Stockhausen, K. (1978) Texte zur Musik 1970-1977 Köln: DuMont Buchverlag pp.

360-401

Four Criteria of Electronic Music

(A tape transcription of a freely delivered lecture, without

written notes, given on 14th September 1972 in the
Folkwang -Museum in Essen, it appears in the volume
“Selbstdarstellung. Künstler über sich” published by W.
Herzogenrath, Düsseldorf, 1973.)

[360] Good evening. First of all, thank you for coming.

There are perhaps only three or four amongst you that have anything to do with the production
of electronic music. However I believe that today there is less of a gap between production and
perception than was the case with earlier music.
I call the first criterion Composition in the musical time-continuum, the second
criterion The decomposition of sound, the third criterion Composition with several layers in
space and the fourth criterion The equal significance of musical sound and noise. These
somewhat technical titles will prove themselves to be generally more valid when I give you
examples. And I beg you to ask immediately if something is unclear.

We have assumed in the music of the past that, according to the historical development of
individual characteristics of sound - pitch, duration, amplitude, timbre and direction and speed
of a sound in space - are various categories that are determined by means of our perception, and
that they cannot be changed. Historically, over a period of almost a thousand years, these
different characteristics of sound have been developed after one another. We forget that too
quickly. Pitch is the most highly developed. We have today an automatic measurement of pitch:
if you use a piano the pitches have already been measured out. You only need to strike them by
touching the keys. The same applies largely also to blown sounds and bowed sounds. Even if
there are small deviations, one complies with the fixed scale of about 88 pitches that have
served composition.

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[361] Durations are very much less developed. In addition, their development started much
later, when people began to measure exactly the length of time of sounds. It only became
necessary as soon as people began to place notes exactly over one another and not simply next
to each other. In a melody, the rhythmic flow can shift unobtrusively and we don’t have to
measure so precisely by the clock. But as soon as something is supposed to fall into place
together one must prescribe values, that are measured and verifiable. Thus, the exact notation -
and thereby also composition - of time durations started about two to three hundred years later.

In addition, two to three hundred years later we began for the first time to compose structurally
with dynamics, not only in layers, but with crescendi and decrescendi. Perhaps you don’t know
that in Mannheim there was a great uproar, as the first crescendi appeared in music as the
people literally rose from their seats and protested.
Such extensions of musical characteristics are sometimes so far-reaching for perception it
is as if they had something to do with changing the relationships, as one would say today. In
reality, they are nothing other than simple extensions of areas of formation.

The same is true of timbre, which from the end of the last and the beginning of this century was
still being composed in an unliberated manner, that is, it served simply to clarify relationships
that were created anyway in the harmony and melody. Even rhythm essentially served to clarify
the harmonic relationships. We know this from the entire theory of syncopation. Schönberg’s
idea, that one could make music with timbre exactly as formerly was the case with changes of
pitches, has not even today penetrated the consciousness of most musicians; that one could, for
example, write a piece in which the pitches are totally constant, for a half an hour, and the same
information composed musically and be perceived - only through changing the timbre - as
formerly in melodic compositions. If a system for the classification of timbre was now
developed similar to that for intervals so that we could also compose and perceive in intervals
of colours, with which we make equally meaningful music, in which we simply neutralise the
pitches, then we would have reached an equality between composition with pitches and timbre.
I mention that in parentheses.

[362] From the middle of the century an emancipation of spatial movement gradually took
place, the point at which in a given space in the open air or in a hall a note sounds, and the
direction from which I hear it can be just as conclusive as (in the traditional vertical nature of
pitches) the various heights at which pitches sound. This is quite new and will at some time, at a

2
greater historical distance, be considered a revolution comparable with the revolutionary
emancipation of dynamics or timbre. Direction and speed of a sound in a given space would
therefore be equally relevant as the frequency of a sound.

So, the first criterion: What does it mean to say that the categorical perception of timbre,
melody and harmony, duration (therefore, rhythm and metre) are formal divisions and not
simply unmediated categories, but that we can if we wish, cross over continually from one
category into the other? As I have said the first theme is, Composition in the time-continuum.
I shall give you a few elementary examples.
If I tap on the desk and record it on a tape recorder, make a tape loop of it, and then speed
it up a thousand times, then I will get a tone, that has a definite pitch, and the pitch would be
defined by means of the distances between the loudest accents of the cycle. If it was exactly for
a second that I tapped, therefore ti, ta, ta… and I made a thousandth of a second out of it, then I
would hear a note that had a thousand vibrations a second, thus a constant pitch depending on
the repetitions of this cycle.
In addition, however, it also has some kind of ‘sound-colour’. At the moment we say it
sounds “like wood”, and that is all we can say at the moment to specify this sound. That is, of
course, quite primitive: “like wood” or “as if I tap my finger on the desk”. That is how we have
to describe the tone colour. But after the speeding it up, what sounds like the C above treble clef
(that is 1000 cycles a second), will also produce some kind of colour. The colour will then
originate from these components which, in the first instance, this wood will have had and from
the subdivisions of the cycle. I have however not simply done: tam-tam-tam, but also ti, tata, ti,
tata. I could also beat a different rhythm. Would that produce something different? Yes. We
must therefore investigate what the difference actually is. What I am saying is: we have
transformed something which was heard as a rhythm (something which clearly occurs within
the area of [363] proportioned durations, that we can perceive and compare individually), into
another perception of musical time, that we describe as pitch or timbre.
If I were now to make a gap between these two accents that lasted, shall we say, two to
three minutes from beat to beat, then we would not hear it as a rhythm anymore, but simply as a
rough division of time. If nothing happened in between, then that would be the music. And we
would thus have three sections in the music, that is: something happened, then something else
and then something else, and the events were fairly similar. Only two sections, that’s all. What
came afterwards, did not stop at all, I simply went away, or someone began to applaud or boo,
and then it finished. And then something else started. Such a ‘duration’ is a formal duration,

3
that we term in the narrow musical sense a form-section.
Thus we would possibly have a continuum available, and that is only to be achieved with
the new apparatus, in which we can continually go from one area into the other: a continuum
whose three areas are FORM, that which we call formal divisions, then RHYTHM and METRE
and, then HARMONY and MELODY, as approximately equal areas of perception. This is very
interesting. We hear pitches from about 20 Hertz to 4000 Hertz, that is as you know about 7 1/2
octaves on the piano. And it is interesting that the durations that we perceive as rhythmic values
are from about 1/8 to 8 seconds long. It can be said that something that lasts longer than 8
seconds can no longer be accurately distinguished as a rhythmic value; at that point our
perception breaks down, it becomes unclear. We suddenly confuse values that we can no longer
remember, whether they lasted 11 or 13 seconds. Our capacity to remember diminishes
therefore with events from 8 seconds in duration. At that point a new area of perception begins,
in which one distinguishes the formal divisions. And this is also about 7 octaves, that is
doubling seven times in width (which is of course 1 ‘octave’). It lasts for the length that in
traditional music we commonly used for one movement or else for a whole work, let’s say up to
quarter of an hour. If you reckon this up: 8-16-32-64-128-256-512-1024 seconds (that is 7 times
double the number) this gives 17 minutes. This is about the length after which in traditional
music a work stopped. Why does it not last seven hours? Because we have developed in our
tradition [364] quite definite ranges of perception within which music runs its course.

