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WELTMUSIK (World Music)

was written by K. Stockhausen on April 8, 1973 for Musik international. Information ber
Jazz, Pop, auer-europische Musik, ed. E Ptz & H.W. Schmidt = Die Garbe V, Cologne
1975. Excerpts first appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 17, 1973.
Printed unabridged in Musik und Bildung (No. 1, 6th year, 1974) and in Universitas (No.
6, 31st year, 1976). Published in Vol. 4 of Stockhausens TEXTE ZUR MUSIK / TEXTS ON
MUSIC 19701977 (pp. 468476) in 1978. Abridged English translation by Tim Nevill
published in Towards a Cosmic Music (Element Books, 1989). The present translation is a
retranslation by Tim Nevill, revised and edited by Suzanne Stephens. It will be published by
the Stockhausen Foundation for Music in the forthcoming English translation of TEXTE ZUR
MUSIK Vol. 4.
copyright of text and translation: K. Stockhausen

Every human being has the whole of humanity within him- or herself. A
European can experience Balinese music, a Japanese music from Mozambique,
and a Mexican music from India.
A persons openness to vibrations thought to be experienced for the first time
cannot be predicted. Some people can be so moved and elated by experiencing
the music of another culture that they feel they have rediscovered something
long vanished and forgotten.
No matter how many books you read about the music of other peoples, how
many photographs or TV programmes you look at, or records or radio
broadcasts you hear, the experience of an authentic performance in the right
place, at the right time, and together with the right people is irreplaceable. That
should never be forgotten.
Tourism offers many people an opportunity to directly experience the music of
other nations. At the same time, however, tourism constitutes the greatest danger
for the survival of musical traditions where music like all the other arts is an
integral component of the religious life of all those involved. Anyone who is
briefly in Ceylon as a tourist is not just influenced by what he sees; he also
influences the people he pays to play, sing, dance, and mime for him.
This process of global cultural pollution cannot be stopped. Even the scholar,
who tracks down the remotest of human cultures with tape recorder, camera, and
notebook not to mention film and TV teams critically disturbs the lives he
wants to investigate and report on. That ultimately results in even the most
unspoilt and originally profoundly religious events being gradually
trivialized. The Balinese orchestra that plays away for hours in the foyers of big
tourist hotels has nothing more in common with the original quality of this
music. Everything can be ruined and pretty quickly too.

That is the way the world is going, and it could be said that what is destroyed
was predestined for that. Spirit is not confined to specific forms, and all forms
are predestined to pass away. One must rather listen to the vibrations which
manifest themselves in forms in a thousand different ways.
Nevertheless, the highest obligation of our time is to preserve as many musical
forms and performance styles as possible. That is problematic. A coup in a small
African state some years ago resulted in the revolutionary General, trained in a
politically progressive foreign country, ordering all musicians and their
families to be killed, and all musical instruments to be publicly burned, the day
after his seizure of power. That was his counter-revolution. Thousands of years
of musical tradition were destroyed in a single day. This music only existed in
an oral tradition handed down from one generation of musicians to the next, and
in a special way of constructing and playing instruments. A well-known
musicologist, who had spent his life trying to tape record African music and
poetry, told me that the political situation had prevented researchers from
previously making at least a taped documentation of this tradition.
It is therefore not only curious scholars and tourists who destroy cultures.
Cultures also destroy themselves from within. They are overripe and in that state
of decay destined to change into something new. The outcome of this rapid
process of dissolution of individual cultures is that they all flow into a more
unified world culture. The first stage of this process is sameness and a levelling
down, but that releases an enormous amount of energy which was previously
bound up in individual forms. Great awareness, reaching far into the future, is
needed in order to combine the energies thus released in flexible forms capable
of constant and ongoing self-transformation without soon crystallizing once
again.
Only European and Japanese musical cultures have become so strongly
crystallized. Even such rigid forms as N theatre and Gagaku, Bunraku, Kabuki,
or Shomyo music all involve the problem of having been handed down by way
of oral tradition with its direct master-pupil relationship. Just a few masters
invented the existing forms long ago and then passed them on. All these musical
forms were therefore not open to the free involvement of individual composers
as happened in Europe. They were instead handed down in a more or less rigidly
crystallized form. That is why there does not exist any notation or instrumental
development comparable with that of Europe, which is conducive to the creation
of the largest possible number of individual forms through utilization of a
relatively unified system of constructional principles and materials.
The enormous diversity of other musical cultures thus confronts the relative
uniformity of compositional technique and instrumental material in European
music. It was nevertheless possible in Europe to establish a multitude of
individual musical forms with innumerably many variants.

