Electronic Music 411 - RIP Stockhausen

a force of nature, that one. What an audacious thing to declare:
The composer also attracted controversy after the terrorist attacks on New York on 11 September 2001, which he reportedly described as "the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos".

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12/07/07 + Fredo

he stated that he had been misquoted.

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12/07/07 + GrapeApe

misquoted?

love his music and theories.

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12/07/07 + tantan

I'm sure it was out of context.

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12/07/07 + astroid

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Sep. 25, 2001

Monstrous Art
Julia Spinola

Four concerts featuring music by the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen have been cancelled, following the composer's distasteful, tactless comments concerning the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The concerts were to have formed the thematic focus of the Hamburg Music Festival, which started last Saturday and continues through this Saturday.

Asked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events, Stockhausen answered that the attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." According to a tape transcript from public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, he went on: "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world."

Asked by a journalist whether he equated art and crime, Stockhausen replied: "It's a crime because those involved didn't consent. They didn't come to the 'concert.' That's obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing."

Before the press conference was over, Stockhausen had already distanced himself from these comments, a spokeswoman for the Hamburg Music Festival said. On Tuesday, the composer formally apologized for his remarks, explaining that he simply wanted to remind people of the role of destruction in art. Stockhausen asked the forgiveness of anyone who felt hurt by what he said at the press conference.

In a circular letter sent out by e-mail, the Italian playwright and Nobel laureate Dario Fo also stated his opinion on the attacks: "Big speculators joyfully splash about in an economy that lets millions of people die every year in misery. What are 20,000 dead in New York by comparison? ... Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation."

While Fo's statement is evidence of a cynical anti-Americanism, Stockhausen's words appear as the monstrous result of radical artistic egocentrism. To the victims of terrorism, both the composer's mental descent into hell and the aging left-wing writer's stale, calculating spite must seem like hideous mockery.Sep. 18, 2001

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12/07/07 + implexgrace

ricemutt said: "he was kind of a douchebag anyway...."

LOLOL pot. kettle. black. stfu faggot.

he will be missed.. nobody like him on earth

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12/07/07 + implexgrace

excuse the faggot statement everyone else, i can't go back and edit it for some reason. i tried.

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12/07/07 + sprouts

word. word.

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12/07/07 + ricemutt

just a little humor people... Everyone always gets so upset when someone dies. That guy left more behind than just about anyone else--what else could he have done? He was old... people get old and die. And yeah he was a bit of a dick, I've read some of his writing. But that kind of comes with the field he was in. A lot of my favorite composers were minor or major assholes, at least in written form... debussy, stravinsky, the list goes on. But I didn't like stockhausen that much, personally, though some of his stuff was really great.

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