What is the significance of the nonsense languages in LICHT?
Pulverizing language into syllables and consonant/vowel fragments affects the balance of sense and sound. It used to be thought that syllables on their own had no meaning; now we understand that baby-talk for example has a fundamental layer of meaning related to its acoustic and gestural nature. This dimension of speech is therefore of musical interest and Stockhausen’s higher purpose in playing with the sounds of language is to reveal the process by which they acquire meaning and how languages vary in their musicality, as it were. Meyer-Eppler’s exercises in cutting up newspaper articles that impressed Stockhausen so much during his studies of information theory at Bonn University also showed that meaning is not something that is here one moment and gone the next, but rather the shift from meaning to music is a gradual process the more the text is cut up. Even if you cut up and reshuffle a text word by word something of its original meaning remains evident in the choice of vocabulary,
