"Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing"
About this Quote
Stockhausen is doing a sly reversal here: repetition, often dismissed as mechanical, isn’t machine-like at all. It’s human hardware. By rooting repetition in “body rhythms,” he reframes the listener’s response as physiological identification rather than intellectual approval. You don’t have to “understand” a repeated figure the way you parse a sonata form; you fall into it the way you fall into your own pulse.
The intent is polemical. Stockhausen spent his career arguing that new music could be sensuous without borrowing old romantic tricks. In the postwar avant-garde, serialism and electronic experimentation were frequently caricatured as anti-human: cold, technical, detached. This line quietly insists the opposite. Repetition works because it bypasses taste and goes straight for entrainment, the body’s tendency to synchronize with an external pattern. “Heartbeat,” “walking,” “breathing” aren’t poetic add-ons; they’re a manifesto for how sound becomes lived time.
The subtext also nudges at the era’s looming minimalism and the culture’s broader turn toward trance, ritual, and altered attention. Stockhausen’s own music often treats repetition not as background groove but as a kind of focused pressure, a way to reorganize perception. The listener isn’t merely hearing a loop; they’re being asked to inhabit it, to recognize that musical structure can be as basic and unavoidable as respiration. In that sense, repetition becomes less a compositional shortcut than a claim about what counts as “natural” in art.
The intent is polemical. Stockhausen spent his career arguing that new music could be sensuous without borrowing old romantic tricks. In the postwar avant-garde, serialism and electronic experimentation were frequently caricatured as anti-human: cold, technical, detached. This line quietly insists the opposite. Repetition works because it bypasses taste and goes straight for entrainment, the body’s tendency to synchronize with an external pattern. “Heartbeat,” “walking,” “breathing” aren’t poetic add-ons; they’re a manifesto for how sound becomes lived time.
The subtext also nudges at the era’s looming minimalism and the culture’s broader turn toward trance, ritual, and altered attention. Stockhausen’s own music often treats repetition not as background groove but as a kind of focused pressure, a way to reorganize perception. The listener isn’t merely hearing a loop; they’re being asked to inhabit it, to recognize that musical structure can be as basic and unavoidable as respiration. In that sense, repetition becomes less a compositional shortcut than a claim about what counts as “natural” in art.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Karlheinz
Add to List
