xpost to tom west: # of performers is unfixed
I will admit that I wasn't terribly into a lot of Stockhausen's music at first -- half the fun with his pieces are reading his program notes, the conceits behind the pieces are just as interesting as the music (in some cases, more).
Each of his pieces claims to be a breakthrough pioneering first, and he talks engagingly about why even in the cases when he's dead wrong (he most certainly was not always first), but his thinking was lucid -- the text that accompanied his pieces were what often forced the lightbulb moment for an audience that had been hearing electronic music but not 'getting it'
I recommend Robin Maconie's 'Stockhausen on Music' for a great starter book, epiphany-per-page, and Karl Heinrich Wörner's 'Stockhausen Life and Music' has a great piece-by-piece breakdown, and a record guide.
Maconie has a new Stockhausen book out that looks good, I'm waiting for the paperback.
― milton parker (Jon L), Thursday, 27 October 2005 19:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― Sweat Loaf (Sweat Loaf), Friday, 28 October 2005 06:13 (eighteen years ago) link
― mentalist (mentalist), Friday, 28 October 2005 06:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 28 October 2005 06:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Friday, 28 October 2005 08:49 (eighteen years ago) link
― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 28 October 2005 09:00 (eighteen years ago) link
Don't have it, dammit!
― Oh No, It's Dadaismus (Dada), Friday, 28 October 2005 10:25 (eighteen years ago) link
Or else assiduously scoured the second hand record and book shops of Glasgow throughout the 80s and 90s, before the Aphex Twin starting mentioning him in interviews...
― Oh No, It's Dadaismus (Dada), Friday, 28 October 2005 10:29 (eighteen years ago) link
― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, 28 October 2005 10:45 (eighteen years ago) link
― Oh No, It's Dadaismus (Dada), Friday, 28 October 2005 10:47 (eighteen years ago) link
― The Vintner's Lipogram (OleM), Friday, 28 October 2005 11:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― Oh No, It's Dadaismus (Dada), Friday, 28 October 2005 11:24 (eighteen years ago) link
hm. well. just hearing Hymnen for the first time. i'm only into region II, but... damn.
― poortheatre, Wednesday, 19 March 2008 00:41 (sixteen years ago) link
Transitional Karl
http://www.stockhausen-verlag.com/CD_Translations/Text-CD_22_I_become_the_tones.pdf
― Milton Parker, Sunday, 22 July 2012 01:55 (eleven years ago) link
The early stuff pre-Kreuzspiel is really weird — sounds like Bartók or Hindemith.
― clouds, Sunday, 22 July 2012 02:19 (eleven years ago) link
... not so surprising
― SomeTwat from Tring (Tom D.), Sunday, 22 July 2012 12:48 (eleven years ago) link
maybe, but what is so weird is how the stylistic shift seemed to happen so quickly — a matter of a year between Chöre für Doris and Formel.
― clouds, Sunday, 22 July 2012 12:54 (eleven years ago) link
maybe it's not so weird as remarkable
Think it was much the same for most of those guys, tho I'm not sure what Nono, for instance, was doing before serialism
― SomeTwat from Tring (Tom D.), Sunday, 22 July 2012 13:05 (eleven years ago) link
Gruppen on tonight
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 6 October 2013 10:20 (ten years ago) link
Be there or be square. Saw "Kontakte" last night and an old lady behind me said, "That piece was a bit long", and this guy sitting a couple of seats along from me swivelled round and said, "Yes I agree, it was a bit long", and she replied, "Yes, what do you think made it long? and I really wanted to say, "The length", but stopped myself because I thought it might seem a bit presumptuous and rude... but, thinking about it, it is ca. 35 minutes and that's longer than most people are used to in Western music...
― Tommy McTommy (Tom D.), Sunday, 6 October 2013 10:25 (ten years ago) link
not in art music shortly to god?
― lusty thoughts of big, strong, powerful hipsters (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 6 October 2013 10:28 (ten years ago) link
surely to god, even
I suppose not but even then they used to have to fit that stuff onto 20-25 mins of a side of vinyl album
― Tommy McTommy (Tom D.), Sunday, 6 October 2013 10:29 (ten years ago) link
shortly to god?
