Karlheinz Stockhausen Quotes

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos...compared to that, we composers are nothing

And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me.

It is true that the eyes dominate the ears in our time.

When a certain piece of music penetrates a person, a resonance is set in motion and an inner voice says: "I like this resonance. It elevates me. It develops hitherto unknown possibilities in me. I don't recognize myself. This is very interesting.

Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears.

I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.

And I'm always interested when other musicians are trying to discover new worlds of sound.

I was horrible at everything I ever tried to do and people respect me. The American Dream has come true!!

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.

I no longer limit myself.

I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.

We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.

Being quiet and meditating on sound is something completely different and will be discovered very soon by a lot of people who feel that the visual world doesn't reach their soul anymore.

No, what is important is neither linearity or non-linearity, but the change, the degree of change from something that doesn't move to other events with different tempos in particular.

I have composed several pieces which are performed outdoors, not only in the auditoria.

Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public.

Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.

In particular what is most important to me is the transformation of a sound by slowing it down, sometimes extremely, so that the inner of sound becomes a conceivable rhythm.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.

Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

One experiments and has to choose always the best results.

So there is a personal sense of style for a given work - I don't like a general style, but every work has its own style, and I want to create a style for every work.