Stockhausen was an "avant garde" composer mostly active from the 50's to just a couple years ago when he died. He's most famous for post-serialism and breakthroughs in electronic music and the unification of acoustic and electronic music. His face is on The Beatles' Sgt Peppers record. He started the first "noise group", well before Morricone's "Gruppo di Improvvisazione". He had 2 (or 3) "mistresses" at the age of 79 and lived in a hexagonal house he designed himself. The last 25 years of his life were devoted to his opera cycle the 7 Days of Light (Licht) - 7 full operas, one for each day of the week. Most people think he went off the deep end with his operas, but I think they are hilarious. One movement (I think Samstag/Saturday) has the orchestra seated in a vertical scaffolding in the shape of a giant head, and the nose will duel with the lips or the ears, etc.....another piece has 4 helicopters carrying the 4 parts of a string quartet and they fly around above the performance venue while video feeds of the players are broadcast and the copters "buzz" the audience.

I used to be a real devotee but these days I've mellowed out some :(. So my background info may be shaky, but I'll do my best.

My first offering will be
Gruppen (Groups) for 3 orchestras

The 3 orchestras are arranged in a "U" and the audience sits in the middle. Don Davis copied the swelling/panning parts for his Matrix scores. This also has the first electric guitar in an orchestral setting. If you like Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes or his Alien score, then you may like this. This is an LP rip of a 1958 performance conducted by Stockhausen, Boulez and Bruno Maderna. I will up the remastered CD as well, since that has greater dynamics, but this is the one which blew my socks off 20 years ago and I still prefer it.
More info (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2001/jun/01/artsfeatures.classicalmusicandopera) (But the Abbado version mentioned in the link doesn't hold a candle to this '58 version.)

Original LP (This is not the actual cover, I couldn't find it)


http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HN5P8GBY

What's that? You want to mount a production of this piece for the local H.S. orchestra(s)? OK here's the score!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NTSNYNJR
Happy now? ;)

Here's a video of a performance of Gruppen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsX1UMednjg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI-oy4iw3vE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpgHrXFNmn8&feature=related

haha stockhausen scores are crazy, i have quite a few myself
thanks so much

Gruppen / Carre
Stockhausen Edition 1992 Remaster CD
Gruppen I described above. My only add'l note is that the guitar solo starts on trk 21 and the Matrix part starts at trk 31 into 32...

Carre (starting on trk 50) is for 4 orchestras and 4 chorus groups. The audience sits in the middle. Unfortunately I don't have a quad version - that would be awesome. If Gruppen is Planet of the Apes then this is The Omen. Actually it doesn't sound much like the Omen, but parts of it certainly sound "satanic" :).



http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y09SHVSChttp://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/4958adb4858ebb8fde54ef04a1b26433/418444.jpg

haha stockhausen scores are crazy, i have quite a few myself
thanks so much

Really - which ones? Do you have Zyklus? That one is fun to color :). If you have any of the graphic ones in PDF I'd love to get a copy. I have the Klavierstucke but those are not good for wall decorations....:)

Here's a "taste" of KS' late era electronic music. It's only 1 meg. I'll share more if there's interest. His earlier stuff sounds like Goldsmith's Logan's Run "bleats" but this is his more mature electronic music (more droney).
Intro to "Mittwoch's Gruss"

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5JZJL9UT

this thread gave me an idea :)

Thread 67996

My first offering will be
Gruppen (Groups) for 3 orchestras

Oof, this is absolutely relentless...! I have the flu at the moment and my brain is absolutely scrambled to buggery and back - perhaps this sheds a little light on the reasons behind the following admission: I'm really enjoying this!

There's certainly some similarities here with some of Goldsmith's more... over-wraught music - Music For Orchestra comes to mind.

This piece is absolutely off its head in the best possible way. Stockhausen knew how to handle his orchestra. Even if you dislike the sound, at the very least you have to admire the amazing ingenuity that went into the arrangement.

