Stockhausen's Spaceship

Started by Cato, September 21, 2007, 06:24:19 AM

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petrarch

Quote from: Sylph on February 14, 2011, 01:14:25 PM
Could anybody tell me where can I find some information about his Fünf Sternzeichen and Fünf weitere Sternzeichen? A description or something like that? Orchestral versions.

Have you seen this? http://www.stockhausen.org/five_star_signs_about.html

Other than that, the original work is Tierkreis which is amply documented.
//p
The music collection.
The hi-fi system: Esoteric X-03SE -> Pathos Logos -> Analysis Audio Amphitryon.
A view of the whole

snyprrr

Quote from: James on February 22, 2011, 03:05:04 PM
Been thinkin' about these piano solos lately,  time to listen again ..



01 Klavierstück XII (Examen) (from the opera "Donnerstag")
02 Klavierstück XIII (Luzifers Traum) (from the opera "Samstag")
03 Klavierstück XIV (Geburtstags-Formel) (from the opera "Montag")

Bernhard Wambach piano

Yes, I'm interested to hear your review. Also, check out the review on Amazon.

(poco) Sforzando

Quote from: James on February 20, 2011, 06:52:34 AM
Insight: NY Philharmonic to perform
Stockhausen's Gruppen... in 2012

BY JAKE COHEN ON FEBRUARY 17TH, 2011 IN COS


The confines of cushy Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center can't accommodate this setup, so the Philharmonic will go further downtown (both literally and figuratively) to perform Gruppen inside the monstrous Park Avenue Armory at E25th Street.

Not to be pedantic, but the monstrous Park Avenue Armory is at E64th Street, so the Phil is moving literally crosstown rather than downtown. But is there any official announcement of this event that anyone can point to? It is NOT listed in the 2011-12 NY Phil brochure I received a few days ago. And if this is really happening, when will tickets be on sale?
"I don't know what sforzando means, though it clearly means something."

bhodges

Quote from: toucan on April 14, 2011, 05:51:52 PM
If Alan Gilbert is trying to impress me he is succeeding!
In fact Gilbert is impressing me even if that is not what he is trying to do.

Humane idea to include Boulez's Rituel (though not my favorite piece by Boulez, Gilbert needs to know that  :P) - and Great idea to include The Unanswered Question

2012 is a long time to wait, though...  ???

Gilbert is a superb programmer. But the really radical kicker to this concert is in adding the Act I finale from Mozart's Don Giovanni to the mix. All four pieces will use musicians deployed spatially in the hall.

--Bruce

Cato

Many thanks to James for taking the time to provide these links!

We will see whether the LICHT operas indeed become the Ring of our era!
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)


Cato

Quote from: James on April 27, 2011, 02:35:14 AM
http://www.youtube.com/v/JotSiYl2dzs

Speaking of Violin Babes, check out the Flute Babe at 4:50!  Credits say her name is Chloe L'Abbe of Quebec.

Plus, somebody wants to know if Pierre Boulez was in the audience (on the left) at 5:20.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

karlhenning

"Chloé L'abbé" ... obviously a stage name. Born Myrna Kornblatt.

Scarpia


Cato

Quote from: James on April 27, 2011, 02:06:36 PM
Not a problem .. what of the cycle have you heard? Just curious.

I received a tape many moons ago, when Stockhausen was not quite halfway finished.  It contained excerpts from Donnerstag Aus Licht (e,g, Examen, Michaels Jugend) and have heard excerpts of Montag, Mittwoch, Samstag, and now Sonntag.

Which reminds me: nearly 4 years ago, when I started this topic (!!!???!!!) I offered a translation of a negative review from May 2, 1988 by the Music Editor of Der Spiegel of Montag Aus Licht.

Allow me to offer it again now:

For the Original German see:  http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13527558.html

"With Hitler and a Bow-Wow into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
Spiegel Editor Klaus Umbach on Karlheinz Stockhausen's new opera Montag aus Licht

Like a lord, with curly hair down to his shoulders, he sits enthroned in the glow of spotlights 5 meters above the earthly stage.  His bright shirt is colorfully knitted, his trousers blossom white.  You cannot help but look at him: Karlheinz Stockhausen, 59, a figure of En-Light-enment for the contemporary electronic music scene.

With big eyes full of transfigured delight, this composer on the podium of the Cologne Philharmonic, a man who spiritually is able "to leave my body and observe it as if it were an automobile," pursues a kind of neocreation of creativity: his work.  And he saw, that it was good.

