What was your last concert?

[Richard Barrett]

it can sound ( and maybe the performance you went to avoided this and it became something else ?) a bit like a "watered down" nod to other musics?

I've never heard it like that, but something that particularly drew my attention yesterday evening was the way everything it does structurally (serially) is so clearly audible and at the same time so fascinating in its unfolding, and this is something really particular to Stockhausen whatever kind of material he's working with. I don't hear it as a homage to overtone singing but as something that from its own logic and momentum strayed into some related areas.

[MrGongGong]

I've never heard it like that, but something that particularly drew my attention yesterday evening was the way everything it does structurally (serially) is so clearly audible and at the same time so fascinating in its unfolding, and this is something really particular to Stockhausen whatever kind of material he's working with. I don't hear it as a homage to overtone singing but as something that from its own logic and momentum strayed into some related areas.

Interesting, and you are absolutely spot on about the audibility of the structure and process.

Did they do the poems in a language you understand?

[ahinton]

While you were all singing "Land of Hope and Glory" this evening

I wonder just how many of us were doing that (I'm not sure that I'd even do it at gunpoint)...

[Beef Oven!]

I wonder just how many of us were doing that (I'm not sure that I'd even do it at gunpoint)...

I don't think anyone thinks that you are important enough to worry about putting a gun to your head about anything at all (other than to rob you of your wallet). And to take a bullet in the nut over such a matter strikes me as imbecilic in the extreme. I suspect there are many who would not want to sing along with LOH&G and The National Anthem but did not feel the need to tell us of this 'important fact'.

[ahinton]

I don't think anyone thinks that you are important enough to worry about putting a gun to your head about anything at all (other than to rob you of your wallet)

Whilst I'm sure you're right about that, did I mention anything about self-importance? (and no one would find much in my wallet in any case, that's for sure)...

And to take a bullet in the nut over such a matter strikes me as imbecilic in the extreme

Figure of speech?

I suspect there are many who would not want to sing along with LOH&G and The National Anthem but did not feel the need to tell us of this 'important fact'.

Did I "tell anyone of a fact"? I'd thought that I merely "wondered" how many were doing this - and, again, did I mention "importance"?

Anyway, as you wrote in another thread on LNOTP, "everyone is entitled to their opinion - it's part of the reason why this forum is so interesting"...

[Richard Barrett]

Did they do the poems in a language you understand?

Yes, they did them in the original. Actually the only thing I found inappropriate about the performance was that most of them were done in a much too dramatic way - obviously they need to come across as informal and intimate, not as "performed". But this was also the problem last time I heard it (with Theatre of Voices at the Proms a few years ago). Not that I'd want everyone to do it like the original recording, but it does seem much more appropriate than the others in this regard.

[Beresford]

Yes, they did them in the original. Actually the only thing I found inappropriate about the performance was that most of them were done in a much too dramatic way - obviously they need to come across as informal and intimate, not as "performed". But this was also the problem last time I heard it (with Theatre of Voices at the Proms a few years ago). Not that I'd want everyone to do it like the original recording, but it does seem much more appropriate than the others in this regard.

My intro to live Stockhausen was Singcircle's Stimmung in Manchester in the 1970's Spine-tingling. Not much live Stockhausen in UK nowadays. Listening to my recording, he does seem to hoover up all sorts of samples of what later came to be called World Music.
At the same concert there was another piece which ended with performers one-by-one switching to a toy trumpet/keyboard and leaving the auditorium, still playing. It finished when the last performer left - faint traces of sound coming from the foyer (RNCM). I loved it, but it would rapidly become a cliche if repeated.

[cloughie]

I wonder just how many of us were doing that (I'm not sure that I'd even do it at gunpoint)...

Quite a few I think, great thing to and even better as I did live last month as part of a chorus alongside a good brass band! Lighten up a bit!

[ahinton]

Quite a few I think, great thing to and even better as I did live last month as part of a chorus alongside a good brass band! Lighten up a bit!

No need! I'm not that bothered about people doing it if they want to; I just wouldn't want to do it myself (and not only because I'm a very bad singer!). Not only does it seem to me to be anachronistic given how long it is since the "British Empire" (arguably remembered now more in the New Year's Honours than anywhere else - DBE, CBE, OBE &c.) ceased to exist in any meaningful sense (in the sense that few today lived at a time when it did exist), but also Elgar was not, as far as I recall, at all enamoured of the idea that Arthur Christopher Benson's verses be added to the trio section of the first of his six marches and I rather doubt that he'd be especially happy about the end result being referred to by some people today as "Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory", but there you go(!)...

[cloughie]

No need! I'm not that bothered about people doing it if they want to; I just wouldn't want to do it myself (and not only because I'm a very bad singer!). Not only does it seem to me to be anachronistic given how long it is since the "British Empire" (arguably remembered now more in the New Year's Honours than anywhere else - DBE, CBE, OBE &c.) ceased to exist in any meaningful sense (in the sense that few today lived at a time when it did exist), but also Elgar was not, as far as I recall, at all enamoured of the idea that Arthur Christopher Benson's verses be added to the trio section of the first of his six marches and I rather doubt that he'd be especially happy about the end result being referred to by some people today as "Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory", but there you go(!)...

OK but it is a good tune to sing along to! As to your voice - just sing as though nobody is listening!

[ahinton]

OK but it is a good tune to sing along to! As to your voice - just sing as though nobody is listening!

That's the only way I could ever be persuaded to try to sing, believe me!

[Richard Barrett]

My intro to live Stockhausen was Singcircle's Stimmung in Manchester in the 1970's Spine-tingling. Not much live Stockhausen in UK nowadays.

Stimmung isn't often performed anywhere actually, it's not a particularly easy thing to do. Singcircle was only the second group to perform it, and this was after months of rehearsal and much correspondence between Gregory Rose and Stockhausen, since there were many features of the score that weren't as clear (or, in some cases to do with the notation of the vocal overtones, as correct) as the composer thought they were. I have the impression that finally it's building up more of a performance history, so that each new performance doesn't have to start from scratch.

Regarding "world music", this is what Stockhausen had to say (in a letter to Rose, quoted in the liner notes of the latter's recording) about the origin of the techniques used in this piece, mostly composed during a period when he and his family spent some months living in an isolated house on Long Island: "I started composing this work with a lot of melodies, singing aloud all the time. But after a few days my work was only possible during the night. The children needed silence also during the day. So I began humming, did not sing loudly anymore, began to listen to my vibrating skull, stopped writing melodies of fundamentals, settled on the low B flat, started again and wrote Stimmung, trying out everything myself by humming the overtone melodies. Nothing oriental, nothing philosophical: just the two babies, a small house, silence, loneliness, night, snow, ice: pure miracle!"

[cloughie]

That's the only way I could ever be persuaded to try to sing, believe me!

Just do it and liberate your vocal chords, you may even enjoy it! Be a bathroom baritone!

[ahinton]

Just do it and liberate your vocal chords, you may even enjoy it! Be a bathroom baritone!

The bathroom would be the only suitable place, methinks (subject to its soundproof qualities) - and, for the record (though God forbid that the results, if any, would be recorded even if only as evidence that may later be relied upon in Court), it would be bass rather than baritone...

[cloughie]

The bathroom would be the only suitable place, methinks (subject to its soundproof qualities) - and, for the record (though God forbid that the results, if any, would be recorded even if only as evidence that may later be relied upon in Court), it would be bass rather than baritone...

Check your range - you might be surprised!