Thanks!

Oof, this is absolutely relentless...! I have the flu at the moment .. I'm really enjoying this!

Wow, I'm surprised, when I have a cold any kind of avant garde harmony usually makes me feel worse! I'm glad you're having a different effect.


There's certainly some similarities here with some of Goldsmith's more... over-wraught music - Music For Orchestra comes to mind.

I don't know that piece - I will have to search for that...


This piece is absolutely off its head in the best possible way.

This is probably my favorite of his orchestral pieces. I've likely heard it 50 or 60 times without exaggeration and it still reveals more each time.

Well, it only gets weirder from here....actually I take that back, later I'm going to post something earlier than Gruppen, and then move forward.

One more for tonite, this is

Punkte (Points) for Orchestra
BBC Prom 48: G�rzenich Orchestra
------------------------------------
Broadcast Live on BBC Radio 3.
Royal Albert Hall, London
Friday 22 August 2008
http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2008/whatson/2208.shtml#prom48

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5CIBDM7A
This file includes radio commentary before and after the piece. Punkte is about placing sounds in points in space, with equal weight to pitch, rhythm and dynamics. KS is taking Schoenberg's 12-tone concept and beginning to apply it to larger scale entities. Anyways, it sounded pretty boring in its first incarnation and for decades after he first recorded it he changed it to make it more exciting. That's one thing that most Stockhausen scholars don't admit. He would make rules and then break them whenever it sounded good to do so. A friend of mine studied in Germany with Stockhausen's engineer and he admitted that Stockhausen would sometimes just start improvising parts of his compositions in the studio, like just twiddling knobs (!!) and ignoring his own score instructions. That really applies to his electronic work tho, not this piece. This piece was carefully sculpted over several decades.

(The only thing I hate about this broadcast is that Stenz, the conductor had the stones to say "everyone knows that KS got carried away with the electronics in his career". Frankly Mr Stenz, you are a clueless dimwit who deserves to be punched in the balls. I hate when conductors try to speak for their audience. In my community it's quite the opposite.)


(this pic has nothing to do with this piece, I just like it. It's a rotating speaker KS is playing with)

The next post will be Der Jahreslauf, a beautiful, almost ritualistic piece from the late 70's, very different from the ones so far.

Thank you for that first piece dooj! I'm loving it!! And here's me worrying that Stockhausen would be all gimmicky soundscapes - this is really compelling stuff.


I don't know that piece - I will have to search for that...
I'll up it as soon as I can :)

Der Jahreslauf (The Course of the Days)
Deutch Grammaphone LP rip
http://www.discogs.com/image/R-1382768-1243520094.jpeghttp://www.discogs.com/image/R-1382768-1243520155.jpeg

This is a beautiful piece which contains lots of bucolic and pagan lyricism - bells, chimes, that sort of thing, calm woodwinds. Kind of a "Rite of Fall" (vs Rite of Spring). But then it turns into this kind of Morricone Euro-horror score (look at the cover - that's what's on stage. Dario Argento would be proud). Later on some surprising elements appear (I don't want to spoil the surprises, but you will go "WTF?". Yes, that was intentional :). I think this is his most accessible piece, I love it!

More info here (includes "spoilers" but is a much better appreciation than what I jotted here)

http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/jahreslauf.htm


http://www.megaupload.com/?d=H8BBJ16K

Another piece filled to breaking point with absolute, fevered insanity!

Unfortunately I dreamed about Gruppen last night - one of those flu-infected horrid nightmare dreams where you go round and round in circles a billion times on something until you're so wound up that you wake up in a cold sweat. So I won't be listening to this fully until my illness has passed...

Thank you for posting, however!

Unfortunately I dreamed about Gruppen last night - one of those flu-infected horrid nightmare dreams where you go round and round in circles a billion times on something until you're so wound up that you wake up in a cold sweat. So I won't be listening to this fully until my illness has passed...

haha that sounds scary as hell

Unfortunately I dreamed about Gruppen last night - one of those flu-infected horrid nightmare dreams ...

