Electronic Music

[Dave2002]

He's responding to Serial Apologist?

Indeed, but I trawled through a lot of text to see if I could find the specific references.

[Serial_Apologist]

Indeed, but I trawled through a lot of text to see if I could find the specific references.

My probably faulty memory recalls reading somewhere that the Stockhausen circle lived communally at that time, or at least semi-communally.

[RichardB]

My probably faulty memory recalls reading somewhere that the Stockhausen circle lived communally at that time, or at least semi-communally.

There's no mention of such arrangements either in Michael Kurtz's official Stockhausen biography or in Mary Bauermeister's memoir of her time with Stockhausen, or in any of Stockhausen's own writings.

[Quarky]

Possibly, although Stockhausen was very particular about accuracy regarding his music; and of course the ethos of that mid-sixties group was very special - as well as touring they virtually lived together - and for that reason alone would be very hard to replicate.

A review article from the Guardian might be relevant here:: https://www.theguardian.com/friday_r...362097,00.html

""Stockhausen had assembled his own "band" by the mid-60s. The Stockhausen Group was rather like the collective Miles Davis led in the 70s (influenced by his ideas). Together they created the fertile ground from which emerged his most radical concepts. Early rehearsals of works such as Es, with its instructions "to stop playing when you start thinking", resulted in brief, largely silent performances. No one was sure what to do, how to react.

Stockhausen's intuitive music challenged the players to be more like the temple musicians Stockhausen had met on his tours of the Far East, who lived as well as played together. The Stones had done much the same in Edith Grove in 1962, and the Beatles in Hamburg. Stockhausen needed the same communal spirit, and with the Stockhausen Group found the perfect vehicle for his ideas.

The late 60s and early 70s marked the zenith of his concert-giving career and popularity. At the 1970 World Expo at Osaka, his music was performed twice a day for six months in a planetarium-like dome with a star-studded roof. Sat behind the mixing desk, Stockhausen manipulated and projected the sounds coming from 55 loudspeakers arranged in rings around the dome. Over 1m people stopped to listen, and it became the most popular event of the festival.""

[RichardB]

A review article from the Guardian might be relevant here:: https://www.theguardian.com/friday_r...362097,00.html

From the website of the author of that article: "Tim Cumming is ... a music writer specialising in British and European folk, Moroccan and East European music, as well as rock and jazz." The article is full of inaccuracies. The texts of Aus den sieben Tagen are not "drawn from a book by the Indian guru Sri Aurobindo". Stockhausen did not perform with Allen Ginsberg. The composition Mixtur is a concert piece that has nothing to do with "performance art, happening, be-in, and musical theatre". Mikrophonie I, "where the recording equipment itself became an instrument", uses no recording equipment in performance. "Since 1977 ... most requests to perform works not in the Licht cycle have been refused. As the composer seems unwilling to allow musicians outside his own circle to interpret his scores, they have disappeared from the repertoire." None of this was true in 2000 when the article was written - the following year there was a major Stockhausen festival at the Barbican where the composer participated in performances of works from the 1950s onward, and from the 1970s until now I've seen performances of large amounts of his music which didn't involve any of the inner circle. I could go on. It's a sloppy and ill-informed article. Not for the first time, I wonder why a supposedly "quality" media outlet seems so often to prefer publishing pieces written by people who have only a sketchy knowledge of the subject they're writing about, when there are plenty of knowledgeable writers around. At least the author doesn't claim that Stockhausen's group practised communal living!

