Stock-friggin'-hausen and Daft Punk (also John Adams?)

Dearest Liz,

I read your post about Stockhausen and I thought I'd share some thoughts (because I think he is awesome).  Alex Ross, in his short name-dropping session here, draws some attention to Stockhausen's enormous Gruppen (1955-1957).  I mention this mainly by way of saying that Stockhausen and the (at the time) new world of electronic music was still entirely an extension of what snobs call the classical tradition (their fusion is evident as recently as in John Adams's Doctor Atomic).  This is because electronic music, like so much of the other music of the twentieth century, is obsessed with music as sound:  the simple, quasi-scientific abstraction of sound in space, of waves and collisions and overlapping interferences.  More than most, Stockhausen was absolutely enthralled by this abstraction.  In his review of the performance of Gruppen, Alex Ross describes how the the space is almost as important as the music:  audience members are advised to change seats in between the two consecutive performances so as best to hear the spatial interaction between the three competing orchestras.

Just as Doctor Atomic is a sort of collage of various traditions and cultures (featuring as it does such varied sources as Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita, the sonnets of John Donne, and the musical traditions of Wagner, Stravinsky, medieval religious music, and pop songs from the forties), Daft Punk's music is a collage of international phenomena (there's an alarmist video on Youtube decrying Daft Punk's samples from terrible pop music that no-one listens to).  Their music, which is predominantly transformed from others' inferior work, is a sort of collage of international tendencies and fads that serves as a cute analogy to France's increasingly varied and international culture that finds the warriors of tradition dug in against the polluting influence of foreigners.

Stockhausen was a little bit of a fad himself, but electronic music has so far survived without him.  Stockhausen, even into his later years (he died in 2007), was such a mixture of odd parts, avant-garde German intellectual and hippie (he was called the Pied Piper of the Youth at some point), that he never really found a lasting base.  His abstract, unpopular philosophizing of September 16, 2001, on the events only five days earlier combined with his claim that he emanated from the star Sirius made him a kind of collage.