Culture Shock:Stockhausen's influence on the strange pop of the 1960s is evidence that art and rock have to be incompatible, writes Fintan O'Toole
In 1993, the BBC radio producer Dick Witts sent a package of music by contemporary electronic performers including Aphex Twin (Richard James) to the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died last week. Stockhausen's response was largely negative: "I wish those musicians would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or their findings because I don't appreciate at all this permanent repetitive language." He wished that Richard James would listen to his own composition Gesang der Jünglinge, "because then he would immediately stop all these post-African repetitions and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms." To which James replied that Stockhausen, for his part, should stop "making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to. Do you reckon he can dance? You could dance to [ Gesang der Jünglinge], but it hasn't got a groove in it, there's no bass line."
The exchange seems to encapsulate the divide between popular and art music, with Stockhausen demanding complex rhythms and time sequences, and rock stars, even those on the more experimental edge of commercial music, uninterested in anything you can't dance to. This impression is not wrong, at least in relation to the way music has been in the last 20 years. But the very fact that such a divide can be taken for granted is a symptom of the impoverishment of the musical mainstream. Stockhausen spoke of a universal music, and in the 1960s and early 1970s, at least some rock musicians believed in this notion of music as an organic whole that could not be packaged into neat categories.
Stockhausen himself appears, famously, on the back cover of the emblematic 1960s LP. In the original, relatively short, list of "heroes" to be illustrated on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he's there with Lenny Bruce, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and William Burroughs. When the cover actually appeared, Stockhausen was lined up between Tom Mix and Terry Southern on the one side and WC Fields and Dion (of The Belmonts) on the other. The mass of faces is a celebration of cultural eclecticism of the 1960s. That the formidably difficult Stockhausen could be reasonably imagined as a pop hero was itself a statement of the ambitiousness of the musical mainstream.
Stockhausen's inclusion was not whimsical. The orchestral crescendos and the noises of in A Day in the Lifewere influenced directly by Paul McCartney's engagement with Stockhausen's work, especially Momente. McCartney attended lectures by the avant-garde composer Luciano Berio and performances of his and Stockhausen's work in London in the mid-1960s. Ian McDonald, in his brilliant book on The Beatles' recordings, Revolution in the Head, points out that the staccato piano chords and double-tracked effects used in Penny Lane, Fixing a Hole, With a Little Help from My Friendsand other songs were directly influenced by McCartney's study of the very work that Stockhausen recommended to Aphex Twin: Gesang der Jünglinge. John Lennon would attempt to emulate McCartney when he used Stockhausen's Hymnenas the basis for Revolution No 9on the White Album.
Nor was any of this a Beatles idiosyncrasy. Pink Floyd's organist, Rick Wright, acknowledged the influence of Stockhausen. So did Pete Townshend, Jerry Garcia and, of course, Frank Zappa. Jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Charles Mingus knew and admired his work. Holger Czukay of the pioneering German electronic rock band Can studied composition with Stockhausen and brought his techniques directly into the massively influential field of Krautrock. Across a wide spectrum of rock, jazz and electronica, it was at the very least fashionable to claim an acquaintance with the pioneers of art music.
None of this is to suggest, of course, that there is no real divide between rock music and the avant-garde. There is an interesting encounter between Björk and Stockhausen in Dazed and Confusedmagazine a decade ago. The Icelandic star is inclined to stress the affinities between them, but the German composer is just as anxious to highlight the differences. He stresses that his kind of music is not primarily about emotional expression: "It is not like a personal world." And he distinguishes his music from that (like rock) "which emphasises this kind of minimalistic periodicity because that brings out the most basic feelings and most basic impulses in every person. When I say 'basic', that means the physical. But we are not only a body who walks, who runs, who makes sexual movements . . . ". Rock will always be rooted in emotion and physicality - art music can break away from both.
But those borders should not be as impermeable as they are now. For all the contemporary disdain for the naivety of the 1960s, there was a sophistication in its mainstream music, an openness to the strange and the difficult, that has been largely lost. Paul McCartney explained the way Stockhausen opened his mind: "I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realised that anyone doing anything weird wasn't weird at all and that it was the people saying they were weird who were weird."
It may not be elegantly expressed, but that tolerance for weirdness is one of the reasons why the pop music of that era is still so good.