IT IS just over a year since the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the dust has not yet settled on his true reputation as a composer. The man's standing as one of the most influential personality cults of the 20th century is beyond doubt, but just how good, or even how interesting, was his uncompromising music?
Was he more an iconic ideas man than an artist of lasting merit? Was the piece he wrote for four helicopters and string quartet more the rhetoric of a particular time than a genuine work of art? Even during his lifetime, some of those who initially a
dmired him and sought his counsel later reacted against his didactic influence – John Cage was one such figure. By the time he died in December 2007, Stockhausen seemed to have had his day, chiefly as a so-called "60s modernist".
When he performed in Scotland a few years ago – decked in trademark 1960s white denim suit, flowing locks and seated like a God at the electronic mixing desk – the air seemed tinged with the aura of a bygone era. When he emerged from the shadows of his studio sanctuary in Kurten in western Germany to pronounce the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks as a "satanic work of art", the general reaction was a mix of scorn and pity. Had the bad boy of the 50s and 60s finally lost the plot?
Well, the air has cleared a little. And next week's Stockhausen Study Day by the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust (ECAT), in collaboration with Edinburgh University and The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), seems just what we need to form a more considered view of Stockhausen's true value as a musician.
There are three key events on Wednesday: a talk by Stockhausen collaborator Rolf Gehlhaar (4pm in the university's music department); a performance by RSAMD students of the spiritually-charged early work Aus den Sieben Tagen (McEwan Hall, 7pm); and a piano recital by the young Edinburgh-based pianist Simon Smith in the Queen's Hall at 8:15pm.
But the closing event is the one that holds the most fascination, as it presents a series of piano works – rather dryly titled Piano Pieces I, …II, …III, etc – which encompass a long stretch of Stockhausen's creative career. And they are played by a pianist who, at 25, belongs to a generation three times removed from the composer. Emotional attachment is not an issue. "I'm just fascinated by the music," he says.
But actually, there is a link. Since graduating from Cambridge a couple of years ago, Smith (also a former pupil of St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh) has been making a living as a music engraver, which is a rather archaic way of describing someone who does computer typesetting for composers in preparation for the publishing of their scores.
As a pianist, he had been drawn to Stockhausen's Piano Piece XIII, saw the "gorgeously handwritten copy", and thought what a challenge it would be to "engrave" one of his scores on computer. "I wrote to him and said I've got this crazy idea. How about if I engrave Mantra (Stockhausen's seminal work for two pianos]?" The composer's publishing arm, Stockhausen-Verlag, responded, saying it had been thinking about this. "I finished it last year and there is a possibility of doing more in the future," says Smith.
So, has that close involvement with Stockhausen's world – although he never actually got to speak directly to the great composer – given Smith a heightened insight into the piano pieces he will perform in Edinburgh? It certainly opened his eyes to obsessive elements in Stockhausen's music. "He was a constructive type, devising everything by formula. Even the flowers in his garden are arranged by serial scheme, certain measured proportions governing the layout," Smith explains.
Such an approach, musically, smacks of the kind of 60s modernism Smith cares little for. But the range of piano pieces he has chosen to perform is not a musical timepiece, more an evolutionary guide to Stockhausen's long-term development as a composer.
"The early ones adopt the hardcore serialism of the 1950s; Nos V and VII embrace experimentalism; No IX is sensuous, probably the best known, and actually quite accessible; and XIII is less forbidding still, regardless of the weird noises," he argues. The "weird noises" include playing bells, whistling, counting aloud and whispering and shouting in German.
That sounds more like the Stockhausen we knew and loved (or hated). But look out, too, in the RSAMD's programme for the heavily spiritual side of the composer – a side, according to ECAT artistic director Peter Nelson, that is as important in understanding Stockhausen as his radical constructivism. "Aus den Sieben Tagen is what he called 'intuitive music', heavily influenced by (John] Cage, which set him curiously apart from the avant-gardism he was so closely associated with," Nelson says.
So there we have it – contradictions and revelations, and a timely opportunity to get to grips with one of music's biggest personalities, whose reputation, it seems, is still up for debate.
&149 Serious to Sirius, ECAT's celebration of Stockhausen is on 11 February; full information on
www.ecat.org.uk. Simon Smith will give his piano recital at Aberdeen University on 8 February. Aus den Sieben Tagen is repeated at the RSAMD in Glasgow on 12 February.
