Karlheinz Stockhausen is well-known as one of the founders of the avant-garde movement in modern music but we seldom get an opportunity to delve into the meaning and form of his work. In the first part of this rare interview, written exclusively for us by Jill Purce, who has known the composer for many years, Karlheinz Stockhausen discusses music and language, forms and shapes in his music, melody, electronic music and the problems of transcribing, and understanding his work.

JP: You've said that you think music is going to be the 'new kind of communication'. What do you mean by that?

KS: I think in the development of language between human beings, language will become always more musical, and in the higher world I'm sure that people are much more careful with the pitches and the dynamics when they talk, with the vowels and consonants, so the way of speaking becomes more and more like music. Because we still have intellectual signs, we put motions for feelings, and for states of the soul in order to communicate, but the musician only wants to communicate the vibration itself and not place a fixed symbol of sound for a feeling or a state of the soul. So in a higher-developed world, naturally, we only sing, we don't want to reduce what we want to say into words, that is terribly primitive.

JP: You must see Close Encounters! Do you think there is an evolution of language on this planet? Which languages do you think are the most evolved?

KS: Oh yes, constantly, the pitches become more and more interesting. Well, I was told by my teacher, Myer-Eppler, that Chinese must be extremely evolved because it has nine pitches, the tonims, in addition to all the pictures which represent their written language. Besides, all the words that they use have much of more subtle meanings which are expressed by the pitches. For example, in German we still have two forms between the personal 'du' (you), and the more formal, separating, 'sie'. Like in French you say 'tu' and 'vous'. In English this has disappeared. In Japan, I was told you have something like ten forms between 'du' and 'sie', to express the distance that you feel between yourself and another person and where you allow, little by little, another person to approach you, and that you approach another person through language, which is much more subtle than in English.

I feel that in music; for example, when I composed Mikrophonie 1, I used a whole scale of 36 different words representing different sounds, and when I needed to translate them for lectures or articles, for many German words I couldn't find English words, they don't exist. I have discussed it over and over again with musicians and they have looked up in dictionaries, special dictionaries, Old English and all that, then they see that many words have been lost in English for describing different sounds. And for colours it's the same.

JP: Isn't it like that in Arabic languages — they have many different words for 'camel', or the Eskimos have many words for 'snow', so you differentiate words as you need them?

KS: It's true; in music, such subtle things are expressed where no words, or no poet, could ever have a language. If I change the slightest bit — the dynamics, the pitch, or the colour, or harmony, or overtones, or combinations of two sounds — I express something else. So it's like being in the vastest space of vibrations which all express the state of the being, of the soul. Whereas, when you start talking it's terribly dull, what you say and so on. When you make love for example, I feel that all the time if you want to say something, even the most poetic language, you don't express one thousandth of what you express with the fingertips. Language is so terribly primitive. But you can do it. If I say the same word in a hundred different ways, from soft to extremely loud, and from the glissando going down to the glissando finally going up and I say just the word you and I say 'yooou', 'youh', etc, I could make now literally a thousand differences, and finally I say 'joo'! What I express with the same word, which in the dictionary has just one meaning — this is music, and then you switch from language to music. That's why more and more people use the telephone and writing has been reduced, tremendously, wherever there is the money available to telephone. The Italians, for example, never write, because they are so close to music.

JP: And when we have telephones with video?

KS: Well, that will be another language. You see, dance is another language, and if you make a movement with the head and don't even talk at all, a person can read what you feel. So we will have the kind of language that the Sicilians have, who have this combined language of hands and voice, the tone of the voice is more important than the words themselves, and the gestures of the hands, of the fingers and the head together with the tone, really make the communication. What they say sometimes if you write it down, it's terribly primitive, but the communication is extremely rich. That's all music.

JP: Is it evolving and getting richer?

KS: I think so, all the time. Music is, at least as far as I am concerned, virtually freeing itself from a more narrow language. Imagine just the integration of all these noises, or the fact that we make music now and treat a little bit out of Japanese music, Mozambique music from Africa, or a tribe from South Africa, just as traditionally we would have treated a trumpet note; it has become sheer material, expressive material. I can take a recording of two bars from somewhere, and a whole atmosphere is there, and put it into my piece and then overlap or superimpose it with something else that I have composed, then you have atmospheres of whole cultures superimposed in a short moment. The entire reservoir of styles of the world has become material - that's what we do in collages.