The argument that Europeans have transformed what was previously territorial
colonialism into cultural colonialism is often to be heard today. In other words,
tourists are conquerors and exploiters in another form. But people overlook the
fact that beneath the surface humanity is affected by developments emerging in
all cultures. One cannot talk about the separate problems of some island culture
without taking into account the currents linking this culture with all others. The
process of inner renewal is getting under way more or less simultaneously in all
cultures. Even if there were no tourists, Bali would strive to establish links with
the rest of the world. However, it would thus bring to an end its own culture and
have to pass through all the complex and largely destructive phases of industrial
civilization which are now inevitable anyway. That is also true of all countries in
this world, and the centuries ahead will reveal this process of assimilation and
integration.
A modern automobile is fascinating for someone who sees such a vehicle for the
first time, experiencing the form of transportation it offers; and a modern
European musical instrument is equally fascinating for people from other
musical cultures who have never seen or heard anything like it. I don't just mean
the magical portable transistor radio, which can make music by itself. I also
refer to the varnished black Steinway piano whose perfectly graduated
chromatic scale, dynamic balance between pitches, and incomparable
mechanism makes it a highly differentiated cultural epoch's ultimate
achievement. And even less will people be able to withstand the fascination of a
modern live-electronic synthesizer, capable of producing the most remarkable
acoustic phenomena.
Eternally pessimistic and profoundly negative spirits constantly play with the
perfidiously nihilistic idea that a vast nuclear war could radically destroy
everything, bringing about a state of affairs where only a few Polynesian
islanders would survive and represent the highest state of global culture.
However the meaning of history cannot be so easily eradicated, and we must get
used to the idea that European cultural standards will retain, and even intensify,
their fascination for all other peoples. That entails the great responsibility of
preserving in their present state as many of other cultures' crystallized forms as
possible. A Museum of Global Culture, where the Museum of Music will play a
crucial central role, is inevitable. The view that it is unimportant if all forms
vanish since Spirit is thus liberated and will constantly transform itself into new
forms is too restricted. Europeans have the technology for both producing
something new and conserving what has previously matured. That is why they
have an obligation to utilize that as faithfully as possible. We have already said
that a great deal will be destroyed in the process, but without such conservation
nothing will remain. One can imagine what today's European culture would be if
everything from the past had been destroyed.
The Africa musicologist I mentioned previously had virtually no official support
for his work, and sought in vain for talented young musicians ready to devote a
few years of their lives to musical fieldwork necessary for recording as many

African musics, dances, dramas, and legends as possible. Such staff would have
to learn several African languages and dialects, be skilled in recording
techniques, and have an excellent ear and an exceptionally robust physical
constitution in order to carry out this hard and non-prestigious work. When a
young American or European musicologist visits the Africa researcher from
time to time, he does not stay very long, merely writing down what can be
recounted in words, perhaps participating in a brief recording expedition, and
returning home as quickly as possible so as to put together a book and gain a
doctorate
Why should support be given to the preservation of as many of the worlds
musical forms as possible? So that they lie around in archives on records and
tapes, and are occasionally used for historical programmes, films, or books? For
that of course too, since even what is apparently the most conservative and
reactionary of information secretly changes lives. However, that is not
sufficient. The decisive issue is that creative forces in every culture grow
beyond the restrictions of their own tradition, developing all those aspects within
themselves which come to life when they look into the mirror of other cultures.
If a European is moved by a piece of music from India, he discovers the Indian
within himself. If a Japanese is touched by some European music, he finds
within himself a European from the period when this music was born out of the
inner pressures of an absolutely specific historical moment. The serpent always
lurks within exotic charms, leading people to lose the protective paradise of selfconfidence. The great shock occurs when someone who approached an
unfamiliar culture with harmless curiosity is so moved by this experience that he
or she falls head over heels in love with it. Music, a temple ceremony, or a
dance cannot be taken home. Either one must stay where this experience
occurred, or one is overtaken by unpredictable yearnings when back home
again
Those are discoveries of the deeper self in which there slumbers everything that
has ever existed in this world or will come into being at any future time. Once
this primal ground has been touched, a yearning to experience the whole,
bringing to life the entire range of diversity, can no longer be stilled.
No musical transcription (no matter how carefully made), no film, no
gramophone record will be suffice any longer. They only have the faded impact
of postcards. And one knows that what one has fallen in love with is condemned
to die. That makes all the stronger the yearning to unite with the ground out of
which this form, which one so loves, has also arisen.
Even though from time to time there have been universalists within European
history even among artists , it is the striving towards a personal style,
expressing oneself, and perhaps also the feelings of those among whom one
lives, which has predominated amid the limited perspective of a culture and
possibly even a specific area within that culture. If, however, an earthling can

