Karlheinz Stockhausen - Goldstaub
“Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but also hunger for dignity, hunger for identity, hunger for power. In fact, they introduce questions about who commands, who protests.” Presumably, Dario Fo did not imagine that he would be taken so literally one day. But in his name, for a few years now Clown Rebel Army has been traveling around the globe and exercising civil disobedience in a clown costumes. “The driving force, the key to the whole, as already in the old popular Neapolitand or Venetian farces, is hunger,” Dario Fo writes in the introduction to the German version of this “situation theater” We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!, which painted a picture of civil disobedience in Italian society of the 1970s. But the “hunger theater” here at issue has very little to do with farce. For the participating musicians, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Goldstaub is an exercise that makes the widespread desire for “whole music making” an existential experience. The score instructs the musicians to starve themselves for a few days. On May 6, 1968, Stockhausen locked himself in for seven days, as he was going through a serious personal crisis after writing 15 text compositions: musical textual instructions that sought to reclaim for music one thing in particular, intuition. He was shown the way to the (closed) realms of consciousness by a book about the Indian yoga guru Sri Aurobindo.
Stockhausen also began at the same time a hunger strike to convince his wife, who had just left him, to return to him. He had never been closer to death, he admitted years later. After four days without food or sleep Stockhausen opened the piano lid and played a single note. It seemed to him like the first note of his life, and touched him like a clap of thunder, “I was highly electrified, highly sensitive,” he reported.
That May of changes forms the biographical origins for the instructions in his composition Goldstaub, where he demands of the musicians no less than he demanded of himself: “Live for four days entirely alone, without food, in the greatest quiet, without much movement, sleep as little as necessary, think as little as possible. Play after four days in the late evening, without speaking beforehand, single tones, WITHOUT THINKING about which note you play. Close your eyes, just listen.”
Stockhausen is an artist of extremes, and just as he previously set standards in strictly serial works—extreme embodiments of Western rationalism—the text compositions Aus den Sieben Tagen now move towards the other extreme. His later work he placed under the sign of the reclaiming of the “total artist,” a reconciliation of mind and feeling that is to raise the musicians to a higher level of consciousness. Goldstaub is the color that he sees when he closes his eyes and the black-gray first turns to a warm red-violet and slowly begins to glitter.
Conceptually, intuition already played an important role in Stockhausen’s work in the 1950s. In Sieben Tagen, Stockhausen left out the “musicomathematic” formulations of the intuitive first idea, as had been definitive for Stockhausen’s work since Kreuzspiel. In Goldstaub, hunger, silence, and the void to which the musicians have subjected themselves for four days are in control. And merely in light of the physical achievement of the musicians, the performance cannot just be seen as an ironic commentary on the society of excess that we have become, in a musical sense as well. Even if as a listener we do not reach the mystical limits that the musicians achieve after several days of fasting, their performance can remind us of something that we had almost forgotten. Hunger is the existential enhancement of a feeling of desire, the other way around: desire is always a sublimated form of hunger. Seen in this way, the evening will surely not be a farce.