Karlheinz Stockhausen (22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was one of the pioneers of electronic music. You may have heard one of his creations today when you heard a beep at the grocery store.
He was also a musical theorist, and many of his lectures are available online.
I’ve been listening to his lectures, and here is some of what I’ve learned.
We perceive a melody, asserts Stockhausen, by perceiving a form, a shape of a sequence of tones.
Musical form begins at eight seconds, but beyond thirteen or fifteen seconds, a form that we might be able to see in a musical score can’t be perceived by the ear (can’t be remembered).
Rhythm is shorter than eight seconds. A one to eight second rhythm is the range of our rhythmic perceptions.
An eight second to ninety-minute form is the range of our perception of form. (Thus, a ninety-minute symphony by Bruckner is near the limit of what a listener can consolidate into one musical structure.)
Between eight seconds and sixteen seconds, there is a transition from rhythm to form. This is where the music begins to be divided into sections.
Music is a structured sound. Noise broadly oscillates around a middle frequency.
With the electronic synthesizer, the continuum between tone and noise becomes available for musical composition.
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 are the basic rhythmic divisions. These are fractally related to 2-minute to 128- minute musical forms (from a short song to a Bruckner symphony).
Rhythm and form are logarithmic in our perception; we perceive rhythm in one scale, and form in the next higher scale, which begins at eight seconds.
Our fingers can execute only eight notes per second; that’s the fastest, unless you roll your hand down the piano.
The human tongue can trill sixteen notes per second, at the fastest; beyond sixteen notes per second, our ears merge the notes into one bar, or into one sustained tone.
So . . . rhythm as it increases merges into tone or noise, depending on its oscillation.
We say “high” sounds, but we should say “fast” sounds because high sounds have faster waves; and instead of “low” sounds, we should say “slow” sounds.
In electronic music, listen to how a sound develops, how it rises, fills, becomes noisy, becomes clear . . . how other sounds pass by . . . how the sound diminishes, accelerates, crescendos, vanishes, reappears . . . these are new possibilities for composition.
Compose the sound itself.
Writing has made the visual seem our most important perception. Even our concept of truth is based on the visual. “You have to see it to believe it.”
You’re not believed until we see your signature on the contract.
What you can’t see, most people don’t believe.
This leads to the odd statement when people are in a concert hall and a sound approaches them very close and then retreats—they say “That’s an illusion.” It sounds “as if it were far” . . . they say “as if.”
This makes it difficult for the new electronic music to be perceived. Many in the audience think the music couldn’t have gone far away “because the walls are there”—as if sound can’t go through walls.
“The tyranny of the visual prevents people from experiences that could change them.”—Stockhausen (paraphrased)
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who loves yet another woman he never knew. Find your copy at Amazon. Hardcover, paperback, and e-book editions available.
https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Two-Words-Orlando-Bartro-ebook/dp/B072MNB4F9