for the first time literally embrace the world, becoming aware of the
simultaneity of all stages of civilisation and of the fantastic diversity of forms of
musical expression and ceremonies, then the dominance of musical
specialization will be profoundly undermined. Despite the risk of not yet being
able to master the instrument of all human vibrations and of occasionally
striking the wrong chords, creative spirits will from now on attempt to play on
all registers. At this stage it will therefore be decisive that anyone with any
possibility of playing on all registers, anyone who possesses the most
differentiated and diversified instruments and most open system, should allow
new structures to come into being, unifying a large number of stylistic qualities.
The preservation of the largest possible number of musical forms from all
cultures even if these are dead forms, crystallized by the very process of
conservation is enormously necessary because the instruments and
compositional processes of European music, for example, have become so
generalized that any sounds and constellations of sounds can be produced with
modern electronic apparatus. That of course involves the great danger of
constantly deploying all registers and thus losing all the power once founded on
the tremendous concentration and one-sidedness of certain musical cultures and
specific forms within these musical cultures. If one can only produce specific
notes on a very limited instrument, that very limitation guarantees highly
original music, unlike what can be produced with other instruments offering
completely different possibilities. Universal electronic equipment, with which
one can in theory do anything, is more likely to kill the spirit than to inspire it.
An unwritten law has always proclaimed that it is precisely through limitation
that mastery can be revealed. Any kind of restrictive channelling accelerates and
intensifies the flow of a river. That is why the greatest possible number of
crystallized objects from the worlds musical cultures must be available so as to
provide orientation. The object is not imitation but rather the possibility of
making people aware of the specific vibratory state involved in each single form
so that it becomes available as one possible energy when a new organism is
composed.
This process of integration, which has been taking place in music and all other
spheres at ever greater speed throughout the world in the second half of this
century is occurring concurrently with humanity's first attempt to fly away from
the earth and that is not just a matter of chance. It may be anticipated that
world culture will have largely achieved integration at the moment when
mankind first makes contact with a hitherto unknown culture in space.
Up to now talented musicians have striven to deploy their skills so as to give
pleasure to themselves and friends within the society where they live and receive
training. In Balinese culture almost everyone is either a musician or a dancer. In
Europe the predominance of scholarly training and the over-valuation of
intellectual capacity have resulted in the suppression of artistic qualities together
with the under-valuation and neglect of musical talent. Of course that is only a
transitional phase within a culture whose very high rate of development entails

succumbing from time to time to one or the other extreme. That state of affairs
will persist for the foreseeable future and possibly even worsen. The scholarly
approach to spiritual life as a whole has only just got under way, and apparent
trends in the other direction are deceptive. This will continue until a cultural
nadir is attained where the arts will be declared superfluous as is already
happening in some propagandistic writings and speeches.
For people whose musical talents are above average, and also for those who love
music as an existential necessity, that means reckoning with a decline rather
than an increase in opportunities musical employment, forms of performance,
range of instruments, and more advanced training. That automatically exerts an
influence on the atrophy of musical life on the one hand and creative energies on
the other. Musical talent will not continue simply being present, let alone
increase alongside the growth in world population. Spirit instead manifests in
forms offering the richest possibilities of development. Many musical talents,
which hitherto achieved self-realization in an extremely lively and extensive
musical culture, will therefore end up in very different professions until another
epoch comes when the arts and sciences unite, complementing one another
harmoniously.
That is why suggestions such as those put forward by the Africa musicologist
are particularly important as indications of new vocational opportunities for
musical talent which has no chance of being engaged in a European orchestra or
a Japanese Gagaku ensemble. Greater publicity should be given to new forms of
employment for musical field-workers and archivists and as directors and
staff in Museums of Music so that at least exceptional talent remains within
the sphere of music rather than pupating as flight personnel.
This first phase of the intermingling and integration of all the earths musical
cultures will be followed by the opening of a second where just like a
mounting spiral whose windings constantly bring it to the same point one level
higher a powerful trend opposing the move towards uniformity will establish
itself. After a time when conservation predominates, the emphasis in individual
spheres of culture will once again be on developing original forms as a
contribution to harmony between all cultural groups. There will even be created
a kind of artificial new folklore, utilizing electronic equipment and heaven only
knows what other technical apparatus. (In this context, for once artificial
really means "artfully made.)
Such individual styles, consciously shaped from the most remarkable
hybridization of all historical and freely-invented possibilities, will then extend
the world of musical forms and rites of performance in a completely new way. A
number of compositions from the past ten years including my TELEMUSIK,
HYMNEN, KURZWELLEN, SPIRAL, MANTRA, STIMMUNG, etc.
provide some idea of what such symbiotic forms could be.

Of interest in that connection is the reaction of a number of contemporary


Japanese composers to a work like TELEMUSIK, which was commissioned by
the Tokyo NHK Studio and realized by me there in 1966. In it, various Japanese
styles and elements from the folklore of many other cultures were integrated in a
unified composition of electronic and concrete music. After TELEMUSIK had
been performed in Japan, several composers, who had hitherto only imitated and
processed European avant-garde music of the fifties, produced works combining
European and Japanese musical instruments, and aiming at stylistic symbioses
between modern European and old Japanese music.
For someone who is not just interested in the restricted realm where his
existence is led but also discovers the earthling within himself whose culture is
that of the entire world alert to shared responsibility for humanitys future to
him, involvement with other societies music is from now on a necessary
precondition (rather than just a hobby) for better understanding of other people,
thereby awakening and cultivating the whole human being.
Music is the medium that touches human beings most deeply, capable of
impelling his or her most delicate inner vibrations to resonate sympathetically.
Our Central European culture is more than ever in need of general sensitization
to music. The full significance of that will only be recognized a few centuries
from now when the crisis of the religion of science will be dying away, and a
time will come when humanity's musical aspects the resonance of all human
rhythms and their harmonization through music will exert an impact on the
entire culture.
Musical spirits must prepare themselves for a lengthy period of being truly
underground, maintaining the flow of life-sustaining currents beneath the
surface.

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