Last year I remember being in Modena (at the Angelica Festival), and I was particularly shocked in an emotional sense by the second concert, the Oktophonie evening, because it was amazing, with the lights turned off. I actually assisted to the whole concert with my eyes closed as you recommended before and as I said I was shocked by the visual strength of the whole experience. It was like being in the middle of a sort of cosmic explosion, with thousands of elements rotating and spinning around me. When you compose a work like Oktophonie do you have a strong visual reference in your mind?

No, I’m a sound man. I work in the studio and I decide every moment what to accept and what to reject according to the inner excitement that I experience through sound; but I’m also a technician and an engineer of sound – that means I always try to find new ways of shaping sound in space. Space is a very new experience in the history of music. Up to now music was always happening in one place and we practically had a monaural experience or sometimes, rarely, a stereophonic one; but nowadays we are striving for music which surrounds us, up and above and below us. So that we can leave the body with our spirit through sound. And travel with the sound – this space is unlimited. It depends on the inventiveness and the technology that is used by the composer. So we are just at the beginning of a totally new history of music. Space music.

Karlheinz Stockhausen “Oktophonie” 1990-91

I think that’s pretty amazing because I think it actually works. I mean with Oktophonie in Modena I remember the strength and when it was over I left with the impression that I didn’t simply assist to a concert but a whole event of micro happenings and many other situations.

…but your comparison is right, it is like leaving and beginning with your first new experience in outer space. Some of them are weird because our body needs contact with the earth and everything the earth can offer, like nature… as if we were pure spatial vibrations and we had no birds, no violins to stick to, we would lose orientation. That is a wonderful state because after death it will be like that for a while, it will prepare us for a different experience.

One last question. Where do you think the direction of music will go in the future?

We should learn one by one the music of the whole planet, which is already a lot to study. No matter from which culture or tradition or country the music comes from… but that will not take very long because the total mixture of everything has almost become normal, in a lot of pop music… but the real future will be exactly like I said; man will slowly develop large auditoriums even with the current interest in music… it will happen because I believe that the constant development of humanity will lead to people that will want to play a new space music, in the new auditoriums people will want regularly have this experience. Being in space without being in space and leaving the body, travelling with music so that the spirituality of man, which means the diminishing of the importance of body, will have a chance. It might take a few hundred years before mankind, in the general, has a new orientation towards what you could call the cosmic feelings and the cosmic experience. Music will make that possible.

Many thanks go to Don Luigi Garbini, Stefania Morellato from Artache and Paola Manfrin for their help; and all my gratitude goes to Karlheinz Stockhausen for his patience and kindness in sharing some of his inspiring and precious thoughts.

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