For background, see this recent article from the New York Times
No Helicopter sign illustration.
At the risk of being labelled a grumpy old square, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Helicopter Quartet has to be the biggest pile of steaming bullshit ever to emanate from the tradition of Western art music. It is nothing more than an expensive and juvenile joke in terribly bad taste. But, any time some bunch of turkeys manage to con a bunch of suckers out of enough money to put on this atonal publicity stunt, you can count on the major papers of the world to fall for it. It happened in Birmingham a few years ago. In this case the organisers write: “To fund one of the most iconic parts of aus LICHT, the HELIKOPTER STREICHQUARTETT, we need € 30.000….Thanks to 149 donations, worth € 30.600, we were able to rehearse the entire composition including the four helicopters on May 7th”
That’s 30k to REHEARSE a stunt where the only thing one needs to be sure of is that the four helicopters don’t kill anyone.
I seem to spend a huge chunk of my life trying to raise money to put on first performances of new pieces where the notes matter and can be heard, and where listening offers some reward, and it’s bloody difficult. Getting audiences to take a leap of faith to come hear a new work lasting 30 minutes or more is also tough. Stockhausen was a significant figure in his early career and wrote some really cool music (and was much loved by many of his students and colleagues), but his delusionary and megalomaniacal self- indulgence helped convince millions of potential listeners that all modern music was an expensive and hugely irritating con job. It turns out that description applies best to the Helicopter Quartet, but the joke is on every sincere composer and performer trying to bring worthwhile musical ideas to life. Stockhausen gets free publicity for an un-performable piece (and there’s nothing cool in writing music that can’t be played) while the rest of the world get’s reduced funding and empty halls. It’s time to call bullshit on the lie that there is something to this piece and that only the cool kids get it. There’s nothing to get. It isn’t cool.
I’d rather hear the helicopters without the music.
UPDATED
I found this fascinating quote from Frank Zappa on Stockhausen. It made me feel like maybe I’m on to something.
ICONOCLAST: What particularly disturbs you about present-day composers?
ZAPPA: It’s the post-Webern generation. The post-Penderecki composers. It is such a climb-on-the-bandwagon type of routine, you know. People started getting into Webern and everybody wrote boop-beep shit. You know, spaces in between the notes, and serializing the amount of rests in your piece, and all that stuff. The only person that could really appreciate it would be a computer programmer, and they certainly don’t have an ear for it. And besides that, Webern did it perfectly, and there is no reason that anybody should have tried to whip on it like that. When Penderecki came along with his dense clusters and his string effects and stuff like that, a lot of other composers started doing the same thing. It is like the latest “mod” clothing or something; just too many people getting into the superficial modernism of a type of sound without providing any real content to their pieces. There is no life to them. I go out and buy contemporary music all the time – that’s mostly what I buy for albums. And I have been invariably disappointed by the pieces an all the hot new up-and-coming guys. And especially the electronic music. It’s just so. . . drab.
ICONOCLAST: Is there anybody in electronic music that you appreciate? Stockhausen? Subotnik?
ZAPPA: I don’t like Stockhausen’s electronic music. I really don’t like Subotnik. There is one piece by Stockhausen that I enjoyed – I have an album with “Song of the Youths” on one side and “Kontakte” on the other. That’s pretty good. Most of the rest of it is. . . it’s not musical [emphasis added]. And I’m not a math freak so I’m not going to sit there and. . .
Ken,
Thank you for saying this. I agree entirely.
I’m curious if you feel this way about the music of John Cage? While I acknowledge that some of Cage’s works are legitimate (the prepared piano pieces, for example), much of the aleatoric music seems like a con job.
Thanks for having the courage enough to say this.
I feel that Stockhausen was led to believe, and given license to think, that any indulgent idea emanating from his cerebrum was somehow legitimized as having some intrinsic worth, a situation akin to “The Emperor’s New Clothes” scenario. I’ve seen the video you link up there, but has never even been tempted enough to click on it. My time can better be wasted on some other useless internet indulgence…
BTW, I really enjoyed listening to your Brahms Op. 26 CD. That is one of my all-time favorite piece, in any genre, any category, a piece that NEVER fails to arouse some intense reaction in me, no matter what performance I hear. There were some petty objections I had, in terms of orchestrational choices, but on the whole it is an admirable job. The second movement, in particular is very effective, and the third almost unimpeachable.
Thank you so much!
Peter
“Donnerstag aus Licht” was mounted at the RFH a few weeks ago. Barring the seemingly interminable final 15mins of Act3, the remainder of the 5hrs went by remarkably swiftly. In the last 20years I’ve not seen a many new opera which get close to this in dramatic deftness and imagination. In my view, closest would be Gerald Barry’s “The Bitter Tears of of Petra Von Kant ” and “The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit”.
It isn’t about music but about performance. It isn’t about content but about show. No one is really listening anyway and classical contemporary music has long lost credibility. Who is paying and who cares?
Good post. Thank you