Among "21 musical performers,", small ensembles of singers, children's choirs, traditional and electronic sound generators, among the cries of babies, goats bleating, and the beat of a cuckoo clock, 3 women named after the primeval mother Eve shriek through a squadron of giant loudspeakers "Huvva Luhudens" and "Akka Aditi", at which point a choir, after a hymn to God as an "immeasurable Intelligence" monosyllabically chants a response: "Michi Michikiki niminimi."

Then a "Birthday Aria" ("Parrot aye Parakeet Bow Wow!") is to be understood, according to a published exegesis by Stockhausen himself, that Heaven has bestowed Life to 7 "Animal boys" and to 7 Dwarfs: "Luci-cat, Wee-wee-grimace, Penis-treasure, Birdie-boobs, Johnny Top, Manny-Tickle-Deer, and Little Brat."

In grateful joy: 3 sailors gargle – according to the score – the sounds "a---öäua aö oöa oa ua" and then "ruketu Urt Werdani," spitting out the water in high arches.

Up until then it had been a really colorful evening!

But then Hell bursts out in Stockhausen's Eden.  Luci-Polyp steps out in the forms of 2 Beelzebubs and rattles down the alphabet "from A-fa and Be-fa to Upsilon-fa and Zee-fa." Then an alarm clock goes off, and Adolf Hitler snores an historic O-tone, so that "we shoot back to 5:45 A.M.," a crowd of men shout "Hail!" and a toilet flushes from an 8-track tape directed by 40 channels of sound.  Aha!  Creation is excrement, the miscarriage must go through the toilet back to a mother's lap.

On to something new: a flock of lovely maidens prophesies "sea Samudra Ice," apparently the code of an exotic genetic technology.  Because immediately a pair of rough chords occur on Eva's Steinway ("Fertilization with Piano Piece"), the birth proceeds ("frai dai dai vae") crazily fast, and already they are in the world of Karlheinz Stockhausen: "seven boys of the days," "healthier and more beautiful human beings," monstrosities of a composing visionary, who long ago lifted off into the cloud-cuckoo-land of his own crazy-quilted private philosophy.

So ("sonono nononono no") this is the way things have been screaming with birth-pangs since 1977, and it will continue in installments until the next century, if the powers of inspiration remain whole for the creator.  Then it shall completely enlighten mankind: Stockhausen's LIGHT, the most monumental and monomaniacal undertaking in Western Musical History, a cycle of operas structured and named after the days of the week, 5 times greater than all of Beethoven' symphonies together, and at more than 30 hours a Colossus of Time, compared to which Wagner's Ring tetralogy is a "a cute little chamber opera" (the newspaper Kölnische Rundschau).

At the beginning of April Stockhausen oversaw at the control panel the concert premiere of his latest piece Montag aus Licht.  On Saturday of this week Michael Bogdanov, Hamburg's designated theater director, is arranging a premiere at La Scala of Donnerstag aus Licht via his previous London staging.

For over 4 hours this syllabic and sibylline  "Play of Light" winds around out of the incense from Poona and Oberammergau, from the Bible, legends, the vocabulary of children's books, and the coffee grounds of Erich von Däniken (Note: a pseudo-scientist who claimed he had evidence of extra-terrestrial landings in ancient times), leading to the heights of the Bergisch Land and Kürten 5067 (Note: Stockhausen's town and zip code), where Stockhausen has his center, a man who claims "not to be necessarily identical to Stockhausen the composer."

Here at the address of Kettenberg 15, a green hill of electronic music astrology, he could listen in on "the 12 melodies of the zodiac"  as well as perceiving the vibrations of Sirius, the "central sun of our area of the Universe," over 8.7 light-years away, "the highest form of oscillations," under whose influence he went from new-sound revolutionary to a new-age softie, and from a philharmonic terror of the middle-class to the supernova of a messianically turned community.

Whether as a pioneer at the podium or the music mixer or as Heaven's loudspeaker, he always stood at the center.  His work Kreuzspiel caused a scandal in 1952 at the Darmstadt New Music Festival.  His Gesang der Jünglinge almost became a classic.  He created by his won estimation the first works of purely electronic music in 19534 at the WDR studios.  The Beatles even honored him with his portrait on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper.  The Distinguished Service Cross Winner of the Republic of Germany once represented the brotherhood of the musical avant-garde in Bonn's Villa Hammerschmidt and in Lebanon for a German cultural exposition.  During Expo 1970 in Osaka 21 soloists offered his new German sounds in a round auditorium for 5 1/2 hours per day over 183 days, and more than a million fair visitors listened enchanted to this new kind of permanent wave from Germany.