If I now play the first example then it will demonstrate what has become apparent and
practically possible only in electronic music: that one can for example transform a melody into
a rhythm, sounds into rhythm, by gradually slowing them down; or that one can change any
form, a large division of time into a sound, by speeding it up.

One could, for example, compress a Beethoven symphony so that it would only last two
seconds. Then, therefore, this inner-life, the rhythmic inner-life of these two seconds would
determine the timbre of this sound, for the sound that appears to me as a unity. It would have a
microstructure that would be composed by Beethoven that would result a new sound. There are
technical difficulties at present in making a transposition in time without also automatically
transposing the pitches; but in principle it is possible.
Or one could - now the other way round - take any sound and stretch it until it reached the
great time span of a symphony. Then we would transfer the micro-musical features, time-
features of a sound into the macro-time form.

4
 Such things happen constantly in advanced works of electronic music. That, for example,
somebody makes a rhythmic structure, then compresses this rhythmic structure so that it
becomes a single sound, and one works further with the sound. Or vice versa, that someone
makes a rhythmic structure, then compresses this rhythmic structure so that a single sound
emerges, and the sound is worked with further. Or the other way round, someone makes a
rhythmic structure and stretches it so that it is no longer perceived as rhythm but we begin to
hear the individual vibrations of the sounds. The rhythmic division that was formerly heard as
rhythm then becomes, if it is - shall we say - slowed down 50 times an insanely slow formal
division with crescendi and descrescendi, and what happens in between is interesting in so
much as one can listen inside the notes and perceive the vibrations of the notes. We
‘microscope’ music.

The following four examples come from KONTAKTE (contacts), a work that I composed in
1959. In these KONTAKTEN all sounds are electronic, even those which sound naturalistic -
wood blocks, cymbals or like cow bells, like maracas or like consonants - sch! – so, all these
sounds [365] are electronic, that is at first, they were produced synthetically. I formed almost
all of the sounds only from impulses - they sound like: dock, dock, dock, when you hear them
from a loudspeaker, or almost exactly like that, or they can be somewhat broader in the
spectrum. From such impulses I stuck rhythms together, from these rhythms loops, let the
rhythms run many hours on these loops - exactly like an alchemist’s kitchen - and recorded the
whole result, I went into a room next door, prepared a new loop; the same in a third room. So
loops were running everywhere, and this could be observed through the glass windows that
were between the studios. Subsequently, I then ran the tapes at a faster speed on the tape
recorder so that they were transposed 4 to 5 octaves higher, the result then once more 4 octaves
higher - then I was already 8 octaves high - until I finally arrived in a different domain, in
which the rhythms can be heard as pitches and timbres. A terribly primitive process! In order to
produce a sound that lasted 8 seconds, I needed a whole day - in order to construct this timbre,
to ‘compose’ it: to define by means of the accents’ microstructure and then to generate a whole
family of sound from this.

The first example shows the following: out of a wide band of more or less undefinable pitches
a sound shoots out that is 169 Hertz. We hear therefore roughly an Eb. It emerges and has the
following sound colour (imitates with the voice), descends in several curves and shatters as it
were in front of our ears, because it passes through the border of perception between 30 and 16

5
Hertz; from 169 Hertz it falls by about 7 octaves. That is about four octaves lower than the
piano! In other words: one no longer hears the original periods as pitches. But we still do hear
something: the impulses into which the constant note has been reduced also have a pitch. I have
done that fairly craftily, so that the pitch one lands on, is again the same pitch as that with
which one began, although we have fallen 7 1/2 octaves lower.
That needs to be explained. The first note had a timbre, certain partials or overtone
components, and these components of timbre are now heard as components of pitch after the
note has fallen 7 1/2 octaves lower and has dissolved itself into individual impulses. These
pitches originate from those components of the first pitch that formerly belonged to the timbre.
So you can fall 7 1/2 octaves and arrive exactly from where you started. And that has often,
visibly and audibly, [366] often caused strange feelings in the stomach with people. It is simply
that here one passes through a critical zone where one loses acoustical balance. It is similar to
entering for a short while a gravity-less or directionless space. One loses balance, and the body
and psyche react immediately to regain balance and accordingly they show the corresponding
symptoms. Something similar always happens when one passes through critical zones, which
are no-man’s land. They are neither pitches nor durations. They cannot yet be heard as rhythms,
but also one cannot hear them any longer as pitches. That corresponds to the deep rattling sound
of the organ for example, when the pitches are so low that the whole casing begins to knock,
and finally the lamps in the space also rattle in sympathy. Therefore what lies between
approximately 12 impulses per second and 30 impulses per second cause us to lose orientation.
That is our concern, not the sound. We will hear the first example.

[367] Illustration 1 (from Kontakte)

Shortly before 17’05” the sound 43i begins its crescendo, continues as 44a at 17’05” and now descends in several
curves, (the dotted line of its formants, that initially determine its ‘colour’, belong after approx. 8 sec. 44b to the
pitch glissando that continues on page 20 in single impulses that then become longer and at 17’38.5” become a
continuous tone, the colour of which becomes increasingly brighter.)

It is possible to articulate this repeatedly, more or less artistically; so, repeated falling and rising
again several times, making the single notes longer and then, for example, returning to a
continuous note that was already there beforehand, and then continue working with this note.
One can, therefore, within a musical process cause such a grandiose phenomenon to occur, that
has the effect of a moment of revelation, where one suddenly comprehends what a time
transformation is. The physical example can be more or less articulated, and that makes the
important difference between examples in physics and in music.