LOL! Once when I was VERY sick I started listening to Rush's "2112" and then for years afterwards everytime I heard that record I started feeling sick again. Yeah, stay off the Gruppen till you feel better..(?)

Not that I condone it one way or the other, but Stockhausen's music was very much part of the psychedelia crowd in the 60s.
In fact here he is frolicking in his own Never-Neverland (note that he is good friends with "Aslan" ;) )

Now we get into the somewhat more impenetrable chamber side of KS. Again this is early stuff. But even his early stuff holds up extremely well, actually better than some of his late stuff (the reason his late stuff doesn't hold up is because he used synthesizers, and not only that but the timbres he chose sound like DX-7 default patches. Yuck. Anyways, that's another discussion).

Stockhausen Edition No. 4: Kontrapunkte, Zeitmasze, Stop, Adieu

Trk 1 - Kontrapunkte
2-11 - Zeitmasze
12-22 - Stop
23-30 - Adieu

Kontrapunkte (Against Points)
This piece is essential and along with Gruppen one of my favorite of KS' strict acoustic works. After Punkte (Points) he decided random points in space was kind of boring so he decided to have the points start "dueling" each other. So there are 10 instruments, conceptually arranged in 5 pairs. These pairs essentially duet, sometimes accompanying the rest of the ensemble and sometimes ignoring the rest.

From wikipedia :
"A 'punctual' ensemble style using ten soloists divided into six sound groups ((1) flute-bassoon, (2) clarinet�bass clarinet, (3) trumpet-trombone, (4) piano, (5) harp, (6) violin-violoncello) is transformed irregularly but steadily into a soloistic style articulated by 'groups', gradually focusing on the piano part" (Stockhausen 1964, 20). This version adds progressively longer insertions of denser note groups, often in single instruments, while at the same time gradually replacing more and more long notes with groups of rapid, shorter ones in a technique called Ausmultiplikation (Kohl 2004). This gradual erosion of the originally sparse texture, reflected in the hyphenated title (meaning "Against Points"), complements three parallel processes already present in the first version: (1) the heterogeneous timbres of the full ensemble are gradually reduced to the "monochrome" of the solo piano; (2) widely fluctuating durations reduce to similar values; (3) wide-ranging dynamics reduce to a generally soft level..

Wow - that sounds pretty academic and cold, but really this is a poetic piece and full of mystery. A perfect complement to this piece is Boulez' "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" (The hammer without a master) which came out on the B-side of some LPs of Kontrapunkte. I'll share that on the avant thread at some point - another essential classic.

Zeitmasze (Time Measurements) - this piece is for 5 woodwinds and deals with tempi - it's all over the place but repeated listenings will yield rewards.

Stop! - not one of my favorites, it's for small orchestra and I just remember that the placements of the instruments was unique for this. I've heard it many times and I can't remember anything about it a few hours afterwards. Listening to it again now, all I can say is that the ending has some nice low brass booms reminiscent of the Close Encounters saucer bleats. KS says he composed this in 7 hours. Hmmmm.

Adieu - for 5 woodwinds again, this piece is chaotically calm. I mean it is impenetrable yet not in any hurry to impress you. When I first heard this as a young adult I thought it was boring, but as a mature adult I can appreciate the feeling of examining phrases and creating moods. Wow, listening to it now, I'm really digging this. One phrase just went by and it sounded like part of a Herrmann radio cue.

This is an odd compilation for me in that none of these pieces were originally released together but KS bunched them together in his definite CD Editions so this is what I'm sharing. I think Kontrapunkte is the main selling point (no pun intended ;)). Frankly I prefer the versions I first heard them in (Kontrapunkte with the Boulez piece, Zeitmasze with some other percussion pieces, Stop! with Ylem, and Adieu with a his short song-cycle stuff) but that may be just nostalgia (?).


http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EH7YJVVJ

I think I will go pretty far out next since this thread has been way too conservative (for Stockhausen anyways ;)

Qustion before I download: what kind of music is it? Contemporary- experimental-atonal stuff, or more "traditional", melodic music?

