Does Stockhausen really come from a planet of Sirius?
No. It’s a German joke. You have to watch out for Stockhausen’s jokes. He has a sense of humor. But hold on now. It’s also a Delphic Utterance. This man is a philosopher. What does the question “Where does your inspiration come from?” actually mean? It’s a way of saying “Don’t ask me: it’s in the music”. We look at the Mona Lisa and ask ourselves “What does it mean? Who was this woman in Leonardo’s life? Was she his girlfriend?” and people pretend that it was his girlfriend and that explains it. It explains nothing: in fact it diminishes the beauty and mystery of the painting to have its essential nature contaminated by mundane facts. Who the woman was in real life is not the point. If we knew, we might discover that her mouth is closed because she had bad teeth. The characters and situations in LICHT are drawn from real life, that is true: but it is also beside the point. In the lecture ‘Intuitive Music’ Stockhausen asks “When I say, I am thinking — who is saying this? … One is not