6
 One can explain musically certain criteria by simple and commonplace methods, or it can
be somehow composed as [368] never before, therefore very originally and in an unexpected
manner. Then it becomes music, then it becomes something artistic. In other respects it is
nothing else but an opening and an expansion of consciousness. All of a sudden one is no
longer the same, when one has grasped that sounds are only as they seem within a certain
process; that I can make something else out of each event, that is a rhythm out of a pitch, a
formal division out of a rhythm, a timbre out of a formal division: so that one can continuously
compose right through the musical categories of perception.
And that is actually the most essential thing that has taken place in the new music in
comparison to the old music. Old music - one perspective. We had one direction: thus, now I
hear rhythmic-metrically, and the harmonic-melodic belongs to it but in another category the
dynamics again in another category. One always had the problem of bringing together these
categories, instead of starting from a unified concept and unfolding and developing multiplicity
from the single concept. The pedestal has now been overturned. The whole compositional
process has become turned around and with it, perception.
The one perspective has become multidimensional by means of relativity. What rhythm
is, circumstances permitting, is not rhythm at all, or is compressed so that it suddenly becomes
a melody, a melodic phenomenon, or a timbral phenomenon. And this continuous crossing
over from one perspective into another during one and the same piece: that has actually
become the theme of composition. No longer to compose or present or demonstrate or construct
something else, but the possibilities of transformation of the sound material is the theme itself.
Constantly I compose multidimensional aspects of sound, to allow those who experience
it also to become multidimensional or at any rate to give them the chance that they no longer
have merely one perspective but to change with the transformations as well. That one, so to
speak, sits on the sound and moves with the sound, and if the sound shoots through one
dimension and jumps into an other one must also make this jump of perception oneself.

Passing through the categories diagonally: that is I believe the most essential of all. Therefore
we also have problems sometimes with phenomena that very quickly expand and renew the
consciousness of Man, because they simply [369] move too quickly. There is a law of inertia of
the mind exactly as with physical matter. And it's not always possible to do anything about it, or
only with great difficulty. It depends on the psyche of the individual human being, how far they
are capable of carrying out as quickly as possible such expansions of consciousness which
come with new experiences.

7
 We shall then repeat the first example (I have dwelt rather longer on the first, the others
will go somewhat quicker).
I suggest - what I do again and again even at the risk that people say I’m a Romantic -:
simply shut your eyes. You simply hear better when you’re not visually distracted - if you no
longer stare at me or the loudspeakers, completely unessential things at the moment of
perception of the tone, but only follow the sound process and as much as possible participate in
this transformation of musical time in order to see what then happens to you. Besides, I shall
turn the light off in the hall and control the volume from the middle of the hall. I shall now let
the example run for about four minutes longer, and you can follow how I make music for
several minutes with only the one tone, that we reached after the rapid fall of 7 1/2 octaves.

[Example 1 is repeated, but this time up to 21’50”]

[After the example is over and the light is turned on again, Stockhausen sings the last faded
note, while he comes onto the podium and then says: “Notice this tone, its colour - something
quite definite will happen to it in the following process!”]

Now the second criterion, the decomposition of sound. What does this mean? In Western
music the production of characteristic musical events which are meant to be typical for a work -
even for a composer - is based quite significantly on the instrumentation, as it is called.
Therefore on the technique of mixing instruments; just as painters have various tubes and from
these tubes mix their colours, specific colours, so composers have mixed their ‘sound colours’
with orchestral colours and choral sounds (and this is even limited to vocal sounds, that are
harmonic sounds, which have a harmonic spectrum). The noises that we will come to in the last
section, have only a secondary function in Western music, they have only provided accents
according to certain conventions. In the quite hierarchically organised pitch ordering this was
for a particular reason, [370] I’ll come to that in a minute. Composition always consisted of the
combination of small parts like the word componere = combine, bring together says. One builds
small structures, figures from simple components. Therefore one always went from the smallest
to the biggest when composing, whereby the smallest unit was considered the given tone
produced by means of an instrument or a voice, and not something like, in our previous
example, an impulse or even only a single vibration.

Decomposition is a typical phenomenon whose essential quality has only become possible by

8
means of electronic means: that is to say some sound that we hear during the course of a
musical composition evolves, in the literal sense causes itself to be uncovered, revealed. It
decodes what actually its colour or its intrinsic nature has determined. That is why I just said
“Keep in mind this note and above all its colour” (one simply cannot imitate this…).
This is therefore a sound, whether I now call it ‘piano’ or ‘car’: it is one tone and that is
another; and that is yet another; ‘a’ or ‘i’ or ‘plane’ or whatever. We have in fact up until now
only named the sounds according to their origin. This is just as if I were to say to you, you are
the ‘man from Bergisch Gladbach’, thus we say ‘piano-tone’; until today we were not capable
of designating musical sounds with names like red or green in colours. If we say oboe, then we
mean the instrument that has been constructed and with which the sounds are made. But an
oboe sound as such can be described by no-one amongst musicians. If musicians hear sounds
about which they know nothing, how they are made, they are completely lost. Then they say:
“Yes, that doesn’t exist at all” or “those are ‘abstract sounds’”, or - “that is not music”. Why?
They do not belong to the categories that we can designate by name. That is very important,
because there we suddenly lose perception, orientation. And it creates insecurity. And
uncertainty is undesirable. Thus: where one cannot categorise sounds, it is musical unexplored
territory. This is the famous new music. And moreover what has been made with these sounds
is ‘unheard of’. Then we call that New in capital letters, New Music.
However, we do not think about people sitting together for ten years in a conservatory
and attending to the fact that we should receive in the next 10 years a clean language for
sounds, indeed for all sounds, not just for the oboe and for the piano and harp and voice, for a
canary or for a blackbird (already most musicians do not know what sounds a blackbird makes).
[371] Therefore I am saying: we have a quite small, limited reservoir of sounds that we are can
name, and that is pathetic Already in the past twenty years in colour theory for example, a
catalogue has been produced, the ‘Ostwaldschen colour circle’ in which over 200 clearly
distinguishable colours have been differentiated (as in the pitch scale of a piano). To draw up
such a scale for timbres would be, for example, a future task for musicologists instead of
eternally dwelling on scores that were written in the 15th century. The same holds true for
scales of dynamics.

I am concerned here that one can imagine a sound in a given composition as a unified
phenomenon - I hear a sound -, and now suddenly separate this unified sound, decompose it.
That is a phenomenon of the expansion of perception. I become conscious of something,
something phenomenal. Namely that the note is not simply only one note, but that it has quite

9
definite components, and what sort of components they are, how the single components sound
and how they become unfolded. Such a process can again either be a scientific example and be
done relatively simply, or it can be a highly interesting musical process. And I shall now simply
play for you the continuation of the example that you have just heard. At the end, the solitary
note was reached again and after an accent, cuts like a scalpel into this note, you will hear (I
shall make it quite clear to you) how a first component descends in a glissando from the note,
indeed in several glissandi and how they really shatter before our ears, as in the example that
we have just heard. It goes like this [vocalises brrrrr with glissandi].
The pitches become so low that one can no longer hear them - and then once again these
impulses continue. Then comes a second component that climbs upwards from this note, but the
original note continues; its colour has already changed somewhat. We suddenly notice! Aha!
There was something inside. It’s like a magic bag, suddenly - there is this, and there is also this,
and there too is also this… Single components appear and shoot out. A second rises, a third
component crosses the original note several times (the original note remains stubbornly on its
pitch), a fourth, a fifth component leaves the original frequency and finally the last component
is left over, it also falls apart in several curves, becomes audible as rhythm, the pitch is lost.
[372] All of the tiny particles that result from the collapse of the 6 components that were
formerly united in the one note, fly around in the musical space, they are also no longer
perceptible individually. They create quite shredded, perforated textures, and finally the little
pieces become longer and longer, heavier, noisier and land with a sharp accent in a quite broad
noise like that of the sea, and this crashing noise is then the beginning of the next structure. And
this process we will now hear through.

