On 10 October 2008, Stockhausen was commemorated at the Royal
Conservatoire in The Hague with the dedication of one of the
electronic studios, and a performance of his final, monumental
electronic work
Cosmic Pulses. As the lights went back
up on a stunned audience, the first, acutely dismissive remark
made to me by a former colleague who shall remain nameless was, “…he
pretty much lost it after
Trans anyway…” This
is the sort of dichotomy which has surrounded Stockhausen for
as long as I can remember. This ranges from the literal effect
of his music, to the kind of response one has to his grandiose
and visionary attitude to the creation of his music, leading
to one commentary of the magnum opus opera project
Licht as
being “an act of gigantic egomania.”
More has been written about Stockhausen than can be comfortably
accommodated in your average municipal library and I don’t
plan on contributing my thoughts and experiences here, other
than to acknowledge the significance Stockhausen has had on all
our perceptions of music whether we realise it or not. There
is a kind of dichotomy in the programme on this double CD as
well. There may be some pleasant surprises later on, but anyone
anticipating ‘difficulties’ with Stockhausen will
probably have their expectations realised with the earlier works
on this set.
Zyklus has become a classic of percussion repertoire.
Written as a test piece for a percussion competition it has been
recorded numerous times, though Tristan Fry’s excellent
performance has for a long time been the standard to which other
players aspire. Played from a graphic score, the work itself
is much as you might expect, with plenty of virtuoso hitting
of various tuned and un-tuned percussion instruments. Interesting
gestures such as glissandi on the marimba render that particular
tuned instrument into an effect, but where individual notes and
melodic fragments do occur they shine through like islands of
brightness. As ever with this kind of piece, the spectacle of
seeing it performed is half the fun, but for percussion students
it will be a fine thing to have this recording easily available
once more.
The two
Spiral pieces differ in performers, the first
being ‘played’ by Harald Bojé, and the second
being a version prepared by Peter Eötvös. This is the
piece which was heard over 1,300 times at the spherical German
pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, and from these two different
performances you gain an impression of the almost random nature
of the music. The material is partially derived from short-wave
radios, which ‘leak’ broadcast fragments as well
as creating various sounds such as Morse signals, and a wide
variety of sound textures such as static and sliding sine waves.
The sounds are processed and manipulated through space in a way
which is only really hinted at in these stereo recordings - such
works really need a surround speaker setup to give their true
spatial effect. For me, these pieces work best when the material
is pared down to almost static sound fields, out of which haunting
musical moments emerge. Created for Expo ‘70,
Pole introduces
a two player element into the mix, and if your right ear can
get beyond the penetrating high sine waves near the beginning
then you will hear how fascinating chamber-music elements occur
as the two players respond to each others’ sounds.
CD 2 opens with a continuation of the 1971 Abbey Road recording
session.
Japan is a fairly meditative expanse of electronic
sounds, with the colours of low percussion and the ‘ping’ of
woodblocks adding punctuation to a fascinating landscape of the
imagination. Even when the intensity rises over the arc of the
piece’s time-span, the sense of contemplative silence is
never entirely absent.
Wach, like
Japan, comes
from a set of 17 pieces written between 1968 and 1971 entitled
Für
kommende Zeiten. These scores are abstract in the extreme,
and as much to do with the working processes that Stockhausen
had in mind at the time rather than anything that can be ‘read’ in
a conventional sense today. In this way, these recordings are
an authentic artefact of something comparable to ‘authentic’ early
music interpretation. The music may seem to have a strange remoteness
and a language which is hard to interpret, but this must have
something to do with the very personal nature of the composer’s
intentions, and the unique synthesis between composer and performer.
This may amount to improvisation of a certain kind, but the best
and most spontaneous performances sound like improvisation: the
only difference here is that the players are being guided by
Stockhausen rather than Schütz.
I first encountered
Tierkreis as the B-side of the 1977
DG recording of
Musik im Bauch. These were the little
pieces for each sign of the Zodiac made for music boxes, and
on this recording they appear in one of their numerous arrangements
- this time for trumpet and organ. I still like the intimate
charm of those music boxes best, but the musical material lends
itself well to the colour of the organ, and Markus Stockhausen’s
trumpet sings or speaks the different character sketches with
maximum empathy. Unlike the electronic works, these pieces often
owe as much to the tonal worlds of Genzmer or Hindemith, and
present an entirely different facet of Stockhausen’s musical
character.
Im Freundschaft was conceived as a solo piece playable
on different instruments, but originally for clarinet. There
are many aspects of this piece which may or may not help an appreciation,
such as the so-called “special art of listening”,
which has to do with a discovery of the various layers of Stockhausen’s
method of “horizontal polyphony”. To my mind, this
is not particularly difficult music, though its strange extended
or repetitive trills and often fragmented and angular impression
may leave many listeners cold.
As with so much of Stockhausen’s work, the strong theatrical
and often physical elements in performance are almost entirely
lost in a recording, as well as much of that powerful sense of
music being created ‘on the spot’. With all of the
pieces in this classic collection, a mindset open to experiencing
music in a different way than to mere consumption is something
of a requirement. Patience may reward however, and in the words
of the composer, “…there is always hope!”
Dominy Clements
Tristan Fry - percussion (Zyklus) 