LOL, sounds like a book you'd see the religious/new age section of a bookstore
― Tommy McTommy (Tom D.), Sunday, 6 October 2013 10:31 (ten years ago) link
I suppose they aren't used to classical music?
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 6 October 2013 10:36 (ten years ago) link
Such a joyride of a piece, such a clever yet simple idea of a three-way game of ping-pong. The separation and then coming together of activity, tempos, sheer energies on display was breathtaking, although I think the textures weren't as strikng, because of that separation. Its a risk but Stockhausen pulls it off.
Nono's Canti was a good counterpart to that. Mini-groups, with the high note distributed among each of the 13 instruments. When these come together in 3/4 groups toward the end its such a rush. Its a real shame that Nono isn't as talked about as Stockhausen or Boulez or Cage.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 6 October 2013 21:09 (ten years ago) link
I hope I get to hear Gruppen live someday.
youtube finally gave me a chance to hear Sternklang. It's Stimmung + filters! It's great! It was always one of those 'later' pieces I was slightly afraid of, but I would have absolutely sprung for a Verlag copy of that during that window when Amoeba had them in stock.
― Milton Parker, Sunday, 6 October 2013 21:30 (ten years ago) link
This is my 2nd Gruppen but the first I've actually got the full effect, as it were. Bit of electric guitar in it of course!
Nono's Canti was a good counterpart
Yeah, this was great as was the other Nono piece. Also saw a couple of Xenakis percussion pieces (Okho + Psappha) (for free!), which were almost upstaged by a couple of toddlers who were in danger of joining the performers at several points.
― Tommy McTommy (Tom D.), Monday, 7 October 2013 08:05 (ten years ago) link
Also good to see Helmut Lachenmann wandering round at a few concerts - not exactly getting mobbed by screaming fans but having his hand shaken vigorously by several young and not so young fans
― Tommy McTommy (Tom D.), Monday, 7 October 2013 08:23 (ten years ago) link
Bit of electric guitar in it of course!
:)
This was actually a good bit of correction to his later reputation as a megalomaniac. The instruments here were sparingly used, not every passage was going for the shock and awe, you can really see his specific interest in the concert space, and how Kontakte was just as dramatic an use of that idea of surround space (at least on record, I didn't go to Saturday's but it should be easier to catch a perf of that).
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 7 October 2013 20:08 (ten years ago) link
I have only 2 memories of doing music o'level back in 1981: one of them was being played Kontakte by my music teacher. The other was her playing us the pistols followed by some romantic gloop and giving us aggression tests after each (the music was supposed to have the opposite effect to its intent, i.e. hearing rotten's snarl makes you feel LESS aggressive. The theory didn't work on us.) I wonder what the impact of Stockhausen would have been if she'd tried the test then.
― Dr X O'Skeleton, Monday, 7 October 2013 20:22 (ten years ago) link
'stimmung' really underrecommended as an introduction
― j., Saturday, 1 August 2015 17:12 (eight years ago) link
it would be a good record to give to kindergarten teachers
― j., Saturday, 1 August 2015 17:28 (eight years ago) link
Huh, I would think Stimmung would be THE go-to recommendation for anyone hesitant about Stockhausen.
― Michael F Gill, Saturday, 1 August 2015 17:38 (eight years ago) link
Anyone else go to Stimmung/Cosmic Pulses at the Barbican on Monday? The singers were all seated around a table with a huge glowing orb at the centre of it, Cosmic Pulses was like being in a washing machine with lasers flying all around you. I can't imagine it working at all without centrifugal sound but in that context, wow.
― Matt DC, Wednesday, 22 November 2017 12:15 (six years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eDgIaJtCk4
― Hans Holbein (Chinchilla Volapük), Wednesday, 14 April 2021 05:07 (three years ago) link
That's
Stockhausen: "Montag aus Licht" ("Monday of Light") documentary (1988) (English)
A half-hour documentary about the music and staging of Montag
― Hans Holbein (Chinchilla Volapük), Wednesday, 14 April 2021 05:08 (three years ago) link