[Whilst the tape is running Stockhausen draws the whole outlined process once more in the air:
the index finger of his left hand represents the constant pitch as a straight line, the index finger
of his right hand draws all glissandi and points of the components at the same time. At the same
time he walks quite slowly from the extreme left to the right edge of the platform.]

Illustration 2 (from KONTAKTE)

The decomposition ‘uncovers’ the components of the sound in turn: 1st component (descending), after 21’57”; 2nd
component (ascending) at 22’17.7”; 3rd component (ascending) at 22’30.9”; 4th component at 22’53.2”;
(ascending) shortly before 22’46.1”; 5th component at 22’53.2”; the 6th component finally moves and ‘shatters’
into its rhythmic particles at 23’3.9”. The groups of impulses that ‘fly around’ become ‘fragmented’ and
increasingly noisy and land at 23’49” (beginning of page 27) in the five-layered ‘beat’ which is the beginning of
the following structure.

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[374] That was therefore, what is meant by decomposition of the sound: that some definite
sound often reveals itself in a musical process, unfolds, ‘decomposes’ (composes itself apart)
and we understand in retrospect what it really is. Now, that is in terms of perception a very
interesting phenomenon. We must divide ourselves. We must therefore on the one hand remain
with the note that continues constantly, but on the other hand go with the components and also
quickly check up once more what has become of the other components that in the meantime are
flying round the space in small parts. One thus becomes oneself multidimensional. That is
always the crucial point, I believe, with such musical processes of perception. If someone
simply listens to something from the outside and does not really hear it, that is the
consciousness concentrates on the sound, inwardly participates in all the processes of the
sound, then naturally absolutely nothing happens. But if he participates then he must divide
himself, then he becomes polyphonic, then he becomes many-layered himself, then he himself
crumbles in one layer which he has followed - but he must also remain constant. I am talking
about this multidimensional aspect of perception. It is quite modern to perceive several
processes at the same time and to also perceive them accurately.
I will now play the same example once more, and I ask you again to conduct the
experiment of consciously following what happens in the inner imagination whilst listening to
these processes. It is a process of Becoming: one note becomes 6 components; and six
components become many swarms of notes, and from these swarms of notes stronger accents
become audible, and these sharper accents become gradually this one heavy block-like sound
from which then, further things lead off.

[Example 2 is repeated, once again all the lights in the hall are turned off.]

I shall try to make clear to you this evening that the new means that are generally called the
means of electronic music and the new methods of composition obviously only make new
perceptions possible if they are used in an original way; I mean original in the primary sense of
the word, therefore not only simply to make a few hundred new sounds which after a few years
would be as worn out as the earlier new instrumental sounds (shall we say the saxophone of 50
years ago). Essentially that word would be uninteresting, because it is a purely fashionable
concern simply to add a few new sounds to the already existing reservoir. [375] It is only
significant to use the new means in such a way that effective expansions and changes of
consciousness take place, for example, continuously going through musical time regions,

11
therefore to make relative the perspective of perception. So that we do not present sound -
phenomena as finished objects to which we give names, but that one presents the becoming
and passing of sounds of what we describe as timbres, and by this means relating a simple note
- therefore to compose with a musical theory of relativity.
One notices that the particular colour is only a momentary condition: that here so and so
many components come together and for a certain time have the effect of a sound; suddenly,
however, the sound opens itself again, changes into something quite different. It happens thus
that one composes more and more processes instead of fixed objects. It is a quite significant
phenomenon to use the new resources like this, so that in effect they expand and completely
renew our consciousness - also our perception of that which we actually are, of which we
through sounds could become. Only then, I find, has a new means acquired its legitimacy, when
someone makes use of these means in such a way that perception itself is renewed, and that,
which appears by means of perception, has enormous consequences. Those people who have
experienced this and who consciously experience participating in these sound procedures, they
are simply no longer the same people. I have previously written that obviously the electronic
resources will be used quite superficially and very soon in a banal way - for anything, simply to
make decoration music, wallpaper music with which time is filled today, which is to fill some
auditorium or a department store or an airplane or a bus so that people have something around
them because otherwise they will be bored to death.

Therefore there is no intention to fascinate people with superficial effects, but by means of the
experience of what happens within the sound material in a completely new way, to join in
experiencing transformations, mutations in sounds. And then music is an expedient to attain this
consciousness.

And another thing: Why is decomposition so important? We have - myself included - always
considered, experimented, made sketches in composed music, [376] and the best outcome, the
finished result is written down or played. The evolutionary process of the sound therefore was
consciously left out. That always belonged, as we say in the preparatory kitchen. I recall a
moment in the year 1951. I was studying at the Cologne conservatoire and was shortly to take
the state degree. As a school musician I was taught counterpoint by Hermann Schroeder. I had
written a sonata for piano like that just out of nowhere. And I took to Mr Schroeder??? this
sonata. As I explained it to him he said: “Stop, what’s that?” I played it on the piano so: a note,
and then a second and the first goes away again and is put on top, and then another comes and

12
then all three go away and so on… At any rate I had obviously composed the genesis of a
theme and at the end there was the theme. And I had finished. It lasted, I think, about 12
minutes. The whole process of the development, that is everything that had gone through my
head, I had noted. Then he said: “What do you mean by it? You want the theme surely!” I said:
“Yes” - “Yes, so write it down at once.” I said: “Why then should I write the theme and
subsequently take it apart, why shouldn’t I just put it together?” He said that the whole piece
belonged in my small room, the story of the genesis of the theme, and I should begin with the
finished theme. I accepted that and I went out and thought: “The piece is rubbish, the teacher
must know.” Had I been able to say him, that the birth of a phenomenon can be very much
more informative than the phenomenon itself at the moment it appears here as a born small
fragment? Would he have understood that? I could also, of course, have taken this thing apart
and led it into another… From the beginning therefore I was concerned with processes, for
example with the process of decomposition, the composition-of-taking-apart. But that the
formation of a colour and the relativisation of a timbral musical structure could be a composed
theme, that I only became conscious of significantly later. The constant arising and passing of
phenomena! Then something could occur, that is totally unexplained, did not arise and does not
pass, but arises from nothing at the moment it appears. Such a thing remains really inexplicable
and disappears once again into nothing. It then come much later to one, sometimes like a
sudden illumination what it actually was. It has very strong effects when producing phenomena
that are not developed, unprepared.