In Amsterdam, as late as 1985, according to a Stuttgart newspaper, "Stockhausen would draw more people than Karajan."  And last year the composer's son and trumpeter Markus even promoted his father in East Germany.

But the more frequently Stockhausen has directed ear into the Universe from his high throne his artistic sense to ideas on salvation, the more persistently he has destroyed his regular position as Germany's #1 composer, which he quite rightly deserved as a revolutionary of the new and as a grandiose craftsman.

To be sure, even in the 3-act Montag aus Licht there are still some trace elements of his sonic inspiration in evidence, especially in the exquisite mixture of voices, synthesizers, and noises, even in the songs without words, which the bassett-horn player Suzanne Stephens and flautist Kathinka Pasveer perform with virtuoso elegance.

But unpleasantly there is nothing else of interest in this score, and it even becomes unsettling to realize: when it gets loud, it sounds like Orff, and when it gets soft, it moans like Cats, and if it keeps going like this, if Sonntag aus Licht is to be expected in the year 2002 as developing this trend, we can expect the world to beam in C major!

This whole musical-theatrical spectacle becomes embarrassing first through its "text-action-stew" (quote from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) with which "total artwork creator" (Gesamtkunstwerker) Stockhausen waters down his musical message, and it makes no difference, as composer and critic Dietmar Polaczek wonders, whether "lower Rhine peasant Buddhism" or "tantric-lamaistic monastic Catholicism" is befogging Stockhausen's sensibilities.

In any case, his community of believers can be seized by the metaphysical smoke from Kürten, and even the Hamburg newspaper Die Zeit ("The Times") gives the prayer wheel a spin: this work LICHT, said the newspaper in all seriousness about the unfinished work, might be a new type of evangelization, a type of Apocalypse of Karlheinz, and between Hitler, Bow-Wow, and a parakeet ("who attempts to whistle the Marseillaise" according to the score) arises "the art of composing as a new sacrament of the new human in a new, transformed Universe."

There, in this new ivory-tower full of thoroughly senseless "Times-liness", the Guru from Bergisch Land* "would like to be allowed to make music with planets and moons and roaring groups of planets and suns and moons."

Really, it's almost tragic: while Karlheinz Stockhausen, the searcher for God, treks down the Milky Way of the Cosmos with his retinue, the composer of the same name has been going down backward on the wrong road for a long time."


* Bergisch Land is the area where Stockhausen lived in (roughly) west central Germany.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

karlhenning

Could be worse. "With Hitler and a Bow-Wow into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" & "and when it gets soft, it moans like Cats" could have been meant as praise.

karlhenning

Quote from: Spiegel Editor Klaus Umbach
. . . Among "21 musical performers,", small ensembles of singers, children's choirs, traditional and electronic sound generators, among the cries of babies, goats bleating, and the beat of a cuckoo clock, 3 women named after the primeval mother Eve shriek through a squadron of giant loudspeakers "Huvva Luhudens" and "Akka Aditi", at which point a choir, after a hymn to God as an "immeasurable Intelligence" monosyllabically chants a response: "Michi Michikiki niminimi."

Perhaps not the core of the practice, but bleating-goat is certainly well represented in traditional operatic practice; so I'm not sure what his complaint is, there . . . .

Cato

Quote from: James on April 28, 2011, 10:39:01 AM
The author of that is merely listing the variety of electronic samples that occur very briefly within the works texture via loudspeakers. So has there ever been the actual sound of bleating goat in a opera and over loudspeakers? Hmmm maybe Stockhausen is making a joke about that traditional operatic practice; i did kinda chuckle when I first heard it.

Bleating goats reminded me...

Many decades ago, before most of you whippersnappers were born, I would crank up Wagner's Ring cycle, or Schoenberg's Gurrelieder or Erwartung, or perhaps a Rimsky-Korsakov opera, and inevitably, whenever Brünhilde or Tove or Fevroniya were twirbling away, my mother would be within earshot and demand:

"Somebody put that poor woman out of her misery!"   :o

"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

MDL

Quote from: Leon on April 30, 2011, 06:51:04 PM
Very interesting interview - he is much more down to earth (despite the Sirius nationality) than his critics make out.

Thanks, James for posting it.

I was lucky enough to hear Stockhausen speak several times before concerts in London. He was engaging, lucid, entertaining and utterly sensible.

Cato

#294
Quote from: Leon on April 30, 2011, 06:51:04 PM
Very interesting interview - he is much more down to earth (despite the Sirius nationality) than his critics make out.

