Coulhart a/k/a { feuilleton } on Expo 70 in Osaka
There is a brief mention in Retromania of Expo 70 on account of what Karlheinz Stockhausen did there:
Stockhausen had a spherical auditorium built to his specifications at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan, with nests for musicians scattered throughout the audience; the latter sat at "the equator", on a sound transparent platform, and surrounded by fifty speakers distributed in ten circles (eight above the equator, two below).
There is a whole account of it here
This is one of the compositions performed
Despite the title resemblance, this is something else - pretty cool sounding, though, and love the record cover
Someone - I think it was Rem Koolhaas - said Expo 70 was the peak of the 20th Century and that's it been downhill all the way since, in terms of human imagination. The swansong of the era of big public projects, governments prepared to plan things that took decades to be realised and that they'd not benefit from electorally, state action with a long-term focus rather than short-term with an eye on the next election.
But there's a lot of gauchely futuristic buildings that have been built in the last couple of decades - London is overrun with them, things that feel like intrusions into realspace of digitally imagined architecture. And then you have the whole megacity ultramodernist thing of Dubai and Shanghai.
Still, none of it has that mid-century utopian aura - it's corporate power flexing itself, imposing on the skyscape. Mostly coming out of the private sector, right?
The future now - in that brash teenage hard sci-fi distinctly old fashioned sense - seems to be owned, as a site of enthusiasm, by your tech-bro oligarchs. They are the "I heart eyesores" contingent of today. The "sores" has a different inflection beyond the aesthetic, it's like gashes in the cityscape left by disruptor capital.
(Likewise Trump's disgusting conception of Gaza as a potential real estate development bonanza.)
Realtor-futurism.
I have not yet seen The Brutalist, perhaps this is relevant.
At any rate I personally now am more interested in seeing bits of England I never got to see than ever getting to the Moon or Mars.
I wouldn't want to live in the house - or apartment - of the future either. Those sort of desires seem arrested-development type desires. Child-man desires.
Perhaps as you get older, you become more painfully aware of what's disappearing than exhilarated by the thought of things ahead - especially given you won't get to see them owing to your rapidly shrinking lifetime.
Stockhausen's auditorium looks remarkably like the most distinctive new building of the past decade: the Las Vegas Sphere. Possibly proof of Paul Morley's contention that Stockhausen is secretly the guiding influence shaping much of modern culture. Or perhaps it's just an example of parallel evolution: high-minded bureaucrats and cynical entertainment conglomerates are led ineluctably towards identical forms.
ReplyDeletePerhaps some enterprising promoter will be inspired to use the Sphere for a Stockhausen show, instead of residencies for U2 and the Eagles.
When did he make that contention? I'd love to see the evidence marshalled in support of that.
DeleteStockhausen seems to me a figure on a par with Buckminster Fuller - immense and looming once but subsequently completely Dropped Away.
Even with the small strand of people who are interested in the composers end of late 20th Century electronic music, his profile has dipped away - people are more likely to go on about someone on Ina-GRM or a Pauline Oliveros type. I think he's too grandiose, too much in the Beethoven / Wagner line. There's so much thinking and spiritual questing behind his Grand Works, it's out of step with today's sensibility.
Morley's argument about Stockhausen is the central theme in his book 'Words & Music: The Story of Pop in the Shape of a City', from 2003. I have lost my copy, but as I remember it he sets up a chain of influence that goes Stockhausen => Kraftwerk => electronic dance music => all of modern pop. Unlike Can, Kraftwerk never studied or worked with Stockhausen, but they were definitely fans.
DeleteThere's plenty of room for debate about the true extent of Stockhausen's influence, of course. But it is certainly fun to think that the most mass-market pop performers - Kylie Minogue when Morley was writing - are the true inheritors of this extravagantly high-minded and deeply serious composer. That's clearly why Morley enjoys trying to make the case.
As for Stockhausen's dropping away, I am sure your point about him being unfashionably grandiose is right. But he was also cancelled - as we didn't call it at the time - for his comments on 9/11, which he described as "the greatest work of art imaginable for the cosmos." And this was not in hindsight, years later: he said it in September 2001, while the ruins were still smoking.
You could sort-of see what he was getting at. The 9/11 attacks were designed as a spectacle, and were monstrously effective in that sense. But Stockhausen's lack of basic human feeling, his insistence on viewing the tragedy primarily in aesthetic terms, appalled people.
Gaffes and blunders are often particularly damaging when they seem to crystallise something many people always suspected, and I think that was definitely the case here. Stockhausen's grandiosity, his lack of interest in compromise to win over an audience, his preference for drama, spectacle and scale over human emotions; those were all things that people might have disliked about him for a long time, but they were brought sharply into focus by his apparently callous indifference to thousands of deaths.
Extended quote here:
DeleteAsked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events, Stockhausen answered that the attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." According to a tape transcript from public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, he went on: "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world."
His attempt to clarify his remarks a few days later were not much better:
"It is a crime because the people were not agreed. They didn't go to the 'concert.' That is clear. And no one gave them notice that they might pass away [draufgehen]. What happened there spiritually, this jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life, that happens sometimes poco a poco in art. Otherwise it is nothing."
I looked again at Words and Music - I couldn't see anything about Stockhausen. Are you sure you are not thinking of Alvin Lucier?
ReplyDeleteHmmm... maybe I dreamed the whole thing. In which case I apologise for sending you up a blind alley. It certainly feels like the kind of thing Paul Morley would argue, but maybe it's just my mental construct of him that puts it that way.
DeleteI remember the Alvin Lucier part, but I was sure there was some discussion of Stockhausen, too. I will do my own research, and if I come across anything I will let you know.
Well a bit of digging did not yield much more detail, so I think that in my memory I have mostly just been using Stockhausen as a synecdoche for the whole genre of experimental art music from the mid-20th century.
Delete'Words and Music' does talk about telling the story of pop "from Stockhausen to Steps", though. So the claim about his influence is definitely there, even if it is less central to the book than I had remembered.