden hair that great inconvenient rope of hair that was.

Weighing me down was her mother's-masterpiece and her own torment and she wrote feelingly of her mother's anguish and her own troubled relief when she cut it off. Sido, her mother, was a nut on the subject of hair and Colette's sister Juliette's hair Was even longer arid more burdensome. We stayed at the Cheval Blanc on the edge of the village. I asked a busty, curvaceous waitress there be looked like the girl Renoir painted', an out-of-style femaleness still found in French villages if many people came to St Sauveur to visit the birthplace of Colette Who asked the girl. Good God! Colette has been translated into every language you can think of.

Gigi alone book, play and film has probably been read or seen by more people than now live in France. Who indeed However, the proprietress of the inn knew of Colette and told us she had eaten many times in that very ihn, whose former proprietor was a friend. But there are no Colettes left in St Sauveur. (Colette was her last name. She was born Sidonie Gabrielle Colette.) Colette's birth-place CM est nie says the sign) is now occupied bv a doctor and his wife, a dentist.

You can see an' old-fashioned dentist's light globe through the window. Visitors are not welcome but we prowled trjrougfh the Lower Garden the stable where Colette's father kept his horse is stiH there and looked at the high stone wall where the ohil- ordinary. He lives in a strikingly modem "house, designed by him-sfelf, that commands, fine views over the hilly country east'- of Cologne and is furnished in the bare style favoured by German intellectuals, with bis second wife and their two children. She is Mary Bauerm'eister, a tM, turbulen VaJkywie, who, is herself a painter and sculptress of considerable, There aire ho servants or at any rate not apparently, for Stockhausen does not approve of mere working, objective relationships. Everyone around him, even the charwoman, must so Frail Mary, who 'is reported to have a.

talent forrin-ohtrusive. organisation, can call in her. cleaners only when the master is absent, If, Jioweyer, an admirer or satellite calls, that is another matter he or she may well be put to housework, or copying Not many visitors are received apart from-those concerned with work. For Stookhausen, work is life. Ho is infinitely precise and controls everything that happens around him to the last detail.

Though he is a talker is, not much, concerned with conversation. tie has a Wagnerian sense, of his mission and bis genius and is' too naive, too Jacking in irony and self-awareness to disguise the fact On a visit to Persepolis, tie neyed to rEtahg de Moutiers, a pond the size of a lake, where Colette and. her brothers 'Spent so much of. their time. Her brothers fished the pond the first sight' we" saw were French boys with fishing poles motionlesswhile Coleitte -roamejd" the wood and.

meadow that stiM, surround the -pond. It Was in, these woods' and meadows, that she picked- upi her love and lore oif vine and "Shrub and berry and birds and flowers whose sounds and smells and tastes rippled through forever after. She was never riaHy the peasant she has been-, pictured, but she had a peasant's feel, for the earth. Colette wrote her. deceptively simple sentences 3,000 pages ruined to up with 250 polished ones as she were writing- -you and you.

alone a letter. You find little 'bits of her prose smiting you as you walk through her village. Oh' the highest ground in St, 'Sauveur still stands 4 a small chateau whose after repeated sales, was reduced to a Remember the de Bonnarjauds, that -mine baronial who "had no money and three marriageable daughters? daughter, got herself engaged to handsome young' -village scallywag. When $he inherited her- great-aunt's money, the" parents kicked him out and looked around for a loftier, They had to woo the young icallywag back hurriedly when they' found the girl was pregnant by him, A very French story. The doors Of the chateau hang on one hinge, the windows are broken, the- bricks show through the I had forgotten the French genius for letting things says my the terrace, before the chateau are two smiling, red terra-cotta lions -I'd 'love to have thefti in my own garden-grinning 'at the vanished, nineteenth century.

The end of the story. i duct designed -solely for the benefit of the public.7-Coiincil -of the Law Society. SURETY one1 afternoon a week can be set aside for beauty. Princess' Luciano Pignatelll't advice on how to be beautiful. I'VE always thought that Europe is.

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threw around her shoulders her best black cashmere jet-beaded pelisse, put on her bonnet trimmed with bunches" of 'pimple But there is an-air of decay in St Sauveur a farm falling to bits in the centre of the. village that would not have been permitted when Colette was, a girl. The sour smeJI of poverty, is there, too. Colette, who. had the finest nose of any would have written about it if it had been there but parents were not rich, but they were rtot poor childhood seemed incredibly rich with the splendour cf both village and country at het fingertips.

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