Karlheinz Stockhausen 

Elektronische Musik 

There is a web site that contains excellent information on Stockhausen including interviews and pictures. Please read the information available on this site, especially the interviews.

We will discuss the SECONDS interview so at least print it out.

Background

Stretcher for a military hospital during W.W.II.

1947- Studied piano at Cologne Hochschule fur Musik .

1950- studied composition with Frank Martin who introduced him to the music of Bartok, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Earned a living as a jazz pianist.

1951- Met Herbert Eimert who introduced him to the serialism music of Webern . Attended International Summer Courses for New music at Darmstadt.

1952- Studied with Olivier Messiaen and Milhaud. Also served as an apprentice in the studio for music concrete (RTF).

1953- Became co-director of the North West German Radio in Cologne (known as the Cologne Studio). Also studied phonetics at Bonn University.

Later became director of the studio until 1978.

Still composes and lectures.

We will use the interview mentioned above for the basis of the class discussion. It is far better than anything that I could write. There are a few things not mentioned in the interview.

He is supposed to pictured on the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper  album.

A critic for the London Observer described one of Stockhausens concerts ,

"..In the foyer, alongside the usual staid concert-going public in its persian lambs and city suits, there was an astonishing gathering of young people. To judge by their clothes and hair, they seemed to have surfaced, as at some mystical signal, from every hippie hole in London." (1)

Works

Studie I  (1953)

Constructed entirely from sine waves.

Studie II  (1954)

Also constructed of sine waves. He also used an echo-chamber.

Pictured above is the score for Studie II.  The upper part shows the pitch in Hertz with a range from 100-17,200.

The middle is the duration in centimeters- 7.62 cm of tape =1 second. The bottom is the amplitude in dB with a range of 0 to -40. The darker portions are overlapping notes.

Gesang der Junglinge  (Songs of the Youths)   (1955/56)    [We will listen to portions.]

Considered to be a masterpiece of electronic music. Album liner notes,

"Combines sung sounds and electronically produced (vowel type sounds, consonant noises; a scale of the intermediary forms of tone- mixtures). Sung sounds are individual "organic" members of the more comprehensive "synthetic" sound family. At certain points in the composition, the sung sounds become comprehensive words; at others, they remain pure sound values; between these extremes there are various degrees of comprehensibility of the word. Whenever speech momentarily emerges from the sound-symbols in the music, it is to praise God (Daniel 3, "song of the men in the fiery Furnace"). This work is the first to use the direction of the sounds and their movement in space as aspects of the form. The score calls for five groups of loudspeakers to be set up surrounding the audience. For the Gramophone version, the composer has made from the original five track version a new two-track stereophonic synchronization.

Kontakte  (1958-60)    [We will listen to portions.]

Two versions of Kontake was written, one a four track version for electronic sounds suited to radio and gramophone, and a version for electronic sounds, piano and percussion. The electric sounds are played over a four-track loudspeaker arrangement and the two instrumentalists play at the same time metal, skin, and wooden percussion and piano.

Once again, from the liner notes,

"The electronic sounds were produced by means of an impulse generator (the speed of the impulses can be continuously varied between 16 and 1/16 impulses per second, and the duration of the impulses between 1/10,000 and 9/10 of a second. A "tunable indicator amplifier" (as a relatively narrow filter with continuously variable band width and correspondingly varied durations of decay) and an adjustable band-filter were also used. Foe a few sound-events, sine-wave generators and a square-wave generator were employed.

Most of the sounds, sound noises or noises were made by various accelerations of rhythmic sequences of impulses. For certain sounds, an echo-sheet with continuously variable echo durations was used.

The scale of electronically produced "timbres" contains familiar tones, sounds, and noises and mediates among them (like metal, skin, or wood, etc.); it facilitates transformation of sound from each one of these categories into every other one, and mutations of sound into completely new, previously unknown sound-events."

Mikrophonie I

For tam-tam, 2 mikes, 2 filters and potentiometers. "Two people "excite" a tam-tam with various materials and in various ways (rubbing, scratching, etc.); each is picked up by a directional microphone which is held nearer or further away from the source of sound, or moved about by another person. And in turn, the sound from each channel is manipulated by someone operating an electronic filter and a potentiometer, thus affecting timbre and pitch." (3)

Mikrophonie II

For choir, Hammond organ and ring modulators.

 Opus 1970

For electronium, electric viola, tam-tam and piano.

An hour long homage to Beethoven's 200 birthday. Each player plays fragments of Beethoven works, prepared in  a method that makes them appear to be short wave transmissions. More of an improvisation with Stockhausen electronically manipulating the music as is played.

Russcol, Herbert, The Liberation of Sound :  An Introduction to Electronic Music , Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1972

1) p.170  2) p. 176  3) p.224-225

Watkins, Glenn, Soundings- Music in the Twentieth Century, NY, Schirmer Books, 1988

Other sites:

The unofficial stockhausen page

http://w ww.v.arizona.edu/~jkandell/music/stockhausen.html