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Ernst Krenek: Excerpt from Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus (1955)

From the album Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus / Klangfiguren

In the third and final installment of a series of posts highlighting the early productions of the West German Radio Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear one of the first attempts to blend synthetic tones with the human voice. Ernst Krenek’s Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus makes an interesting parallel with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s groundbreaking composition Gesang der Jünglinge, created around the same time.

Both compositions combine electronic sounds and vocal timbres, although Krenek’s approach in this regard was relatively traditional in comparison to Stockhausen’s. Both works were also based on religious texts—Krenek and Stockhausen were devout Catholics, and understood their works in the grand tradition of sacred music. Krenek even labelled his composition an “Easter Oratorio.” (This religious sincerity was lost on some critics: the German musicologist Friedrich Blume castigated such works as musical blasphemy in a controversial 1958 lecture portentously entitled “Was ist Musik?”)

Unlike most of the composers working in the Cologne studio in the 1950s, Krenek was a well-established figure in European modern music. Still, his Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus shows a youthful eagerness to explore the new possibilities presented by the electronic medium. Krenek tweaked the sine wave generators to create a slightly “squished” scale with 13 tones to the octave, instead of the customary 12, casting a strangely distended coloration over the music. The combination of pure sine tones, dissonant “tone mixtures,” and angular, ring-modulated vocal lines likewise contributes to an eerie and unsettling musical mise-en-scène.

Played 94 time(s).

January 03, 2012, 8:28pm

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Karel Goeyvaerts: Composition No. 4 with Dead Tones (1952)

From the album The Serial Works (#1-7)

In this second installment of a series of three posts exploring the early productions of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear a remarkable and little-known work by the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts (1923-1993).

Composed in 1952, but realized in sound nearly three decades later, Composition No. 4 comprises a basic sound material of four tones, identical in pitch, timbre, and duration with each appearance. (Hence the “dead tones” of the title.) Technically, these tones are what were called Tongemische, or “tone mixtures”— that is, artificially generated tones consisting of sine waves in non-harmonic proportions to the fundamental frequency. The only variation in the piece is in the duration of the silences between each iteration of the tones, which is altered according to serial procedures. As the interjections of silence between each tone gradually increase and decrease over the course of the composition, the four sonic layers of the piece are brought out of phase and back into phase again. The result is a remarkable phenomenon of motion in stasis, a slowly shimmering stillness that musicologist Hermann Sabbe has anointed the first ever piece of “process music.” For Sabbe, “Composition No. 4” is also an early example of conceptual art, being based on a simple generative idea that could be realized in any number of ways. (Goeyvaerts did not specify the pitch of the tones, only their duration and timbral quality.)

In the early 1950s, Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen carried on an intense theoretical conversation concerning the principles of serial composition. Although the two shared a deep fascination with the technique, they diverged aesthetically: Goeyvaerts distinguished his approach from Stockhausen’s, calling the German’s music “baroque,” and claiming that he based his composition on a preconceived sonic image. Goeyvaerts, by contrast, envisioned music as (in the words of Mark Delaere) “the objectification of a spiritual idea in a structure of sound.” This distinctly modernist form of musical mysticism can be traced to such varied sources as the medieval concept of numerus sonorus—music as “sounding number,” essentially Pythagoreanism made into compositional doctrine—and the vision of a static, painterly “neoplastic music” outlined by Piet Mondrian in the 1920s. Delaere has called Goeyvaert’s early works “the most abstract compositions ever written.”