[381] The third criterion is musical multi-layered space. We have, over time, by means of
certain descriptions - and for some of us through four channel electronic reproduction - come in
contact with new spatial composition, and perhaps you have at some time heard GRUPPEN for
three orchestras or CARRÉ for four orchestras and four choirs, where the orchestras are built
around the public.
Last week we experienced it once again in Paris, where the work CARRÉ (so, with four
orchestras and four choirs, four conductors - with their backs to the wall) was performed four
times. The sound moves in this work more or less exactly from group to group in the space.
There are spatial constellations that are exactly as clear as interval constellations in harmony:
for example left and forward, left and right, slowly rotating round by the right… accelerando of
the rotation up to a maximum, then suddenly beginning a leftwards rotation up to a pause, an
alternating movement between back and left and in front on the right etc. ... Spatial
constellations are composed like interval constellations in melodies and chords. I shall therefore

13
speak about spatial melody and spatial harmony.
Can you imagine that: spatial melody? Let’s say we had any number of loudspeakers
around us as in the sphere in Osaka at the world exhibition in 1970. A spherical auditorium.
The public sat on cushions in the middle on a sound permeable platform. Between the rows of
cushions was space, one would look through them downwards, it was fairly deep. The whole
sphere was 28 meters in diameter, and around were ten horizontal rings of loudspeakers
distributed from top to bottom, four beneath the listeners and six above. One could steer almost
any number of configurations of sounds in circles or alternating movements between whatever
points in space, either by improvisation or according to certain patterns.
For circular-, spiral-, and other periodic kinds of movement I made use of a ‘Rotation-
mill’. Any microphone or combination of microphones could be put into the input of such a
mill. [Stockhausen draws the diagram of the rotation mill on the board]; the mill had 10
electrical outputs, with which one could connect any 10 of the 50 loudspeaker channels, and if
the handle was turned manually left or right like a coffee-mill the sound moved accordingly in
space. The highest speed amounted to about five periods a second. With signal buttons one
could still alter the sound mixture during the movement. If, for example, a singer [382] were to
be projected via loudspeakers in this way it would be as if a person moves invisibly in space.

The question is, whether it remains the same person whose voice can be separated from the
body. Actually, not at all. Independent of the corporeality of the musician we come across a
quite new phenomenon, for the time being the last that has been developed historically - hm…

But what does that mean: sounds moving in space? Unfortunately I cannot make a four track
reproduction this evening, otherwise you would already have a very good impression of it. You
would have to sit here in the middle and you would have four loudspeakers above and four
below in the corners in order to at least get a complete circle if not the whole sphere of space.
Then you would perceive what already many people have perceived at demonstrations of
electronic music. Most spaces are not suited for this. They are built for quite different
objectives. The usual acoustic is not good for such purposes because one cannot locate the notes
clearly.
But that means that henceforth a note need not automatically sound where a musician is.
And that music need not automatically be, as in Western culture, spatially neutral and frozen,
that is that the viewpoint of the listeners and the players are constantly opposite each other, and
that the division of the musicians of an orchestra are conventionally fixed. The direction from

14
where the notes come to your ears according to where you sit, the speed with which they come
are assumed as self-evidently constant apart from the reflections in the hall. That the musician
always sits at the same conventionally determined place has only indirectly something to do
with traditionally composed music. That is it does not make this music clearer or less clear if
the seating arrangement of musicians is changed, presuming that one bore in mind the natural
dynamic differences of the instruments.
The movement of a sound like that of a singing bird or a car that passes by, plays no role
in traditional music. However, in order to perceive in a new space music such kinds of forms of
movement [383] and spatial constellations, it is absolutely necessary that I hear if a sound is
coming from the front left or right behind. In modern traffic in a city for example, it is
absolutely necessary for a pedestrian to recognize if a car comes from behind in order to make
the last jump before it hits him. It is also important to notice at what distance the car is behind
him. So, this is simply a matter of life or death in traffic, whereas whilst hunting for example it
is matter of total indifference for there is scarcely anything to left to hunt. In hunting it is
important to know where a noise comes from. It amuses me nowadays still to experience
something like a hunt. I live on the country in Kürten, in Bergischen Land. Sometime ago I
observed approximately 15 hunters and beaters. I know the wood fairly well - there are only a
few hares and rabbits. And what kind of claptrap do you think the hunters in the evening were
talking? “How the rabbit sat there and I raised my gun…” So, what I want to say is: the
necessity whilst hunting, to hear the sounds from a certain direction, and the speed with which a
sound draws near and moves past or goes away: this has become for the modern European
totally unimportant.

Church and concert music remain spatially fixed. That the awareness of the spatiality of the
sound is revived once more again by its movement, has an eminently important effect. We
desperately need today an unexhausted parameter, because pitches are at present still fairly
paralysed. Harmony and melody only function relatively, they are neutral due to the collapse or
rather the total departure of the tonal system. In the West we can, therefore, only do a limited
number of significant things in harmony, which people will also be able to understand or
participate in or execute. That has its advantages naturally.

The movement of the sound is thus no longer necessarily fixed to the body. That is
something very important. For this I thank modern devices, microphone, tape recorder,
loudspeaker, no longer must 172 pounds be transported when my voice is to be heard

15
somewhere in the distance. That an oboist who sits at the front left of a stage shall always be
heard from there where he sits is just no longer necessary. We all know this from the radio and
television. And certainly modern means will be continually developed so that we experience a
quite plastic, three dimensional acoustic as well as optic space, I mean therefore sounds
everywhere at any point in space.
[384] Loudspeakers are only a means of transmission, that you certainly know. One
would have to have 80 loudspeakers, for example, in order to reproduce what an eighty piece
orchestra sitting in front of me could, so that every sound has its own space in order to be able
to unfold in space. Every note needs therefore its own volume of air in order to be able to
develop to its best and be heard. It is therefore a transitory condition that such primitive
loudspeaker reproduction should be used. One will make use of quite new phenomena, like for
example, ionised air in certain auditoria where one can directly cause small particles of air to
vibrate without having to push the air by mechanical membranes; so where the sound no longer
has to be transported by airwaves at a certain speed, but can vibrate an air-cushion directly over
you, over your nose. We will have several significant revolutions in the next 20, 30 years.
Industry naturally attempts to slow this down, because it still earns enough from loudspeakers.
But when that is over one day, then something new will come.
It is exactly the same with four-channel stereo. At the moment you have two-channel
stereo installations and must save for it with difficulty from the housekeeping money. And
when you all have that, four-channel listening will begin. After that a few rich people can buy
the apparatus, subsequently the so-called middle classes will buy it, and then finally the people
out in the village where I live will soon have it, because they simply must have ‘Quadrophony’
- we just can’t help that. Then good rooms will be cleared out that are already now the
television room, four loudspeakers put in and so one will hear with four channels. That will
happen here in Germany exactly as in America or Japan. We must spend our free time
somehow…
I shall say that this is not so banal as it sounds now, but to a certain extent it forms new
people. One can talk also more about significant things than formerly. About certain
movements of sounds for example, and what happens because of them. The fact that a sound
appears above us and could move with a speed that is faster than a human can move from above
left to half way down on the right according to a certain angle and a certain rate within my field
of perception, can be just as real a piece of information as a fourth in a melody of pitches. If I
pinpoint space topologically and correspondingly compose structurally in order to move
sounds in quite definitive arrangements, this can lead to an unprecedented [385] lively music. I

