STOCKHAUSEN ~

ALEXANDER KLUGE ~

Seagull Books 2016

"The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who composed his
series Moments between 1962 and 1969 and later wrote the
work SATURDAY FROM LIGHT defined his concept of
the MOMENT FORM as 'AN ETERNITY THAT DOES
NOT BEGIN AT THE END OF TIME BUT WHICH IS
ATTAINABLE AT EVERY MOMENT'. 'Depending on
their characteristics, moments can be as long or as short as
one likes', he added. In so doing, he referred to a dispute he
once claimed to have had with Werner Heisenberg (when
he was staying at the Siemens studio for electronic music in
Munich). And it may be he misunderstood him, at least to
the effect that — in the same way that at the level of Planck
space the beginning of the world repeats itself in every tem-
poral interval of now-time, in other words, the universe
renews and produces itself at the elementary level from one
second to the next while still possessing a beginning and a
distant future, as far, that is, as light has been able to travel,
meaning that all things have a life in duration and a life in
the moment — everything that can enter into the sounds of
a piece of music always does so in a two-fold manner: as a
now and as a duration, as a puncture and as an entire piece.

— Can a sound also be rooted in both?

— No.

— Why not?

— Because our access to the moment and our access to
the end of the world belong to two different worlds.

— Parallel worlds?

— Antiworlds! "


A L E X A N D E R     K L U G E



M O R E !