2. Darmstadt 1951

We can safely say that never before in the history of music had so much money been made available for new music independent of public acceptance. Composers became rich, sometimes even very rich. In the past, composers such as Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini had made their fortune from a number of box office hits: Strauss made an awful lot of money from his operas Salomé and Der Rosenkavalier, and Puccini was able to buy a whole collection of villas with the profits from La Bohème, Madama Butterfly and Tosca. These pieces are still favourites with all opera houses. Compared to such ‘evergreens’ there is not a single piece by Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti, or Xenakis that even comes close to these successes, but they too became rather well-to-do!

- The Advent of the Electronic Studios. For the first time, composers could hold music in their hand - on tape. All at once, the notion that music could be dissected - like a chemical substance - into pitch (Hz), duration (seconds), colour (formant), and dynamics (decibels) became very concrete. It became easier to think of sound as a collection of physical structures. 2. DARMSTADT 1951

The language of this new music, mostly referred to as postwar Modernism is to a high degree a collective creation of a limited number of composers who met on a regular basis, had debates, sometimes reviled each other and forced each other’s to take up explicit positions, and performed each other’s works. They formed a network of young, extremely talented musicians given every opportunity to do whatever they chose to do, as long as it was ‘advanced’ music. The young Stockhausen is a good example of this.

In June 1951, 23-year-old Karlheinz Stockhausen, who has just finished his studies, attends the summer course in Darmstadt. There he meets Karel Goeyvaerts and together they perform the second part of Goeyvaerts’ Sonata for two pianos. This piece is strongly influenced by the later works of Webern, especially his Variationen for piano (1936).

The Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts had a perfect feeling for the Zeitgeist by making a connection with the later Webern in his pieces. He therefore was the first to make a work that was entirely composed in rows and he also presented a number of shockingly empty electronic compositions, such as Composition 4 with dead tones. Around 1960 he disappeared as a composer but he resurfaced in the 1980s with an opera for the coming age of Aquarius, in minimal style.

At the same festival, Stockhausen debates with the philosopher Theodore Adorno, who does not think very highly of Goeyvaerts’ music.138 He also meets Werner Meyer-Eppler there, an experimental acoustician, phoneticist and information theorist. Between 1951 and 1953 Meyer-Eppler, together with Herbert Eimert, worked on constructing an electronic studio in Cologne. From 1954 to 1956 Stockhausen was a student of Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn, while working as an assistant in the electronic studio in Cologne.

Back to Darmstadt. In 1952 Stockhausen hears Goeyvaerts’ Composition 4 with dead tones, a tape piece, to which he responds with his Konkrete Etude (musique concrète) for tape (1952). In 1951, the French music critic Antoine Goléa brings a recording of the Modes played by Messiaen himself to Darmstadt. Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen play this recording five times in a row, exclaiming: “This is the first integrated and systematic exploration of pitch space! This is what we have been dreaming about!”

He meets Pierre Schaeffer, at the time the most important composer of electronic music and a representative of the musique concrète (see Ch. V, 13.4, p. 335). Overwhelmed by all these new impulses he travels to Paris on January 8, 1952 to study with Olivier Messiaen and makes the acquaintance of Pierre Boulez.

Boulez is already one step further: in 1946 he studied with René Leibowitz and later with Olivier Messiaen. In 1949 he meets another student of Messiaen’s, John Cage, and together they perform Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for two pianos. In 1951 Boulez makes his great leap forward: he writes Polyphonie X for 18 instruments and Structures I for two pianos. The premiere is in 1953 in Cologne, performed by Yvette Grimaud and Yvonne Loriod, who would later marry Messiaen. Boulez himself plays the part Ia together with Messiaen in Paris in 1952.

Polyphonie X is booed in Donaueschingen in 1951 and Boulez withdraws the piece. Stockhausen responds to this work with Kontra-Punkte (1952-53) for 10 instruments, and his piece is well received. Nevertheless, in the years to follow Structures I becomes the official analysis piece for all participants in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, thereby strongly influencing the ideas of these young composers. Stockhausen has to content himself with the position of lecturer in the Ferienkurse. In Paris, in 1952, Stockhausen corresponds extensively with Goeyvaerts, writing to him about his improvisations in the style of the later Webern and Messiaen’s Modes de valeurs et d’intensités. These represent two fully struc-

138Stockhausen: "You are looking for a chicken in an abstract painting." (Stockhausen 1989, p. 36).