16
could during the course of a composition set up spatial constellations exactly like chords, and
relate these to other constellations; equally I could compose spatial melodies, that describe
every possible geometric configuration by means of the ascent and descent of sounds, by means
of the progressions that pass one by at certain heights or depths or in straight or curved lines, if
they are used structurally by the composer. And so we have won a new field of representation
for composition.
In 1953/4 we tried to hang loudspeakers by ropes, and move them in the hall. We made
all kinds of experiments. You can’t just simply tie a trumpeter to a chair, hurl him across the
hall and have him play at the same time. Therefore we look for other possibilities to move a
sound on its own in space and this development has only just begun.

Something that seems to me to be of greater significance is this: that several spatial layers of
sounds could be composed behind one another. That is - it is comparable to field of optics -
one can compose sound curtains, that open and close again. And when a sound curtain opens
one hears something that lies behind it that was already there, but of which was not conscious
of, and this sound layer could open in its turn and release a third layer etc ...
Quite interesting questions arise. How many layers can be ultimately composed behind
each other? Up to now, how far has someone managed to compose layers behind each other? I
have got as far as 6 layers. But that is really difficult. Quite definite timbres are required
generally to place a second layer behind without it being heard when the layer is in front. It
requires quite specific categories of sound and of sound-composition in order to compose such
deep-layeredness, such stacked up differentiated spatial depths and then correspondingly to
be able to perceive them. During the work on KONTAKTE I needed to spend a long time on
sound extracts, in order to find out experimentally whether I could put one more layer behind
several that already existed or not. How did that one have to be? Very clearly defined, therefore
create small figures and behind another noise layer that is perhaps worked with groups of
impulses in order to have an adequate concealing effect on a layer behind with harmonic
spectra and so on... And this revealing and covering up of sound layers that are behind one
another and [386] produce spatial depths becomes very important for we are used as much as
ever to hearing music in auditoria and not in the open air. So, I cannot have sound perceived
without additional noise via over-dimensionalised loudspeakers 300 metres away. This effect of
depth must be produced in all directions.
What does this comprise? Two phenomena belong to it. Firstly a much more
differentiated composition of dynamics than formerly. Loud-soft is indeed sufficient for one

17
note that has as the effect of being near or far, but only just. For many notes that are heard very
near can be decidedly soft. But I can say nevertheless: that one is quite near -, whereas other
notes that are fairly loud could clearly have the characteristic that they sound at such and such a
distance, let’s say 50 meters or 200 meters or a kilometer.

The composer must occupy himself with the problem why a note appears at the certain
distance if he wishes to compose with spatial categories. What is it that makes it possible to
have a certain sound appear to the left at a distance of about 150 metres and then at high speed
within a second to move extremely near to me? Near-far impressions are therefore more than
loud-soft. You know that for yourselves. It is also the result of the distortion of the sound, how
often the note is reflected until it reaches my ear. And from these subtle interactions of
dynamics and timbre one can compose spatial distances.

With this we come across a basic problem of our entire concept of perception. We say for
example, if a note appears very far to the left in a hall: yes, that is an illusion. If, for example, I
now turn the light off and give a four track performance of a section of KONTAKTE and then
say: “Remember this note, how it behaves spatially: it goes quite a far away and then becomes
back to the front again”, then you say: “Yes, that is still an illusion, the note has not gone far
away.” With that you notice something interesting. The fact that you could not imagine, that
this wall has moved - in other words: the fact that walls of the space in which you are obviously
have not moved for your eyes, misleads you into the reaction of saying: “Yes, what I experience
acoustically is an illusion and only what I can move optically is the truth.” And this has
immense consequences; for you know that nowadays only that which is written counts as the
credible truth, [387] which is ‘approved of’. All that has to do with our visual education in
writing. We are no longer acoustic beings. We are basically deaf. Our concept of truth is
based solely on the perception of the eyes.

For example, I can say as a musician: for me the reality of the sound is that which I experience
when I close my eyes; the establishing in our minds that the walls can not move is an illusion;
the sound moved 150 meters away and then returned. There you see, you could turn the whole
thing upside down: It would be an illusion to say the walls have not moved. Why? Because we
designate the visual as the absolute for our criteria of perception and not the acoustic. We are
living in a purely visual society and tradition.
Thus music now acquires enormous importance. It can for example, because of the

18
expansion of the spatial parameters, contribute to basing a phenomenology of perception as
equally on the acoustic as the visual, and which will gradually be developed. Clearly, in this
space I can hear a sound three kilometres away if I produce it over loudspeakers! The crucial
thing is, what I am perceiving. And only if the categories of perception are revised, then one
can count on the fact that what I compose will be perceived or accepted as reality, as
musical reality.
There are few remarks about the consequences of the musical use of spatial multilayering.

I will show you an example again. The last sound of the previous example, this thick, solid
sound, is not so thick and solid for nothing: it conceals very completely. And you will hear it
now several times very loudly, also very broad in the spectrum, very noisy. It opens, and you
will hear behind a second layer. In this second layer you will hear small figures, like the cries of
crows; a third sound-layer wipes this one away again, and comes right into the foreground,
quite near. This near-far-experience is important. Free yourself from the visual. You know
now how that can be done.

KONTAKTE (from 23’49” – see diagram 2, p.373 below – to 27’45.5” – see score 31 [diagram
3] [During the performance the light is switched off again.]

See score page 27 (continuation of the 2nd criterion) from 24’18.7” an acoustic ‘window’ (the strong noise-sounds
in the foreground stop at 24’18.7”) One hears a first background, on which - again somewhat nearer - small figures
at 24’29.2” and at 24’33.9”, then a strong, percussive sound quite near, which for a short time covers everything
and then disappears into the distance at 24’37.1” and - symmetrical to the aforementioned sound – once again both
figures but reflected on page 28 of the score at 24’44.1” and 24’45.6”. The whole wall of sound is inserted again in
the foreground at 24’56.6”.
A corresponding window, with three layers behind one another from 25’49.6” to 26’5.1”, a further one from
26’9.2” to 26’15.2”. The described process of spatial differntiation finally explodes.

