Art & Creativity Quote by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen is arguing for conversion, not merely appreciation: the listener won’t be persuaded by lectures about “difficult” music, but by a felt encounter with art that rewires attention. The sentence is built like a chain reaction. New media leads to new experiences, which leads to new consciousness, which expands the senses, which broadens perception, which sharpens intelligence, which deepens sensibility. He’s not selling a genre; he’s selling an upgrade to the human operating system.

The subtext is defensive and missionary at once. Stockhausen knew the modernist bind: electronic and serial music were often treated as cold, academic, even anti-human. His counter is to frame experimentation as bodily and enlarging. Notice how “new media” isn’t presented as gadgetry but as a vehicle for “new experiences” and “new consciousness.” That’s a crucial pivot: technology becomes spiritual rhetoric, a promise that circuitry can open inner life rather than replace it.

Context matters. Postwar Europe was rebuilding its institutions and its imagination; the studio (radio, tape, synthesis) arrived as both tool and metaphor for starting over. Stockhausen positions the avant-garde as the art adequate to a world transformed by machines, mass communication, and a shaken faith in inherited tradition. There’s also a quiet elitism in the “when”: interest is conditional on the listener’s willingness to meet the work halfway. He’s betting that once people feel their senses expand, they’ll stop asking whether this counts as “music” and start asking what else they’ve been missing.