"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"
About this Quote
Stockhausen recalls the revelation of treating space as an instrument, when he could spend six or seven hours each day physically projecting sound through a system built to his specifications. Projecting sound, for him, was an active, performative art: not simply playing back tapes, but steering trajectories, sculpting timbres, and shaping the listener’s position inside a moving architecture of sound. The memory is indelible because it marks a shift from composing on paper or in the studio to composing in real time with space itself as a parameter.
The context is the postwar rise of electronic music and the new studios and concert environments that emerged with it. Stockhausen worked closely with engineers to create devices that realized his ideas: ring modulators, filters, multi-channel consoles, and above all diffusion systems that distributed sound around an audience. At the Osaka World Expo in 1970 he performed daily in a spherical auditorium equipped with dozens of loudspeakers and custom control surfaces, logging hundreds of hours of continuous practice. Such immersion forged a tactile knowledge of acoustics, psychoacoustics, and perception that no occasional rehearsal could supply. Fader moves became muscle memory, and spatial form became as concrete as melody or rhythm.
Calling attention to devices built for him also frames a larger claim: the modern composer is an inventor of instruments and environments. Music becomes a laboratory where technology is not an accessory but the medium of new musical thought. The sheer duration of daily work suggests a quasi-ritual discipline, turning avant-garde ambition into craft, and craft into embodiment. Out of that discipline came a broadened sense of what a piece could be: an environment rather than an object, an experience unfolding around the listener rather than across a stage. The remembered breakthrough affirms a lifelong thesis: sound is energy to be projected, space is its resonant field, and technology, when shaped to artistic will, becomes the means to compose not only what is heard, but where and how it is lived.
The context is the postwar rise of electronic music and the new studios and concert environments that emerged with it. Stockhausen worked closely with engineers to create devices that realized his ideas: ring modulators, filters, multi-channel consoles, and above all diffusion systems that distributed sound around an audience. At the Osaka World Expo in 1970 he performed daily in a spherical auditorium equipped with dozens of loudspeakers and custom control surfaces, logging hundreds of hours of continuous practice. Such immersion forged a tactile knowledge of acoustics, psychoacoustics, and perception that no occasional rehearsal could supply. Fader moves became muscle memory, and spatial form became as concrete as melody or rhythm.
Calling attention to devices built for him also frames a larger claim: the modern composer is an inventor of instruments and environments. Music becomes a laboratory where technology is not an accessory but the medium of new musical thought. The sheer duration of daily work suggests a quasi-ritual discipline, turning avant-garde ambition into craft, and craft into embodiment. Out of that discipline came a broadened sense of what a piece could be: an environment rather than an object, an experience unfolding around the listener rather than across a stage. The remembered breakthrough affirms a lifelong thesis: sound is energy to be projected, space is its resonant field, and technology, when shaped to artistic will, becomes the means to compose not only what is heard, but where and how it is lived.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Karlheinz
Add to List