Have you noticed how this cluster at the end fades away into a fairly large but enclosed space?
We hear this. It sounds like this in a church with lots of echo.
Right, everyone must use their imagination for themselves and try to hear authentically
such music if it is presented in a relatively good auditorium, with appropriate loudspeakers that
are not distributed just in one level but if possible in a half circle or rather an octagonal
loudspeaker-cube, in order to verify generally what I am actually speaking about. And that this
relativisation of the position and the speed of the note in space will become a formal criterion
of music which one can only achieve through experience.

19
 In any case it is self evident that the connection between sound and the corporeality of the
musician as well as instruments, which we have utilised until today is historically at an end; that
we are certainly tied no longer to the body and its muscular capabilities in order to play
instruments and to consider the maximum and minimum speed of the finger muscles or the
breath as absolute limits, that we are beginning to emancipate ourselves from this physicality
of the body is in meantime certainly clear to some musicians; and they can imagine that it is
not so agreeable to continue to play our mechanical instruments as we have learnt and as they
are still constructed today.
Of course, in order to accomplish an immediate transference of the inner to the outer - to
convert inner vibrations into sound vibrations - one can make use of mechanical resonators to
produce notes (thus wooden boxes like violins, strung with cat gut or steel strings; or blow
pipes made from certain metals like trumpets, horns etc.). But that is limited historically and not
tied for eternity, we will more and more use electronic apparatus for sound generation and for
exact differentiation of notes, concerning dynamics, and exact measurement, as far as timbres
are concerned.
[391] Spatial movement of notes will be achieved by this means that we will play through
contact-microphones or microphones and through ones own movement try to steer the sound.
But somewhere our feet and hands are limited: one can adjust dynamics more exactly with a
pedal, perhaps in 50 or 60 degrees; one can control the timbre with a filter; one can with a hand
turn knobs in order to differentiate still more exactly the dynamics and timbres or to influence
the rhythm (for example to produce quicker rhythms than is possible manually), and one can
play the pitches with the other hand on a keyboard. But that is the final stage.
Possibly an assistant will be needed, like a modern pilot who flies in a fairly complicated
airplane and not just a single motor machine. That means that two, three people must possibly
work together in order to produce a single note. And it will happen like this: one will play the
pitch, timbre, rhythm, for example, another will regulate the dynamics and the spatial
distribution, and it can be unified according to written documents or freely understood during
the actual playing.

For the spatial directing of the sound a small radar screen could be utilised, on which one draws
the flight path of a sound with a light pen, or by moving the body in a Theremin-field the sound
could be moved in space. The movement of the body would simply cause changes in an electro-
magnetic field, and these could be used to direct electronically the phase relationships of a
sound. I don’t know if you have heard about it. It was once suggested in the twenties in

20
America, that radio would develop like this, so that every person who sits in front of the radio
set could influence the sound’s volume in the space with hand movement. And what applies to
the dynamics, one could also apply to rhythm or spatial distribution, so that one modulates the
sound at will. That could again be of great interest today.

Two years ago, for example, in Australia I met a group of young people who were engaged in
utilising Theremin-equipment so that ballets could be made with them, in which the ballet
movements could be scanned in an electromagnetic field and which operated amplifiers, so that
every movement produced a certain note or else interrupts a particular electric current and
thereby influences something else - for example projectors. [392] Such a field could be created
around every musician; there where the musician moves, would also be the sound.
But I am looking for more a more ideal possibility, so that also quick movements will be
produced; that is rotations around the listener, that are quicker than 16 revolutions a second.
I am searching for a solution to develop an apparatus by means of which the musician not only
influences dynamics, rhythm, pitch and timbre, but also the projection to a certain place in the
space with an optional speed, so that the musicians who are sitting on the stage run after each
other, meet, move in a parallel manner, turn around each other and so on ... So, like boys today
have remote controlled aeroplanes. Only now it’s not aeroplane but notes that I want. In the
next decades there will be no limits to the imagination, in order to create new means for music,
with which it can progress, emancipate itself and become free from the physical limits that until
now we have obviously taken for granted.

The fourth and last criterion is the equal value of tones and noise. You have also heard
much about this. So today we make ‘noise-music’ as people so nicely put it. “But that is not
music, for noises are not music ...” Such a judgment is like the taboo of the Russian orthodox
church – at least until recently - that no organs could be used, only human voices, and this is for
quite definite reasons. The reason that no noises were permitted in our Western music, lies in
the development of polyphony. For polyphony can only be controlled harmonically with
exactly measurable intervals and chords. In order to be able to hear intervals exactly, notes
with periodic vibrations are needed; therefore no noises can be used.
Noises are only approximately definable in their pitches. Therefore non-European music -
for example Japanese or African or South-American - could naturally use noise in varied ways;
for it was after all unison music that is a heterophonic music.

21
 In European art music the intervals had to be clearly perceptible (as vertical intervals) as
interval constellations up to three intervals in chords that were heard at the same time and
judged a unity - namely as a chord in relation to another chord -, [393] and therefore noises
were taboo. This is not only because the church was the home of music right until
secularisation. After secularisation or - as we say - after the domestication of music that was
also preserved. This is for quite specific reasons. They are in the system itself. Only with the
breaking up of the harmonic system and its rules of intervals, the ‘tonal system’ was it possible
to include noises to a greater extent. And that then took place.
At the beginning of the century the use of percussion instruments quickly increased -
Stravinsky, Webern, Milhaud, Bartók, Schönberg, Varèse wrote in 1931 Ionisation for 32
percussionists and two sirens, whereby mostly no definable pitches are produced, such as
cymbals, gueros, side drums, whips, small bells, maracas, castanets and so on ... There is, I
believe, only one pitch instrument in it, the piano. The sirens also have a recognisable pitch but
these are not notated. All the others are noise-instruments. Or we could consider Construction
in metal, a piece by John Cage from the year 1937, that you must actually know by heart in
order to understand what has happened in the second half of this century. For Construction in
metal Cage gathered together a whole collection of metal instruments purely in order to make
possible a certain sound world to mediate between tones and noise. These are therefore really
works that must be known in order to understand what actually happened.
The ‘Bruitisten’ should also be known even if one thinks that they were not great
composers. For example Russolo who since 1913 made much din with his electrical noise
instruments and with his ‘futurist orchestra’.

