Karlheinz Stockhausen a sfera sacrum
Karlheinz Stockhausen and the sphere of the sacred

Author(s): Agnieszka Draus
Subject(s): Music
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: Karlheinz Stockhausen is, without a doubt, the most outstanding composer in Germanythese days. A artist has written over 350 works, minor and major ones, vocal and instrumentalones, covering various forms and genres. He is associated mainly with an avant-gardeschool in Darmstadt, experiments within organization of a music material, sound, formalcontinuum and note record. However, the latest works devoted to Stockhausen portray it ina different way. They emphasise the importance of messages in these works, their extramusicinspirations, religious content, conception of the ritualisation of the course as well asspecial experiences accompanying their performance and reception. Stockhausen himself,more and more often, describes his works as spiritual music (geistliche Musik), sharing withit in an unusual way, i.e. co-celebrating its mysticism. The very process, as well as the phenomenonof life sacralization Stockhausen experiences, inspire him to search for the relationsbetween his works and a mysterious sphere of the sacred. The article presents selectedworks which reflect the features of the sacred. On the one hand, these are the universal features;both unambiguous (e.g. a religious theme) and ambiguous (e.g. triggering numinoticexperiences). On the other hand, the very features are individual, for example, from thepoint of view of the content or music. In the former case, it is visible in a combination of thesphere of the most important values with the sphere of the surrounding macro-cosmos andman’s internal micro-cosmos, introduction of texts in different languages in order to makethe message as clear as possible. In the latter, it can be seen in a vocal cast, referring to traditionalsinging practices of all religions and an instrumental cast, often beyond conventions,i.e. apart from traditional means of extracting sounds, it introduces acoustic and onomatopoeicsounds, different types of noise and electronic sounds.

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