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Fathers and Sons: usually, the former teach the latter, but the music in question, "Oktophonie," is also the result of the influence that the young Simon Stockhausen, then 22 years old, had on his father Karlheinz. Who, in 1990-91, composed this long piece of electronic music with common synthesizers and samplers, assisted in sound construction by the skillful Simon.
This music is titled "Oktophonie" because it is diffused by 8 groups of speakers positioned at the corners of a virtual cube within which the listeners find themselves. The sound moves freely: with vertical and diagonal movements, with slow spiral rotations, and no longer just horizontally as was the case in Stockhausen's earlier pieces. Thus, the piece results from a compositional process of sound production (Karlheinz in collaboration with Simon) and spatialization (Karlheinz alone).
The piece was conceived as an introduction and sound background for the second act of the musical theater opera "Tuesday from Light," one of the seven parts of the gigantic cycle "Licht" (Light) dedicated to the days of the week, which Stockhausen completed in 2003 after working on it for something like 25 years. And since Tuesday is the day of Mars, the god of war, "Oktophonie" is the sound chronicle of the war between Michael and Lucifer, two of the three main characters of the "Licht" cycle (the third is Eva).
A music abundant with sonic explosions, the hissing of anti-aircraft fire, glissandos of airplanes in flight that, after being hit, crash to the ground four octaves lower. It is a constant alternation between dark background sonorities that fill the acoustic space and sudden flashes of vibrant detonations made of sounds.
With "Oktophonie," the barriers between avant-garde electronics and what is called unrefined electronics fall: it is music not difficult to listen to, which doesn't even seem written by a father of the most extreme musical research; while certain electronic pieces produced in the last twenty years by musicians of non-academic origin are much more challenging than this. The credit goes to two Stockhausens: the father Karlheinz, for having left the doors open to the new; the son Simon, for having contributed to making these 69 minutes of music an experience that leaves a mark.
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