kagablog

Mantra is a pivot between the great cycle of process-plan pieces of the sixties –
Plus- Minus, Prozession , Stop, Pole , Spiral- and the formula derived compositions Inori, Sirius and the twenty seven hours of Licht.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was early acquainted with European pioneers of cybernetics such as Raymond Ruyer, Viktor von Weisacker and Gotthard Gunther as well as the famous shape-shifted organisms of Wentworth D’arcy-Thompson.

He often spoke of writing a piece that would reproduce, mutate itself and even expire according to transformative rules – a kind of musical DNA or cellular automaton in sound.

Mantra realizes this ideal of an endlessly self-replicated , adaptive and responsive musical event fully for the first time in the history of music.

The thirteen characteristics of the Mantra ( please scan and reproduce it on the cover) are like genes which may be expressed, switched on and off, according to context . The ring modulators (which are radio derived circuits for multiplying sounds by one another) and the sine wave generators (which are the minimal expressions of tone) provide the thirteen contexts, the spectral environments and sonic landscapes which the Mantra DNA explores by means of intervallic augmentations and diminutions. The way Mantra unfolds is by recursion- the application of parts of the Mantra formula to itself.

Recursion would become the great scientific and philosophical theme of the eighties, with Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach showing that the limits of knowledge and the nature of consciousness were aspects of recursiveness and Steven Wolframs A New Kind of Science showing that simple recursive patterns in a few lines of programming code could model every process in the universe. Both of these vastly influential arguments could have been derived directly from Stockhausens Mantra, which founds their new picture of nature and experience a decade before on purely musical phenomena.

Mantra is a Hubble telescope of style , looking very far back and forward into Stockhausens aims. The ring modulator was an early device in the electronic music studio for enriching the pure sine tones that made up the first explorations of artificial sonic space. Stockhausen would use it to realize his ambition of uniting the precision of the studio world with the dexterity of the orchestral world in Mixtur, projecting scattered orchestral groups onto a blended electronic screen . The ring modulator would function symbolically to merge and mix traditional musics in Telemusik , a utopian model of all encompassing, non-homogenizing musical society and again as cosmopolitan gesture speculatively linking nations ,peoples ,noises and ideologies in Hymnen.

In Mantra, by contrast, the ring modulator becomes a distinguishing device, making defined harmonic planes around each note of the formula: virtual spectra containing grades of dissonance and harmonic direction , marked by the entry of the Crotales and bracketed by the hunting glissandi of the sine waves.

Procedurally, Mantra reactivates Formel- a formula composition from the early fifties which Stockhausen withdrew as naive and would later , thanks to Mantra, come to view as a precursor to Licht.

Mantra is the beginning of Stockhausens own self revision- the Klavierstucke are mined for their gesture and drama and purged of their commitment to serial variation:.the brutalism of Microphonie One and Two is framed and led by the articulate blueprint of the pianos;. the intuitive listening and reacting of Spiral and Aus den Sieben Tagen are recreated as two soloists probing the zones and turbulences of an electronic cloud gathering above them. Soon Trans would in turn revise Mantra, rewriting its electronic wall into a chromatic screen of strings and Inori would colour the formula itself with minute orchestral dynamics and spectra in place of the hallucinatory electronic multipliers.

Stockhausens legacy is hardly explored because such exploration is neither benign nor simple. Now ,as in his lifetime, his work engulfs whatever is set beside it - leading some closest to him to take refuge in a new obscurantism of plain surfaces or eclectic forays into pre-fifties modernism.

Most composers split his oeuvre into ‘their’ Stockhausen- always of the fifties and the sixties, already canonical and easily tied to the safely-spent task of culminating Modernism- and the ‘other’ Stockhausen from Mantra to Licht and Klang- usually vilified or pathologised by the pundits of his ‘classic’ works - an aberration induced by mysticism, seclusion, vulgarity or worse.

This is equal to dismissing Schonberg’s works after opus 22 as degenerate or Picasso as conservative following the break with Braque. Every performance of Mantra is indispensable to breaking the spell of these revisionists , demonstrating that Stockhausen – never young- became his own successor at forty two, emancipating the shadow of his own earlier music and that of his colleagues. This performance of Mantra is a depth charge to map some of the extent of his lengthening shadow. Many live in his enclaves, none have glimpsed his boundaries.