Transformations Through Music Poem by Daniel Brick

Klavierstucke I-XI


This music trains a new kind of human being, who the hearer not yet is and who has never existed before on this planet... (Listening to the piano pieces) one grows beyond oneself.
Stockhausen

(I)

I have reached that future
you told me about years earlier.
You said, 'The Piano Pieces are
musical time machines: they take
the listener into his own future.'
There was a learning curve designed
for me to follow. There were moments
for soul, and moments for body,
opening into a new era of soul-body fusion,
with times of silence carefully measured
against moments of noise, and rising out of
these timely events, an increased visionary
capacity gradually unfolded within:
I can hear the ground flake as the mole
presses forward; I can hear the ruffle
of the owl's feathers as she stirs
in dappled sleep. I can hear the solitary passage
of a worm through topsoil, so keen has my hearing
become. I can even hear the creak high above
in a cottonwood when winds part its tallest branches.

(II)

In Piano Piece V (we experience) the serialization of freedom...
The last section of Piano Piece X emerges from the pitches of the hand cluster like a butterfly from the chrysalis.
Jonathan Harvey

The music, oh the music,
overcame my doubts and
pulled me into your circle
of inspiration. I know,
in some profound way, you see
me, merely a listener, with no
technical training, no musical
gifts, as a co-creator. How can
this be? The whirligig of performance
took over and tossed me from sensation
to sensation, each folding me deeper
into the music, deeper into the sheer
experience of being one with the Musical
Vision: My eyes see into the infrared
of distance; they are scorched by heat
from a faraway fire; they fix on
churning eddies, heaving waves, currents
twisted into whirlpools; finally the still center...
At that still center your presence informs me: I know
what I need to know, and my interior life responds.

(III)

Listening within oneself: It is as if one makes contact with oneself
as if with some unknown person, as if one wants to explore oneself
as something that mirrors itself.
Stockhausen

In the whirligig of time we shall all get our revenges.
Feste the Clown, TWELFTH NIGHT

I am at this moment listening to my favorite
of the KLAVIERSTUCKE, which is VI, written between
1954 and 1961, in four versions. Can we speak of
a MOMENT of composition, spread over seven years?
Is there ONE COMPOSITION among the four versions?
What really am I listening to? Are these valid questions?
Asking them has distracted me from listening. In a moment,
I will begin from the beginning. But during this extended
moment of silence, with no music for my hearing to focus on,
my mind of music can appreciate VI as something precious
something pure and alive, something I listened to late
at night, just before surrendering to sleep, sprawled
on my black couch, with only one dim light in the room,
my eyes open only to the interior world, a barrier erected
in my mind against all intrusive daylight thoughts,
against desires and urges, against hopes and dreams,
even against prayers, however necessary. The 24: 40 time frame
of VI was, and is, a column of sounds, pure and living,
connecting what must be connected. And that is sufficent.