17th

My experiments in electronic music #1

16th

SUPRA-HUMANIZATION

BY Karlheinz Stockhausen

Manifesto for the Young

Once again we are making a revolution – but this time throughout the entire world. Let us now set ourselves the highest possible goal: to become aware that the whole of humanity is at stake.

There was once a time when consciousness became so strong in certain animals that they finally developed into human beings. Now we are passing through an age when supramental consciousness is so strong in some people that they are close to becoming higher beings. Here, on this earth. Only a few will achieve that for the moment. But every human being longs, to a greater or lesser extent, to reach beyond him- or herself, achieving higher consciousness. Hence the crises we are experiencing throughout the world whose nadir still awaits us this century. Everywhere in the world people feel under pressure and experience panic about some imminent development comparable only with the emergence of the first plant life out of inanimate matter, with the emergence of the first animal out of the plant kingdom, and with the emergence of the first human being out of the animal realm: a new stage in the development of consciousness. No matter how strong human longing for the next level of being may be, fear of and resistance to opening up this consciousness are equally vehement. Individuals, groups, political parties, and nations believe they have primacy by right, and can suppress and literally devour others. We are after all unequal in terms of intelligence and power, and we know that only a few will manage, on the basis of their inner resources, to achieve freedom and supramental consciousness – just as only individual animals succeeded in becoming human beings.

One can only become a higher being by surmounting egocentricity and the fear of losing oneself in the process.

Let us not try to erect new systems in opposition to those we want to do away with because they are too restricted, aiming at excluding, suppressing, and eradicating too much alternative thinking. Our concept must be so far-reaching that we see ourselves and the whole world from above, allowing old systems to run down without replacing them by something new claiming exclusivity.

Systems are products of the reason that our forefathers made the sole ruler of the body. The soul thus became its own prisoner by handing over all power to its former servant, reason. Let us realize that if reason is not constantly fed with higher inspiration from the supra-mental, it incessantly recombines everything stored within itself, and can at any time assert both anything it likes and the opposite. Reason can be utilized for anything. It represents any opinion, and can justify, substantiate, and refute anything. And if one has not learned to switch it on and off, it races on without interruption. Reason is neither more nor less than a useful instrument: a model computer. But WHO uses it? And for WHAT?

The Higher Self should provide reason with something to think about, receiving an impulse from the intuitive consciousness which is in turn fed by the higher and highest consciousness, linking every individual consciousness with supra- personal cosmic consciousness.

Why am I saying this when I am a musician, not a philosopher or the like? Because we musicians should, so far as possible, live entirely by intuition. Because I have learnt that everything begins anew when one attains this consciousness and strives to rise ever higher. One is only secondarily a musician, a specialist, a human being with a profession. One is primarily an individual spirit that must first establish contact with the universal spirit before communicating anything essential to other spirits, which, beyond individual interests, concerns every other spirit to some extent.

Music should not merely be a wave-bath for body massage, a sonic psychogram, or a thought-programme comprising tones. It should principally be a current of supra-conscious cosmic electricity transposed into sound.

Most practicing musicians today act automatically and without awareness. They have lost the enthusiasm they perhaps once briefly had during early youth when they decided to become professional musicians. We must start again right from the beginning, reawakening that original enthusiasm within ourselves, or give up being professional musicians. That is why all orchestras and choirs should be disbanded for a considerable time, allowing each musician an opportunity to reflect, meditate, and discover what he or she is actually living for, why he or she makes music, and whether that is an absolute necessity. We would see that most musicians – who have been at work for years and expect things to continue in the same way until death or retirement without anything essential changing in their lives any longer – would give up and do something else. Perhaps they would do nothing for quite a while – if they continued to be paid and thus had no material reasons for working – and that could be wonderfully fruitful. The usual reasons for earning money – providing for material needs and satisfying established demands – are just lame excuses.