Nowadays every sound is potential musical material for a composer. Even a sound of a toilet.
The only question is in which context it is put, in order to simply neutralize the toilet noise as
noise and then you no longer hear it as a toilet noise anymore. And if the association is still
present then it must, in any opinion, be communicated in order to integrate itself into a music
that has a wider realistic representation than merely oboe, piano, and as with Messiaen
perhaps Le merle noir.
In several of my compositions from the last years like TELEMUSIK, HYMNEN,
KURZWELLEN practically everything takes place with associated sounds. Now and then
throughout new additional sound events can be heard. The essential point today is: every sound
can be musical material. Not that the sounds are good or bad music, but it depends [394] what
one does with them. Whether they are mediated or they really are composed. Or whether they

22
are only exposed as if in an exhibition - like in an acoustic vendor’s tray when the salesman
says: I have this sound, I have also that sound, I can make these notes, but I can also make
others. (Most composers do this. Most then care very little about the searching question and are
surprised ...)
It is essential that mediation takes place, that a sound is suddenly a variation of another,
so that therefore between tone and noise a continuum is composed. And that creates an
expansion of consciousness. It shows all of a sudden that a consonant is a degree of a vowel: if I
continually over blow or distort a vowel more and more, it becomes a consonant through a half
consonant. Every sound be brought into a continuum with every other one, and in the middle,
between the two existing sounds, an ambiguous situation is formed. We don’t know if it is one
or the other. It it fish or is it meat? With three available sounds a three-dimensional mediation
is formed etc...
This ambiguity of timbre is essential for the inclusion of noises. Because of this all
taboos were also dismantled. There are tracts on music, in which certain percussive sounds have
been identified with the devil, and other harmonic sounds with God. There are, therefore,
marked holy and profane sounds. There were even books in which certain instruments have
been recommended only for certain uses. Just read in The Republic by Plato what an Aulos is
good for what a harp is good for. Or read books about mantra-technique about what certain
sounds can inflict on humans and what effect they have in a human being.
Just this morning I received a letter from a biologist in Siegburg. (You should bring him
here to give lectures), he told me phenomenal things. For example he is working with mental
patients. He describes how people can be healed by certain sounds, and what progress he had
made recently due to the expansion of the possibilities of sound. He says: “I must come to your
studio. I should like to use electronic possibilities, for I want to make continuous accelerandi
and decelerandi with certain sounds which people know and see what happens. Something
phenomenal happened to me last week. I recorded a metronome on a tape and continuously
slowed it down a lot; over headphones I transmitted the sounds to an aquarium and was able to
synchronise it with the rhythm of a fish. Due to the deceleration [395] of the metronome the
fish died, that was really not intended. It moved slower and slower - totally synchronized with
the metronome - and suddenly it was dead.” And the writer continues: “On the other hand I
have accelerated the metronome so that a fish swam around like mad.” And he adds: “I shall
continue; I want to know more ...”
A new science, similar to the Mantra-teachings, that are ancient oral traditions in India.
What do certain sounds to do humans? Most believe that what they hear makes no difference.

23
One could listen to pop music at 110 phons in the ears for a few years without damage. One
notices immediately that certain centres begin to vibrate madly. But no one actually knows
what is happening to themselves. That we at some time will get a small blow or no longer be
able to hear properly, that people do not know at all. Why? Because at our high schools music
is only taught coldly and abstractly, without knowing what it can inflict on people. Lots of
people say with a particular piece they feel sad, or at a certain passage they become sad and at
another they become happy. But what do these ‘pieces’ and ‘passages’ really produce in the
psyche?

When a person experiences something acoustic, he is changed, because he becomes

modulated by the vibrations, each of his atoms is modulated; he can only partly find the
state once more, in which they previously vibrated. No musician knows anything precise about
this. And it should be the most elementary, necessary training, that we know, more and more,
and research precisely even in teams: what happens with certain noises, with certain notes, note
constellations, so that we receive a new teaching of musical events as a supplement to the
abstract teachings.
Up until now we think: there is the music, here am I. I remain the same, and have an
opinion about that which I have heard. And if someone says after listening: “That was rubbish",
then he is finished with it. But that he himself in the meantime was made to say such an
ordinary remark by the music is not noticed. And what this music has evoked in us, these are
phenomena that should be studied, above all when we aspire to the equality of tones and noise.

[396]You will hear straightaway the last section of KONTAKTE and to what degree tones
and noise have been mediated there, you can consider for yourself. In the previous section that
we heard there were predominantly noises; tones were only heard as tiny figures in the
background. Still earlier you heard clear pitches that came from one tone that unfolded itself;
the moment that it broke up I did not need pitches anymore, and then I made more and more use
of noise.

In the last section, that follows now, I have tried to achieve a balance between notes and noises.
Whether I have succeeded is for you to judge. And there is yet another essential criterion to
consider. How many noises - compared with notes - can be used in a particular relationship in
order to establish an equality? Measured in time: exactly as many noises as notes? No. There
must be far fewer noises that notes. Why? Because noises have a very strong masking effect

24
and are within a certain context simply imprecise materials.

Therefore this imprecise material has, within a relationship of precise pitch, a pronounced
diverting function. But if I make a piece in which only noises appear, relative noises,
immediately I must ask myself again: how many of which category? Then it is in no way
follows like this, one takes quantitatively equally as many, so many noises and so many exact
notes in order to say: right, now I have an equality. That won’t work! It is quite a subtle affair.
We have to listen to a section and say: no, here there is still a few spots missing, so that one has
the impression that there are noises and notes and intermediary stages equally divided, they are
equally important. Now I bring one into the foreground, then now the other. You will hear that
at the end of the piece. This balance is deliberate.

The possibility of composing by means of electronic resources in the continuum between tone
and noise and, on the basis of these continua, then to compose an equality of all dissimilar
divisions of importance in relation to precise pitch phenomena and more or less imprecise pitch
phenomena: that will only stand out gradually by increasing improvement of the new resources,
and only justify itself by such compositional utilization. Please listen to the last section of
KONTAKTE (from 27’45.5” – see page 31 of the score – to the end)..

[397] [The light in the hall is put out once again, and Stockhausen also recommends shutting
the eyes, because it is still not quite dark and there are always silhouettes which are visible.]

Last example.

Diagram 4 (from KONTAKTE)

From the graphic representation of the score. The many-layered polyphonic composition of more or less noise-like
(‘band-shaped’, ‘texture-like’) sound events and note-like (point- and linear-shaped) figures become clear.

[401] Dear listeners, I have tried to explain to you the criteria of electronic music. Naturally
they are only some of the more significant criteria.
I very much hope that what I intended has been made clear. I just wanted to prompt you
to listening in a concentrated manner. The KONTAKTE (contacts) do that to you if you only
participate consciously. On the other hand I also wanted to make clear that renewal as in
electronic music is to be understood as a constant process of human consciousness-becoming.
There will always be in the future constantly new things, and what I have said today about the

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criteria of electronic music is already self evident.
But it is not at all self evident that every one who knows what he could do in order to
experience for himself in a new and deeper way through such music and to enlarge his
awareness of himself in the world, and to do that in practice. To this, belongs a lot of discipline,
and also a capacity for enthusiasm, fervour, patience, persistence and the belief that everyone is
born constantly to rise in awareness, to grow beyond himself.
Music in which dimensions enlarged which sounds in new ways, can serve, as I have
often said, as a fast airship to the Divine.

I thank you for your attention and wish you a good evening.

Translation: John Dack

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