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.

14th

4th

Listening to Stockhausen

"Bach - Haydn - Mozart - Beethoven - Brahms - Wagner - Schoenberg - Webern - Stockhausen. As the story of Western music unfolds and the history books are written we find Stockhausen's name written in the most recent chapters. A direct linear thread traces out the Post Renaissance tradition and when we get to the turn of the 21st century ..... there is Stockhausen writ large. His name first appears in the middle of the 20th century, just after the Second World War and around about that time several other elements in this story also appear - the tape recorder, vinyl records, the teenager and commercial pop music. Stockhausen's career runs almost parallel to that of pop music but whereas the latter has remained essentially rooted in the essence of its origins Stockhausen's music has transformed, developed and has continuously changed in its methodology, its procedures and its sound world. In every piece that he has composed he has virtually re-invented the idea of what music is and how it comes into being.

Pop exploded into the world in the 1950s because the technology of sound recording and vinyl records allowed the music to be produced cheaply and distributed widely, and the post-war economic boom created the mass market, and invented the teenager, to avariciously consume it. In essence and structure the music has remained the same since those times. It is often music that accompanies some other activity - dancing, driving a car, housework, homework or maybe doing nothing in particular. It often sits easily in the background and is quite happy there. Stockhausen's music, on the other hand, interrupts other activity. It disrupts, it demands attention and it necessitates concentration. This music empowers the listener who cannot but take part in the musical process. When engaged with Stockhausen's music, the listener's skills are exercised, developed and enhanced. We cannot simply hear this music because hearing is passive, a physiological phenomenon; we have to engage the hearing along with intellect, emotion, knowledge and all the powers we posses.

The painter Willem de Kooning once said, 'The past doesn't influence me, I influence it.' On the surface this may appear to be an incredibly arrogant statement but there is more than an element of truth here and, although Stockhausen has never made this declaration, the idea could well apply to his work. Having heard one of his piano pieces or a work like GRUPPEN or HYMNEN we come away with new ears; something in our lives will have changed and, if we are open to these changes, new ways of listening will have been discovered, new structures will have been observed and new ways of thinking about music will have been acquired. Engaging with Stockhausen's music does not require the exclusion of other musics; indeed he has written of TELEMUSIK that he wanted "to take a step further in the direction of composing not 'my' music but a music of the whole Earth, of all countries and races." His music asks questions, raises doubt, makes us search and investigate. It's not easy -Stockhausen hasn't written this music to make himself popular, he doesn't have to be 'commercial' and he has no obligation to please critics, publishers or record companies.

The guiding light of Stockhausen's mature works has been serialism, a compositional methodology that grew out of the intensely chromatic music of the late 19th century and the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg. By the turn of the 20th century the idea of music being rooted in a particular key, with a strong pull towards a fixed centre, had given way to this twelve tone system where all the notes of a scale had equal value or attention. This was the beginning of the idea that music was about sound not just notes or tunes or harmony. Melody as the primary structural element, as the most important feature of the music, gave way to the idea that all the characteristics of sounds could have equal importance. The duration of a sound (the parameter that articulates rhythm), its volume and its timbre (its colour, what the sound actually was - piano, cymbal, sine-wave) became as important as pitch, notes or melody. And because composers no longer had tunes around which to structure their pieces they had to find other ways of putting sounds together. For Stockhausen, serialism was the way to go. In 1971, having worked with this method for twenty years, he said "Serialism is the only way of balancing different forces. In general it means simply that you have any number of degrees between two extreme that are defined at the beginning of a work, and you establish a scale to mediate between these two extremes. Serialism is just a way of thinking."

In the mid 1950s Stockhausen added the parameter of physical space to the list of sonic characteristics that could be incorporated into the compositional process. Works like GESANG DER JUNGLINGE, GRUPPEN (for three orchestras), CARRE (for four orchestras and choirs) and all of his electronic works after the two studies exploit the fact that sounds are located in space, that they can move in space and that humans have two ears to detect where sounds are located and, if they are moving, the direction and speed of the movement. The listener can hear all of these things in Stockhausen's music and the way he has put together the disparate musical elements is there for discovering.

Electronic music proved to be the ideal medium for the application of the unifying principles of total serialism. All musical parameters - pitch, duration, volume, timbre and the location of sounds in space - could be precisely delineated and controlled. The pitch of a sound could be specified as an exact frequency, in cycles per second, rather than the label by which a note was named - B flat, C sharp or whatever; duration could be measured down to a tiny fraction of a second and the volume of a sound could be enumerated in decibels. But perhaps most importantly, new sounds could be composed from scratch by the fusion of sine-waves, the 'atoms' from which sounds are constructed; sounds that had never been heard before, and for which there were no names, came to life in the studio. This extraordinary and wonderful new sound world had a huge impact all music in the second half of the 20th century and the technological and musical innovasions it spawned continue to evolve today.

The influence of Stockhausen's work and the possibilities he has offered the listener are immense. He has challenged the idea of what music can be, time after time after time, and he has re-written and re-defined the 'laws' of composition with almost every piece he has composed. The rules that, for hundreds of years, said 'this is how music is written', have been torn up. He has liberated the whole world of sound and this, in turn, has empowered and liberated the listener."

Robert Worby