JP: So you think we will sing to each other?

KS: Well not we; it will take a while, because the majority is deaf, or just stupid. I mean, that is clear because they are not musical, because this planet is only preparation for higher worlds, for those who make it. This planet I think is basically a training camp for beginners, and most of them are very unmusical. We come from the reptiles and from the fishes.

JP: What do you see your role as a composer? To teach people the language?

KS: Not teach, but just to manifest, to show that something different is possible from what you usually experience here in the world of sound, just to make a few aware of what can be obtained or reached through sound.

JP: Do you see your music as a meditation through which people can grow?

KS: Some use it like that.

JP: How do you feel about that?

KS: I should not make any comment about how my music is used. That is the purpose, people will use it the way they want. Some smoke pot with it, and some make love with it and some just make an ego trip with it or put a film together with it - the strangest things, the strangest ways of using my music I have encountered, and there are relatively few people who close their eyes and concentrate only on the sound, put on earphones and listen to one piece 40 or 50 times so that they really dive into the depths of the piece and only by that reach the real content. The rest is just a gimmick.

JP: I found that the more I listened in that way to Inori, it was almost that the cosmic shapes, the forms, were falling into place. I had that experience very strongly listening to that piece. That somehow it was just perfect. I experienced it in a geometrical way, on a very high level; the forms just dropping into position.

KS: There are very good proportions in Inori. It's probably because the overall form, the global form as well as every detail is constructed according to the Golden Section in Inori. And in many works.

The Fibonacci series occurs everywhere in my work, since the beginning. In time and space, in intervals, it's all very balanced. It always occurs when I use numbers, in the Fibonacci progression and all interval series.

JP: Is your work getting more spiritual?

KS: I think it's becoming more clear; it has been spiritual from the beginning, but I think it embraces more and more, it becomes more complex, more vast and deep, more rich in interrelations. So that it becomes quantitatively more and so by that also naturally qualitatively more.

JP: Has it become more overtly 'religious'?

KS: I'm not so sure. I found out now, when I look back, that I have never made any fuss about it, which means that since the very first piece which has been performed on record and published, it is pure religious music. The Agnus Dei in Chore fur Doris (1950) is the first piece — oh, yes, and then in Drei Lieder (1950) there's The Rebel, by Baudelaire, about a spirit who says 'No' to God, and my own text, Frei, about Harlequin, who steals the Golden Axe and cuts the knots and the rope that God has given him and then hangs himself.

JP: The knots are the problems in life?

KS: Yes, which he never learnt and then he hangs himself. The first so-called 'point' music is nothing but a picture of the stars and of the Universe, openly in that sense - Punkte, Kontra-Punkte, Kreuzspiel; this was cosmic music.

JP: What happened in '68, was that a big change for you?

KS: It was a turning point. I reached a form of music where almost nothing was written any more, only a few words to put musicians into a state of intuitive perception and then play out of nothing, and then afterwards I started writing again, and now I write nearly all the notes. But it always comes back, this experience, and sometimes now it occurs in the middle of a big piece where things remain completely undecided for some time, where everything has to come from the outside into the piece. Musicians are left free with general instructions so that something should happen that is not determined — for example in Inori, and Sirius.

JP: Do you see these as moments when the Divine can enter?

KS: There is nothing but the Divine. Here you not only perform the piece but intuition can make you do things you cannot rationalise, it's just a different method.

JP: I've noticed that since 1970 you've introduced short melodies which I think are so poignant and haunting, one finds them in Mantra, Inori, Sirius and then Indianerleider of course; is that going to be more important?

KS: This has become terribly important, particularly since Mantra, 1970, that the melodies should be memorised, should hit you as something that you can never forget. In Licht it is the same, they are very characteristic.

JP: They are so beautiful, it makes me wonder where they come from. Does a whole tune ever come into your head?

KS: No, I whistle and sing and then I construct them. They are the product of very rational construction. At the same time I check among the many possibilities, always to continue or to connect elements if at the same time it has a gestalt which can easily be memorised and sung. You start with an interval which you hear because you think of all the other melodies that you have made before. The very first is easy, and then the second already excludes the first and all its characteristics, so more and more I have to think of all the melodies I have composed in order to write a new one which is very characteristic and different from the others. I must remember them all, sing them and whistle them — well I have them in my head, naturally — and then I know which one started with a descending interval and how it was, which one it was, whether it was a major 2nd, or a 5th or a major 7th - so all these things I try to avoid — and how it ended and what its main curve was, rising, descending, descending-rising or just descending or starting at ⅔ of the height and then going first down and then up and finishing in the low... there are millions of possibilities.

JP: However different they may seem to you, to me they all have the same quality, this poignancy, this moving, heartrending quality.

KS: Yes that's what I'm looking for. It must strike me, I must like it.

JP: Do you have a favourite?

KS: No, they all express a different side, a different mood. I have conducted Inori so many times that I have become identical with this melody, but Mantra was also very interesting, very deep, or Harlekin.

JP: And Libra?

KS: The whole of Tierkreis (The Zodiac), I particularly like Sagittarius because it's so happy, and Libra I like very much because it dances so well, but that's their character and that's only my preference for certain characteristics. But Virgo, which is an architectural melody, very rational and very pure, when it's performed the right way, then I also feel fine, it sounds like a very clean and beautiful church song.

JP: What about Indianerleider?

KS: That is all one melody which is developed from one note to twelve notes.

JP: In all the pieces you use one melody to construct the whole piece. Did you do this first in Mantra?

KS: Mantra was the first piece where I wrote a melody that should be remembered, but otherwise this is the principle of all the work of my life, this is Serial composition; it starts with a series which is nothing but a melody and you make an entire work out of this one melody. But this is an old tradition, Bach did it.

JP: Will the whole of Licht, your new work for the seven days, be based on one melody?

KS: That's a triple melody, that's different. For the first time it's multiform, not only one form, but one form out of three, triple form.

JP: Will you go on composing electronic music as part of your work?

KS: I hope so, it's difficult physically; working in the studio just knocks me out, if you work for several months in the studio you are just physically kaputt.

JP: Is this why it seems to play a smaller part in your music than earlier?

KS: Yes, I'm sure it is, now I have made a piece of 92 minutes, Sirius; my God, it took me two-and-a-half years solid work in the studio. But I also want as much as possible of what I am doing to be preserved, because the work of construction is so rich that I think other people should know what I have been doing. But when you do electronic music, most of it is just in notebooks, scribble on thousands of pages. When I go away no one will ever be able to make sense of it, and I cannot see, in 200 years, even if you had several musicologists devote whole lifetimes on this kind of work, that they would rediscover what I did, it's extremely complicated.

JP: So it exists as long as the tape exists?

KS: Not only that, but the rationalisation of what I did is always important, and if there is a score, then you can analyse it and in years find out what I did. And then you hear what I did, because we know what the score says afterwards, and you consciously begin to hear what you know. But if there's nothing written, or only in terms that you don't understand or which makes only part sense, you get totally confused. You can then only know what you hear and that takes much longer to rationalise. It would take centuries, even if the tape were preserved. First they need to transcribe it in modern terms of timbre, pitch and rhythm: that needs a totally new notation, because if you see numbers you can't visualise the numbers in sound, you cannot imagine what it sounds like. A score is better help for listening itself, so it will take a long time in history before they know what I have been doing.

JP: So if they try and copy it by listening and trying again...

KS: They would transcribe it and find a way of analysing it so that slowly, in time, they would rediscover what I did. But things are more complicated, you only know what you hear. If there's something more to study at any time-speed on the score, you can spend a year on two pages, if you like, like musicologists do sometimes, then afterwards you hear what you know, you discover much more, you become conscious through what you very slowly discover through another sense. The eyes have a very slow indefinite time; the ears have a fixed time.

So I won't use electronics much more than I have been doing. There have been periods: the first two Studies were very small works written in 1953 and performed in '53, '55 and '56; then Gesang der Jünglinge was written between 1954 and '56; Kontakte took two years to write, from 1958 until its performance in 1960. Then in 1965-67 I made Hymnen - and Telemusik in between, in 1966 - and finally, of course, Sirius, which took me two-and-a-half years between 1973 and '77.

Continued next month.