Musically Scored Light-Spaces of the Postwar German Avant-Garde: Karlheinz Stockhausen and the ZERO Group of Artists

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Magdalena Zorn
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 388691158

For Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Düsseldorf-based group of artists known as Zero, the "musically scored light-space" (musikalisierter Licht-Raum) was a metaphor for concrete artistic parameters of representation. The composer Stockhausen oriented his musical vision toward the parameters of spatiality and luminosity. Meanwhile, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker designed visual compositions that centered on the spatial evolution of light and served as settings mirroring particular musical structures, a form of artistic transposition. Stockhausen continued creating music for light-spaces all the way up to his opera cycle "LICHT" (2003); this practice permeated the works of Mack, Piene, and Uecker even after the ZERO group (1958-1966) broke up.The scholarship has broadly overlooked this intertextual dialog between music and visual art and its significant role in German cultural history after the Second World War. The proposed musicological project will correct this omission and for the first time place the works of Stockhausen and ZERO side by side to investigate both their musical traits and their musical philosophy. One objective is to present the mutual links in their artistic structures. We will investigate how ZERO art's seriality, spectrality, and use of rhythm were informed by compositional codes in Stockhausen's music and, inversely, how Stockhausen's works make structural references to ZERO's "compositions". Besides analyzing musical structural parallels, the project will research the notions of space characteristic to Stockhausen and ZERO. It will explore the aesthetic spaces' aspects of immersiveness and intermodality (circularly linked auditory and visual structures) and will ultimately locate their devotional artistic content in the historical and cultural contexts of their time. First on the agenda is an extensive archival and primary-source investigation with the Stockhausen and ZERO foundations in preparation for a structural and aesthetic comparative analysis of Stockhausen's and ZERO's musically scored light-spaces. To tease out the correspondences between music and visual art, the project will employ intertextuality as a method of intermedial inquiry. The project will be conducted in academic collaboration with the ZERO Foundation, which will be embarking on its own art-historical research initiative about Mack, Piene, and Uecker's concept of structure beginning in September 2017. The foundation's art-historical undertaking will in turn benefit our proposed cultural-historically relevant project, as we identify the role of music in the postwar German avant-garde, which was profoundly marked by upheavals in spatiality and the luminous turn.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants