"Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo"
About this Quote
Stockhausen is describing a compositional worldview where time isnt a neutral grid but a material you can bend, layer, and collide. The phrasing is telling: he doesnt talk about melody or harmony first, but "series of tempos" - a nod to postwar serial thinking, where parameters get organized with the same rigor as pitch. Tempo becomes something you can sequence, permute, and engineer.
The real provocation sits in that image of separate groups moving at different speeds, only "meet[ing] every now and then". It frames ensemble playing less as a unified body and more as a society: parallel communities with their own internal logic, occasionally forced into alignment. Thats not just technique; its a philosophy of modernity. After the mid-century catastrophes that shattered faith in a single cultural narrative, Stockhausen builds music that accepts fragmentation as the baseline condition, then turns coordination into a rare, charged event.
It also quietly resets what "together" means in performance. Instead of the romantic ideal - everyone breathing as one - he asks musicians to sustain independence under pressure, to coexist without constant confirmation from a shared pulse. When the tempos finally converge, the moment lands like a rendezvous rather than a default state: earned, fleeting, almost miraculous.
Context matters: this is the European avant-garde insisting that new music must invent new time to match a newly dislocated world, and that the drama can live in synchronization itself.
The real provocation sits in that image of separate groups moving at different speeds, only "meet[ing] every now and then". It frames ensemble playing less as a unified body and more as a society: parallel communities with their own internal logic, occasionally forced into alignment. Thats not just technique; its a philosophy of modernity. After the mid-century catastrophes that shattered faith in a single cultural narrative, Stockhausen builds music that accepts fragmentation as the baseline condition, then turns coordination into a rare, charged event.
It also quietly resets what "together" means in performance. Instead of the romantic ideal - everyone breathing as one - he asks musicians to sustain independence under pressure, to coexist without constant confirmation from a shared pulse. When the tempos finally converge, the moment lands like a rendezvous rather than a default state: earned, fleeting, almost miraculous.
Context matters: this is the European avant-garde insisting that new music must invent new time to match a newly dislocated world, and that the drama can live in synchronization itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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