In India, on a country road between Agra and Jaipur, I met a musician who sang and played for me on a small string instrument he had himself made. He was one of the few really wonderful musicians I have ever encountered. He owned literally nothing; and just looked at me blankly when I asked him whether he would sell me his instrument for 20 dollars, a sum it would take him many years to earn. At best he got something like 21/2 cents a day from passers-by or villagers – according to the Indian driver, translating for me. Tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head. I felt utterly ashamed.

Those who want to be musicians, following their higher voice, must start with the simplest meditative exercises, at first just for themselves. ’Play a sound in the certainty that you have any amount of time and space’ – and so on. First, however, they must achieve awareness of what they are living for, what we are all living for: to attain a higher life, allowing the vibrations of the universe to penetrate our individual human existence. Musicians must prepare the way for arrival of the higher human being still concealed within ourselves, setting in motion the entire body right down to its least component so that everything becomes relaxed and receptive to the vibrations of the highest consciousness.

I sense in advance rejection by those who encounter this ”Charter”. That does not upset me. The situation would, however, be bad if you did not have a sense of being inspired by intuition in your best moments, accompanied by some inner presentiment of the possibility of a higher existence keeping you alive. You shouldn’t want to continue leading a hollow existence. You should achieve certainty. Become aware of where you’re heading and why. And you should know that our incapacity and imperfection are only a sign of our being drawn upwards, and of the future within ourselves – which is the supramental consciousness – endlessly raising us upwards, ever higher.

Great power is given to us musicians. Our sounds can kindle in other human beings the fire of longing to rise above themselves. Let us not abuse this power ! More is at issue than individual musicians vibrating in the heights. The vibratory field around them must also become so strong, so supercharged, that anyone entering this field will vibrate in sympathy.

Let us therefore participate in humanity’s great revolution since we know what we want. It is worth staking our lives when everything is at issue. That is no longer the case for partial truths, or for private, group, national, and unilaterally political problems. Let us no longer accept that this is a French, Vietnamese, Czech, Russian, African... revolution. This is the revolution of world youth on behalf of the higher human being. Such a higher being will not be born out of destruction, atomic fission, or the closing of borders. This higher being will emerge from growing consciousness that humanity is a single body, which remains sick and incapable so long as even just one of its limbs is beaten, kicked, oppressed, and violated.

The struggle – and struggle is unavoidable – will be hard. Holders of power have lost faith in humanity. They believe themselves to be the elect because they possess means of physical power; because they dispose over moral, political, and religious systems and dogmas which exclude more than they make viable; and because they can judge over the weak and exploit them as they wish. But they are the prisoners of their own reason, which dismembers everything so as to ’understand’ it and thereby rule it; prisoners of the reason that recklessly penetrates the subconscious and unconscious ignorant of the higher awareness whose supremacy should first be acknowledged.

The engineers of reason will ultimately lose their unholy wars because they are ossified and are not winged by the supra-consciousness of the higher being. We are ruled by generals, business magnates, statisticians, political functionaries, religious fanatics, trade union leaders, and specialists in administration – what else can we expect?

Let us begin with ourselves. Only when we have attained higher consciousness will we no longer need to be ’ruled’, and we will seek advice from saints – not ecclesiastical saints but spirits who serve the whole of humanity, who have achieved a universal consciousness extending beyond differences of religion and race, and no longer confuse universality and uniformity.

How is music involved in all of that? The whole is at issue here. If we comprehend that, we will also produce the right music, making people aware of the whole.

15th

Presentation / evolution sketch for a "documentary" on BBC Radio 3:

Electronic music set it self out to discovery... First like a child, rehearsing and playing... Then, trying to go behond, to new sounds, to a new world... Today there are no bars, no limits... Find out for yourself Tuesday and Thursday night on BBC Radio 3...

