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Iancu Dumitrescu: Monades (Gamma) for 6 monochords, crystals, and metallic objects

From the album Edition Modern 1002 (1991)

As a young composer in Romania in the 1960s, Iancu Dumitrescu heard the distant siren-call of the European avant-garde: “The music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Messiaen, Berio, circulated clandestinely, being prohibited, from one hand to another, by copies of tapes which had become almost unlistenable. But imagination continues to hear what, in fact, did not exist any more. The spirit of modernism, of new worlds being beyond these deformed sounds, raucous, grating…”

In the 1970s, Dumitrescu studied with the the brilliant and eccentric conductor Sergiu Celibidache, whose metaphysically-tinged musical philosophy, fed by such diverse intellectual sources as phenomenology and Zen Buddhism, had a powerful influence on the young composer.  Dumitrescu would later refer to Celibidache as his “spiritual father.”

Dumitrescu’s mature compositional work has been tightly organized around two institutions: the Hyperion Ensemble, which he founded in 1976 with his wife, the composer Ana-Maria Avram, and the record label Edition Modern, started in 1990, on which many of Dumitrecu’s and Avram’s recordings have been released.

While his music can be broadly grouped with the spectralist movement, Dumitrescu distances his work from that of the French spectralists (Grisey, Murail, Dufourt). He views his music as an attempt, through modern techniques, to reanimate the primal Orphic power of music:

My approach implies many ancestral, primitive sources. All that is archaic, elementary, magic, today finds the value of an acute modernism… What remains [beyond logic] is the field of the mystic. I believe that music has an enormous proportion of this mysterious remainder. It would not have any value if it were different. Its value lies only in the fact of bringing to consciousness something not otherwise able to be thought. It brings nuances to us, modulations of thought which do not have an equivalent.

February 09, 2011, 11:25am

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James Tenney: Spectrum 6 (2001), for flute, clarinet, percussion, violin, and cello (excerpt)

From the album Spectrum Pieces

In his series of eight compositions bearing the title Spectrum (1995-2001), the brilliant American composer and theorist James Tenney embarked on a new exploration of the musical potential of the harmonic series, a phenomenon that had inspired him throughout his career.

While in many of his earlier works based on the harmonic series, such as his Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow (1974) or Septet for six electric guitars and electric bass (1981), Tenney had methodically introduced the partials in an upward sweep from the fundamental, in the Spectrum pieces the pitches of the series are used all at once.  If the effect of his earlier music had been strongly tonal, thanks to the emphasis on the lower partials of the spectrum, these later works betray their harmonic foundations only in fleeting glimmers; the dominant mood is ungrounded and suggestive.

All the spectrum pieces are written in “time-space” notation, meaning that the duration of each note is determined not by its shape (half note, quarter note, etc.) but by its visually-measured length on the staff, each line of which in this case lasts exactly 30 seconds.  Tenney used a computer program which allowed him to steer the general parameters (density, register, etc.) while the computer automatically generated the actual notes.  This is the principle of stochastic processes, or constrained randomness, which was introduced into music in the 1950s by Iannis Xenakis.

Tenney’s Spectrum pieces sound to me like a distant echo of the most disembodied textures of the early 20th-century Austrian composer Anton Webern: the tones seem to float serenely in a rarefied space, expressive of something profound yet wordless.  

August 15, 2010, 1:00pm

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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