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| Fifth Column |
| Stockhausen: 9--11 was "Greatest work of art imaginable" |
| 2001-10-04 |
Susan Sontag set a standard difficult to match. Still, for sheer outrageousness, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen topped her, calling the destruction of the World Trade Center "the greatest work of art imaginable. . . . Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing." When the uproar in Germany caused the cancellation of a major program of his music, Stockhausen apologized, saying he meant that the terrorists had created a work of "the devil's art." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |