9 - Music beyond Theater: Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen

Summary

I. Composing Culture

There is a consensus in art history that a certain tradition of modernism ended in the 1960s. The music of the 1960s similarly brought its own tradition of modernity to its conclusion. This took the form of a radical paring down of the musical artwork to its barest minimum, a reduction next to which the movement popularly known as minimalism appears harmless and decorative. Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) marked the end point of this tendency, abandoning all conventional musical notation in favor of short verbal instructions to the players, occasionally resembling prose poems (although the resemblance is misleading, as will be evident). These instructions, moreover, sometimes address the state of mind performers must attain as much as the type of music to be produced. The most extreme case is Es (It), the text for which runs as follows:

Think NOTHING

Wait until it is absolutely still within you

When you have attained this

begin to play

As soon as you start to think, stop

and try to retain

the state of NON-THINKING

Then continue playing

The difficulty of listening to the musical results might be compared to that experienced by a first encounter with the Rothko Chapel (1964–70):

A strong component in the visitor's initial impression of the chapel is likely to be a sense of bafflement, of the inadequacy of one's available discursive apparatus to the experience one is confronting.…[…]