Music clips: Création du Monde (Vangelis); Eulogy and Light (Funkadelic); Erotic (Pierre Schaeffer); Trip to the moon broadcast; |Exchange| (Massive Attack);

14th

13th

Music On a Long Thin Wire, Alvin Lucier

As seen in the first Q&A, describing electronic music isn't easy. What do we mean when we say electronic music? Purely electronic generated sounds? Sounds diffused by electronic means? If it's the latter, it means all music is, in fact, electronic, all it takes is ear-buds. I think, however, this is over-simplifying things. Surely that without electronic experimentation, most of Beatles albums wouldn't sound as good, but should we call it electronic music? It's pop, nevertheless, but music, foremost, and apart from Tomorrow Never Knows, A Day in The Life and Revolution 9 there aren't many Beatles songs we could rightly call "electronic".

Musique concrète was born under the sign of tape manipulation, that is, looping, distortion of recorded sounds, and what Schaeffer, as Henry or Varèse, were interested in, was not being faithfull to those recorded sounds, but changing them by all means possible and creating something completely new, the New Atlantis of Music, if you will. Achieving this by technical and electronic inovation.

After the proliferation and establishment of these technics in the music industry, electronic music became mainstream. But that doesn't mean, again, we shouldn't call Kraftwerk or Air, for instance, electronic music, their music is generated by sounds you cannot hear from any known acoustic instrument.

Is electronic music, then, somewhere around the place where acoustic music ceases to be acoustic?

Maybe, maybe not. Don't expect me to answer...

12th

Q & A with Katherine Norman, writer and composer:

Q: Given that information travels so fast, and that no one seems to have the time, or the will, to listen, really listen (I talk of young people, at least), do you think there's a place for musique concrète, today?

A: Well, I'd disagree with you. I think there's a lot of listening going on - now that we all have ipods, and easy ways of listening to good (and bad) quality music and other sound-based work as we travel about. Nearly every 'young person' I see on the train is listening to music. But I agree that listening 'skills' - a more critical, analytical listening to sound-based music, and to sound in the environment, are a different thing - I can't comment on whether people listening less, or more badly than previously. Certainly the levels of noise and sonic activity in post-industrial landscapes are high, and noise is definitely a stressor (look at the number of court cases about noisy neighbours etc). I think if anything there's more scope for a bigger intest in musique concrete because a wider range of people are able to record sound easily, and digitally transform it. In addition, there is of course an increased interest in the environment, in ecology etc - and I think a lot of young people are interested in 'saving the planet'. But yes, sound is often last on the list.

Q: Musique concrète (or electronic music) has an obsessive relation with sound and noise, a mere sound can originate a symphony. As a composer, is this what estimulates you the most? To be able to deconstruct and then articulate sound?

A: I enjoy doing that, yes, but most of all I enjoy dealing with sounds that having meaning for me, and I hope for others - though their meanings may be different. Everyone brings personal associations to sound - I like that most of all. When you and I listen to the sound of the sea, we each access different remembered experiences as well as similar associations.

Q: Would you agree that musique concrète's mais departure from classical and harmonic music, is its proximity to realism? Has musique concrète brought realism to music?

A: I'm not sure I understand that one, but I think a lot of electronic music using concrete sounds is quite surreal, it is going 'beyond' realism.

Q: What are the composers that influenced and influence you the most? In what way, if you could explain?

A: Bach is top of the list, which may seem odd, but it's to do with the construction and meticulously balanced counterpoints and melodies - the way he puts things together.

In e/a music I was very influenced by my PhD supervisor, Paul Lansky's interest in voice and text, and that started me off in all kinds of areas to do with voice and sound. But lately I'm not hugely inspired by a lot of electronic music - it is all very similar, at least in the UK. I'm impressed by Hildegard Westerkamp's work, and like many of her more 'documentary' soundscape pieces. I really like some of the noise music from Merzbow and Otomo Yoshide's work - both noise and instrumental.

Q: Is there a future for electronic music?

A: That's a very open question, I'm sure music of all kinds will continue as long as people are around to make it, and want to listen to it.

11th

Peter Christopherson

(27 February 1955 – 24 November 2010)