LE  SOUFFLE  DU  TEMPS

- QUODLIBET POUR KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN -

( The Breathing of Time

- Quodlibet for Karlheinz Stockhausen - )

[only currently available in French]

Since the 50's, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has been one of the musical creators who most changed and renewed the music and art world of the second half of this century. Today, at the age of 75, his creative force is as original and powerful as ever, and he is about to finish the composition "Licht" (Light), a 7-opera cycle started in 1977, which is undoubtedly the most colossal work in the history of western music.

The last book of Stockhausen interviews issued in French, " Conversations avec Stockhausen" by Jonathan Cott (éditions J.-C. Lattès - translated from "Stockhausen : Conversations with the composer" - 1973) dates back to 1979.

Now, a new work has been published by the French publisher Telo Martius, "Le Souffle du temps" (The Breathing of Time), authored by the French poet and composer Paul Dirmeikis.

Filling a 25-year gap, this book allows all those who are interested in contemporary music - but also artistic and spiritual topics in general - to read about the most recent thoughts and views of this creator who has raised passion, enthusiasm and debates throughout the world for the last half-century.

Karlheinz Stockhausen & Paul Dirmeikis in Kürten, February 1997

Yet this book is far from being a conventional book of interviews. If the conversations recorded at Stockhausen's home in February 1997 are indeed its main material, Le Souffle du temps is a polyphonic literary composition in which these conversations are weaved in a contrapuntal way with various quotations of composers, philosophers and poets, recent and old articles, poems, score extracts, and, above all, hitherto unpublished accounts by some of those who worked and still work closely with Stockhausen, such as

flutist Kathinka Pasveer,

trumpet player Markus Stockhausen,

violinist Irvine Arditti from the Arditti String Quartet,

soprano singer Annette Meriweather,

tenor singer Julian Pike,

bass singer Nicholas Isherwood,

as well as dancers and choreographers Michèle Noiret et Alain Louafi.

The French composer Jean-Claude Eloy also added his voice to this

« Quodlibet pour Karlheinz Stockhausen ».

(Quodlibet : generic term given to a religious or secular musical work, made up of a successive or simultaneous miscellany of heterogeneous melodies or literary texts in a quite unseemly combination.)

An updated list of Stockhausen's works and discography on CD concludes the book.

Format 30 x 20 – 336 pages – ISBN : 2-905023-37-6