[Serial_Apologist]

From the website of the author of that article: "Tim Cumming is ... a music writer specialising in British and European folk, Moroccan and East European music, as well as rock and jazz." The article is full of inaccuracies. The texts of Aus den sieben Tagen are not "drawn from a book by the Indian guru Sri Aurobindo". Stockhausen did not perform with Allen Ginsberg. The composition Mixtur is a concert piece that has nothing to do with "performance art, happening, be-in, and musical theatre". Mikrophonie I, "where the recording equipment itself became an instrument", uses no recording equipment in performance. "Since 1977 ... most requests to perform works not in the Licht cycle have been refused. As the composer seems unwilling to allow musicians outside his own circle to interpret his scores, they have disappeared from the repertoire." None of this was true in 2000 when the article was written - the following year there was a major Stockhausen festival at the Barbican where the composer participated in performances of works from the 1950s onward, and from the 1970s until now I've seen performances of large amounts of his music which didn't involve any of the inner circle. I could go on. It's a sloppy and ill-informed article. Not for the first time, I wonder why a supposedly "quality" media outlet seems so often to prefer publishing pieces written by people who have only a sketchy knowledge of the subject they're writing about, when there are plenty of knowledgeable writers around. At least the author doesn't claim that Stockhausen's group practised communal living!

Which only goes to show the essential importance of cross-checking references for accuracy!

[RichardB]

Which only goes to show the essential importance of cross-checking references for accuracy!

I might seem to be overreacting, but it happens all too often that I'm reading some student work that quotes from dodgy sources and if you let them go they can easily get perpetuated, like the claim that Keir Starmer (whatever his faults) was personally responsible for Savile not being prosecuted.

[Joseph K]

[Dave2002]

A little bit of history.

[RichardB]

Very nice to see that most of the material originally released on the INA-GRM label has been brought out on Bandcamp. Many of the landmarks of musique concrète that I remember from their beautifully produced LPs are here, as well as some unfamiliar things like Bernard Parmegiani's L'Echo du miroir - the first track on the album is a bit too weighted towards spoken narration (having been originally produced for a film), but the other two are like a distillation of that strand of Parmegiani's work where brief sound-events are projected against (and sometimes exchange places with) a more static background. The label also features what seems to be more or less the complete electronic works of Eliane Radigue.

[Bryn]

. . . The label also features what seems to be more or less the complete electronic works of Eliane Radigue.

Along with some of her non-electronic works, including, as of yesterday, Occam XXV, played by Frédéric Blondy on the, on this occasion, electrically powered Willis organ of Union Chapel, Islington (it was originally hydraulically powered and its hydraulic system was restored a few years ago). Beware, however, if you want the programme notes, it looks like you have to opt for the (sold out) CD version. I 'pre-ordered' the download (96/24) and the zip came with just the cover image, no booklet pdf.

Also: https://unionchapel.org.uk/venue/wha...-frdric-blondy

[Quarky]

Karlheinz Stockhausen Kontakte.

The level of invention and ingenuity in this work never ceases to amaze me. But how the human mind can be expected to produce such works at the same level year in, year out? I doubt.

[RichardB]

The level of invention and ingenuity in this work never ceases to amaze me. But how the human mind can be expected to produce such works at the same level year in, year out? I doubt.

In the 1950s Stockhausen understood the nature and potential of this new medium arguably to a greater extent than anyone else. There will always be arguments about whether his later music stands up to the ground-breaking work he was doing between say 1950 and 1970, but one of the things I most admire about his approach is that right up until the end he was still exploring new areas and taking risks, as can be heard in his last electronic piece Cosmic Pulses, completed a few months before his death. (The same could be said about Xenakis and Nono, but perhaps not really about Boulez and Berio, to cite a few other composers of that generation.) You might be interested to read this https://richardbarrettmusic.com/Stockhausen2012.html

[Joseph K]

Karlheinz Stockhausen Kontakte.

The level of invention and ingenuity in this work never ceases to amaze me. But how the human mind can be expected to produce such works at the same level year in, year out? I doubt.

Which version of this work have you/did you listen to?

[Quarky]

Which version of this work have you/did you listen to?

I don't know - I was listening to it on a radio streaming service, and it passed into the aether without commentary.

Prior to that I was listening to a piece in a similar vein by the current composer ?