“I want to build a new tradition, an aural tradition, transmitted via the ears,” Karlheinz Stockhausen declared in 1971. Such a tradition, he insisted, would avoid treating “the materials of music as separate from the process of composition” and would be “based on the direct experience of working with sounds rather than writing on paper.” It would entail a compositional method in which intuition and imagination, impoverished resources in a culture marked by a “decline in acoustic facility,” would play a central role. In a society dominated by spectacle, driven by the demands of the secular market and the debasement of “spiritual activity,” the “science of musical vibrations” is reduced to a “very primitive level.” To combat this aridity, Stockhausen, ever the iconoclast, advocated the creation of a “multimeaningful” sonic order “open to intuition” and oriented toward the expansion of the performer’s “inner universe.” His ambition was to liberate “a higher level of consciousness beyond the mental.”
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