By the time of his death on 5th December, it had become very easy, and certainly very common, to dismiss Karlheinz Stockhausen. Far from being a spent musical force in his later years, Stockhausen continued to be highly productive, and he leaves behind 362 completed works. Yet in his lifetime, Stockhausen had gone from being a figure of enormous moment in the musical world to someone operating almost on its margins. His death was extensively reported, yet provoked little serious reflection among commentators.
Much of this is because the world of music and the world of Stockhausen took such radically different journeys since the late 1960s, when Stockhausen was briefly fashionable enough to have interested the Beatles and to feature on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Music turned away from experimentalism and became increasingly eclectic in ways which Stockhausen despised. Meanwhile, Stockhausen himself grew increasingly idiosyncratic. His music became more mystical and pompous—but in a highly personal way. It was Wagnerian in ethos, though not remotely in sound.
By 2007, Stockhausen was a figure from a bygone age. To all but an increasingly grey-haired, modernist circle in the academy, he had become a curiosity. His death did not remove something that continues to pulse within the public musical world. On the contrary, most of that world will go on exactly as before without him.
Yet it needs to be said both that Stockhausen matters and that interest in his work is now almost certain to grow rather than to diminish, even though he is doomed to remain a minority taste. At his worst, his music is either impenetrable or bombastic. The more that his compositional life revolved around his massive and pretentious Licht opera project, which it did from the 1970s on, the more the interest drains away. Stockhausen's most recent concerts in this country often attracted pathetically small audiences, even when they featured otherwise rare performances of his major works.
There is, of course, an epic irony to this indifference. To Stockhausen personally, and to his generation of postwar avant-gardist composers, the past was toxic. Only the contemporary mattered. So there is a symmetry, which at one level might have pleased Stockhausen, in the fact that the public response to his own death mirrors the far more determined indifference with which the young Stockhausen and his circle responded to the death of Richard Strauss in 1949. To them, Strauss was a figure from the past with nothing to say to the new generation. Today, much of the musical world views Stockhausen in a similar light.
Yet just as Stockhausen was obviously wrong about Strauss, so the current generation may be wrong about Stockhausen. The best pieces from the 1950s and 1960s will live on, not just for their historical interest, but because of their musical qualities. At his best, in works likes Gruppen, Stimmung and Gesang der Jünglinge, Stockhausen produced sounds, sequences and juxtapositions that have the subtlety and richness to open the ears and the minds of those willing to listen. He was a hugely flawed, often bewildering but indisputably significant figure. His music will continue to draw us back, because it remains an unignorable response to the great unanswered question about music's future.
The rest is noise
In the classical music blogosphere, Alex Ross's lively and informed website The Rest is Noise sets the standard by which the others are judged. Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, offers a near-daily commentary on the musical life of his home city and the wider world, which is at once serious and succinct. What makes Ross particularly readable is his inherent deftness and sense of perspective. Unlike so many of the narcissistic music writers on the web and elsewhere, he doesn't overdo it. In the autumn, Ross published his much-anticipated book on 20th-century music, also entitled The Rest Is Noise, which incidentally contains fine passages about Stockhausen. It is a fair bet that when Ross's book is finally published in Britain in March, it will attract a lot of attention, as indeed it deserves to. It is high time that someone attempted an intelligent exegesis of 20th-century music for a wider audience, and high time that musical debate moved beyond the bankrupt pitting of popular against classical. The Rest Is Noise may be the catalyst for that. Ross's approach is anything but narrow. Popular music rightly plays an integral part in his story. As an American, he also avoids Eurocentrism, even though Europeans from Strauss to Björk provide the backbone of his account. Nor is he doctrinaire. Sibelius and Shostakovich, anathema to modernists, are major figures in his pantheon.
Yet since Ross's version is likely to be the standard work on 20th-century music for the foreseeable future, it is important not to treat it as gospel. No one who spends most of their musical life in Britain can possibly be satisfied with an account which skips so quickly over Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett, says almost nothing about Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and Tavener, and does not mention either Rutter or Lloyd Webber. In Ross's world, the only British composers worthy of attention are Britten (of course) and Adès. Maybe, in the end, Ross is right. But, without making exaggerated claims, I think he should have another go with Vaughan Williams, especially as 2008 is the 50th anniversary of his death.
