Young musicians all over the world continue to send him music samples for comment and approval - in 1995, BBC Radio 3 ran a mini-series examining Stockhausen's musical legacy and sent a package of tapes from the likes of Aphex Twin, Plastikman, Scanner and Daniel Pemberton (the so-called Technocrats) to the composer asking for feedback. It was, as you can imagine, a revealing experiment.Given all this, would it not be fair to at least ask for his views on the future of music today? "No suggestions - just hope," he replies, in typical fashion.Stockhausen's lecture Composer and Interpreter is at 5pm today at the Frieze Art Fair, Regent's Park, London NW1 ( www.friezeartfair ). "Close your eyes and listen for the eight simultaneous movements of sound layers in space."Kontakte, which will feature alongside Oktophonie, is a seminal piece from 1960. Exploring similar techniques by way of four groups of loudspeakers encircling the audience, what you experience is a kind of dizzying encounter between electronic sounds and instrumental music. Stockhausen has likened this to a sense of gravitational loss, a feeling of flying.A few years back, the conductor Peter Eotvos, who worked with the composer on Licht, remarked that there were "many students at the Music Academy in Cologne who didn't know if Karlheinz was alive or not" Periods of lengthy isolation fuelled the rumours.
In Oktophonie (Tuesday from Licht, 1990-91), which will be performed in its original version at the Billingsgate concert tomorrow, Stockhausen incorporates what he calls "a new dimension of music space composition where rhythm is significantly slowed down and pitch changes are reduced to small steps or glissandi".Whether or not Oktophonie is, as Stockhausen claims, evidence of his "outer space" experience (he claims to be from the star Sirius, but one's never quite sure what to believe), is there anything the listener should be aware of? "Yes," he says. In early works such as Kreuzspiel, Punkte (1952) and Kontra-Punkte (1952), the idea of liberating musicians from the constraints of gravity is there. In Helikopter Streichquartett, for instance (finished in 1993), four members of a string quartet are expected to perform from two independent helicopters flying above the concert hall. And both for composing for God." Stockhausen "composes only what he finds musically necessary," he tells me.His music is clearly inspired by mystery and science, too. There are billions of precious things in the universe that we have no time to study."Messiaen (with whom he studied in Paris in 1952) and Webern are cited, not as influences on Stockhausen's musical style (as some have previously said), but as "examples of integrity" - "Messiaen for his synthesis of Indian and French music and for his religiosity as a Catholic Christian; Webern for the synthesis of isorhythmic and 20th-century 12-tone music and for his praising of nature. These pieces are extraordinarily precious, full of mystery and intelligence and invention. I'm thinking at this moment of certain works by Bach, or even earlier composers.
There are so many fantastic compositions, 500 or 600 years old, not even known to the majority of human beings So it will take a lot of time. Someday you might arrive at CD 81 [the last publication]," comes the typically concise (but not always helpful) reply. But then, the concept of time has always sat very comfortably for Stockhausen. When Bj?asked him how he felt about filling the time between birth and death - "Will it be enough to do all the things you want?" - his reply was illuminating: "No, you can only do a very small portion of what you want to do That is natural... 80 or 90 years is nothing."There are a lot of very beautiful pieces of music of the past which the majority of people alive now will never hear. Given that he has composed about 200 works (and is still hard at work), and that some of them have taken an unearthly length of time to write (his opera Licht, for example, which is based on the seven days of the week, took 24 years to complete and would run for almost 30 hours if played through in its entirety), this might prove a little difficult.Assuming we have the time, could he suggest where we might start? "Start with CD one. Since 1998, he has been running the famous international Stockhausen Courses during the summer months at K?n, the secluded little community near Cologne where he has been living for almost 30 years, and to where students flock from all over the world.He maintains that "people who want to understand the work I do have to spend at least as much time as I have listening to it".
