Karlheinz Stockhausen Quotes

But being quiet and meditating on sound is something completely different and will be discovered very soon by a lot of people who feel that the visual world doesn't reach their soul anymore.

Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public.

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

It is true that the eyes dominate the ears in our time.

Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

Karlheinz Stockhausen to journalist: "I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [was] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations."

Aphex Twin to journalist: "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to".

Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears.

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos ... compared to that, we composers are nothing

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.

I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.

One experiments and has to choose always the best results.

But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

And I'm always interested when other musicians are trying to discover new worlds of sound.

Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.

So there is a personal sense of style for a given work - I don't like a general style, but every work has its own style, and I want to create a style for every work.

And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.

I have composed several pieces which are performed outdoors, not only in the auditoria.