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Karlheinz Stockhausen: Stimmung (excerpt; 1968)

From the album Stockhausen: Stimmung, performed by Singcircle, dir. Gregory Rose

While Stockhausen’s avowal of a pantheistic spirituality in his writings is sometimes difficult to take seriously, his 1968 composition Stimmung seems explicable only as the ecstatic credo of a devout postmodern universalist.

Stimmung is a German word rich in connotation, but most often meaning “tuning,” “mood,” or “atmosphere.”  The tonal spectrum of the work is generated from the overtones of a single low B-flat, to which the singers’ voices are anchored by an electronically-generated drone that they alone can hear.  Shifting vocal colors and gently pulsing rhythmic patterns shimmer across this sturdy harmonic edifice: the rhythmic profile and vocal timbre of each part is precisely notated, the latter using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The “score” for Stimmung is essentially an assembly kit comprising 51 short sections (or “moments,” as Stockhausen calls them) that are ordered uniquely for each performance, with certain limitations imposed by an overarching “form-scheme.”  Improvisation comes into play as the singers respond in various ways to the introduction of new material and determine the moments of transition to new sections.  The music is punctuated by the invocation of 29 “magic names” of divinities from various world cultures and snippets of erotic poetry penned by Stockhausen himself.

For the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Stimmung was presented in a spherical concert hall—another of Stockhausen’s brainchildren.  It was performed there 72 times:

Stockhausen designed [the hall] in conjunction with an architect and he placed fifty speakers around the hall so that the audience was surrounded with a circle of sound. He controlled the spatial quality of the sound from the desk on the platform in the centre of the sphere and he was able to make a sound mill that revolved around in circles over the audience’s heads. The spatial movement of the sounds became equally important as the other parameters of the sound such as duration and dynamics. (Rory Braddell)

In spring of 2003 I had the good fortune to hear New Music New College give three performances of Stimmung over the course of a week. The sustained, concentrated experience of these sounds created a wonderful effervescence in my head that lasted for days. This is transformative music.

April 09, 2010, 10:15pm