Thanks, James for posting it.

"Can you tell us what the most beautiful sound, or the most interesting sound, that you've ever heard, is?"
"No."

To be sure, a more down-to-earth response is not possible.   ;D

Quote from MDL:

QuoteHe was engaging, lucid, entertaining and utterly sensible.

I am reminded of the following incident: once I was having a conversation with a lady psychologist, who was dating a medical doctor I knew.  Things were going fine: she was engaging, lucid and entirely sensible...until... she pointed to the glowing logs in the fireplace and said:

"Last night it was so wonderful: the fire attracts The Green Fairies, you know."
I: "Oh really?"
She: "Yes, one of them fluttered right in front of my face for a while."
I: "And why exactly does fire attract The Green Fairies?"
She: (incredulous) "For the warmth, of course."
I: "I would think that their magic would keep them warm."
She: (Spurning) "The Green Fairies are not magical.  They're natural."

She later complained to the doctor that my skepticism produced vibrations that kept The Green Fairies from appearing that night.  Yes, he still dates her, despite her acquaintance with The Fairy World, apparently because she has certain talents a la Amsterdam and/or Shanghai.

No, she was not testing me for an experiment in how people react to unusual claims.   :o

People with delusions can be quite functional...even psychologists.






"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

karlhenning

Quote from: Cato on May 01, 2011, 04:09:08 AM
. . . She later complained to the doctor that my skepticism produced vibrations that kept The Green Fairies from appearing that night.

Ah-hah! Robin Williams suggests as much to Jeff Bridges in a scene of The Fisher King! So your psychologist is onto something! ; )

karlhenning

Quote from: Cato on May 01, 2011, 04:09:08 AM
People with delusions can be quite functional...even psychologists.

In principle, of course, there's no absolute reason a delusional person should not be a psychologist. Or a composer ; )

MDL

Quote from: Cato on May 01, 2011, 04:09:08 AM

Quote from MDL:

I am reminded of the following incident: once I was having a conversation with a lady psychologist, who was dating a medical doctor I knew.  Things were going fine: she was engaging, lucid and entirely sensible...until... she pointed to the glowing logs in the fireplace and said:

"Last night it was so wonderful: the fire attracts The Green Fairies, you know."
I: "Oh really?"
She: "Yes, one of them fluttered right in front of my face for a while."
I: "And why exactly does fire attract The Green Fairies?"
She: (incredulous) "For the warmth, of course."
I: "I would think that their magic would keep them warm."
She: (Spurning) "The Green Fairies are not magical.  They're natural."

She later complained to the doctor that my skepticism produced vibrations that kept The Green Fairies from appearing that night.  Yes, he still dates her, despite her acquaintance with The Fairy World, apparently because she has certain talents a la Amsterdam and/or Shanghai.

No, she was not testing me for an experiment in how people react to unusual claims.   :o

People with delusions can be quite functional...even psychologists.

Well, yes, I suppose you have a point.

snyprrr

Quote from: Cato on May 01, 2011, 04:09:08 AM
"Can you tell us what the most beautiful sound, or the most interesting sound, that you've ever heard, is?"
"No."

To be sure, a more down-to-earth response is not possible.   ;D

Quote from MDL:

I am reminded of the following incident: once I was having a conversation with a lady psychologist, who was dating a medical doctor I knew.  Things were going fine: she was engaging, lucid and entirely sensible...until... she pointed to the glowing logs in the fireplace and said:

"Last night it was so wonderful: the fire attracts The Green Fairies, you know."
I: "Oh really?"
She: "Yes, one of them fluttered right in front of my face for a while."
I: "And why exactly does fire attract The Green Fairies?"
She: (incredulous) "For the warmth, of course."
I: "I would think that their magic would keep them warm."
She: (Spurning) "The Green Fairies are not magical.  They're natural."

She later complained to the doctor that my skepticism produced vibrations that kept The Green Fairies from appearing that night.  Yes, he still dates her, despite her acquaintance with The Fairy World, apparently because she has certain talents a la Amsterdam and/or Shanghai.

No, she was not testing me for an experiment in how people react to unusual claims.   :o

People with delusions can be quite functional...even psychologists.

Aye aye!!! now that's change i can believe in!

petrarch

It is interesting, but I have the opposite reaction re Boulez's Sonates I-III and Stockhausen's Klavierstucke I-IV, despite the fact that I love the latter.
//p
The music collection.
The hi-fi system: Esoteric X-03SE -> Pathos Logos -> Analysis Audio Amphitryon.
A view of the whole