|
COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Washington
WHAT IS PLURA-MONISM, or, who is Pluramon? An answer by Stockhausen follows:
I've called this [the end of the Fourth Region of Hymnen] the hymn of PLURAMON, who is a symbiotic being combining aspects of both a pluralist and a monist. And I say he lives in the Harmondie ...a region, let's say like Texas, ruled by Pluramon.... Pluramon combines the being of a pluralist, who really wants to keep the multiple and not destroy it, and the monist, who is always looking for the "one," for unification and integration. (Cott 1974, 144)
Stockhausen tries to bring the one and the multiple, the single and the whole to a special unity. This universal unity, however, causes contention and confusion. Faced with the double negation (neither resolution into a kind of utopian, undifferentiated totality, nor into a separately multicultural collage) and between "the multiple" and "the one," we remain in obscurity.
Now, it is surely not difficult to encounter this curious coupling of singular and plural, particularity and totality by Stockhausen. Examples follow:
This goal of bringing the particular and the whole into unity stands above all work, despite the detailed questions of a just newly introduced extensive process of systemization, and ought not to be forgotten. (Stockhausen 1963, 59)
Concentration is essential: multiplicity within unity. (Stockhausen 1963, 26)
In the character of the latest music one can recognize that a reorientation from wishful listening into a meditative listening will take place, involved in the general mental transformation from the extremely individual to the personally collective (Personlich-Kollektiven) (Stockhausen 1963, 17)
Similar expressions by Stockhausen are to be found everywhere. To these I would like to draw an auxiliary line, a parallel: Leibniz. This is surely no novelty, for the name Leibniz belongs rather to a common association: Stockhausen--serialism--Leibniz. Of course a serial procedure like permutation with numbers is in reality very simple and primitive in comparison to that of Leibniz, but nevertheless we should remember that the serial, i. e. infinite serial, mathematical method in the case of Leibniz, the Leibniz-series, was a special solution of the Fourier-series, which presents the mathematical basis for electronic sound synthesis. We should also remember that "serialism as a hypothesis," understood as "reconciliation of opposites"--as the Austrian composer Karlheinz Essl writes in his clever essay (Essl 1989)--finds its way to Leibniz's theory of monads. So monadology is also my parallel. Was it not one of the most famous philosophical attempts to unify the single and the whole?
But not only that: Leibniz, this most radical of serial thinkers, really provides a surprisingly exact parallel. I think that not only serialism in the strict sense, but also almost all of Stockhausen's formal ideas depend on it--with reference to his pantheism and "theodicy" too. Hence in the following we would have to pursue the consequences of serial thinking closely. We will see that Stockhausen's musical conception--from total serialism through formula composition--deduces all its emanations and developments from this serial thinking. Let us begin with "serial thinking"--what is this?
STOCKHAUSEN: Well, that started very slowly during the late Fifties. It is basically the result of what we call even today "serial thinking." That means that if you have any kind of opposition--black and white for example--at the moment you begin to think in degrees of grays, then you already think like a serial composer....
So dualistic thinking, like sound and pause, or like noise and sound, high and low, or music and non-music, et cetera, is a traditional kind of thinking. But since the Fifties relativity has come into our way of thinking on all levels. And now I can transform a mouse into a glass--you see what I mean?
SECONDS: So you could set up a series between blue and yellow and you could theoretically say that yellow is blue.
STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. It is the extreme kind of blue if there are mediating degrees between the two, naturally. (Stockhausen 1997, 72)
Serialism is only a way of balancing different forces. In general it means simply that you have any number of degrees between two extremes which are defined at the beginning of a work, and you establish a scale to mediate between these extremes. Serialism is just a way of thinking.... Serialism tries to go beyond collage, beyond the incoherent multiplicity of things. It tries to find unity without destroying the individual elements, and that means to interconnect, to--yes, to try to balance out the different aspects of sound. (cited after Danuser 1992, 314)
This is exactly what Leibniz calls the "law of continuity":
[The] Law of Continuity, by which one can regard rest as an infinitely small motion, i.e., as equivalent to a subspecies of its...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