Qustion before I download: what kind of music is it? Contemporary- experimental-atonal stuff, or more "traditional", melodic music?

Contemporary- experimental-atonal stuff. There are no melodic themes or "chords" in the traditional sense. It's strictly avant-garde. Give it a try, if you don't like it, post your reaction, I'm interested in feedback both positive and negative.

Contemporary- experimental-atonal stuff. There are no melodic themes or "chords" in the traditional sense. It's strictly avant-garde. Give it a try, if you don't like it, post your reaction, I'm interested in feedback both positive and negative.

Sure. As soon as I come back from holidays. Thx for posting!

Mikrophonie I (Microphone 1)
For 2 Tam-tams, 2 microphones and 2 mixers
Unreleased archival recording off France radio(France Musique)
(Ens. Champ d'Action, PARIS, IRCAM, 4 December 1998)



http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2OQR5YGV

I've previously described some of KS' music to sound like a collection of Toho Godzilla SFX. This would be one of those. Not sure how many are still listening to these posts, but this one will either turn you off completely or get you completely hooked. If you like Einsturzende Neubauten then you will see that they learned alot from pieces like this. SPK, Throbbing Gristle, etc....they must all have heard this stuff.

Basically there are 2 Tam-yams (giant gongs)
http://web.archive.org/web/20080210001456/http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco2/Rec/Stockhausen/tamIR.jpg
and 2 players rub, hit and bow these things, while another 2 performers hold the microphones and move then around the players, and 2 other people do mixing of these 2 microphone tracks. The score is largely instructions and there are no pitches or key signatures (LOL).
There are many recordings of this piece, one of them is even on SONY Classical, but I like this one because the performers and the audience are clearly having a good time and while respectful, they are not so pretentious as to ignore how hilarious this must have looked.

Here is a short archival performance vid (but not of the one I'm sharing here sadly). If you hate this, then don't download and save your bandwidth. But give it a chance and maybe you will get into like I did at one point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ukk5R6T3TU

Here is a youtube vid of a classroom using Mikrophonie concepts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsdebXuKSPk

More info here (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMikroph onie_(Stockhausen)&ei=cK9xSuDYGYP0NZya_bAM&usg=AFQjCNGR7iW3LXTGuucEhWuNfhKJL6wPiw&sig2=V8LwlSLIQLvbjMMnRTt5Qg) and here (http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/mikrophonie1.htm).

Feedback welcome. Is this music or what?

Here's a video of Kontakte, which I wasn't planning to up. However it is another avant garde classic and since I just found this here is a link..very Goldsmith sci-fi but much more aggressive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I8RbxQ8qZg

(also added a video concert of Gruppen up on the 1st post)

My last bit of Stockhaus-annalia for today, just because I had no idea there was so much of his music on Youtube.

Here's a youtube vid of the definitive performance Klavierstuck X (Piano Piece 10). I'm just going to copy the OP comment:

"...It definitely requires several listens, even for the most snobbish avant-garde poseur... ''
LOL!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v7YYvPSYzw

The Klavierstucke are a dry listen even for me. I believe however that in Klavierstucke XII the pianist sets off some model rockets from his grand piano. It's part of one of the operas. Can't remember the details but it has Satan in it. Maybe rockets vs Satan?

Here's the last of the Stockhausen I've uploaded:

Bird of Passage (from Ceylon LP)

This piece has a nice jungle feel, very tropical, but then it gets a bit weird. Probably the most ethnic of KS's music. There is also a HIGH degree of improvisation here. In fact I don't think there are any actual notes written down for this piece, just verbal instructions.


http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0FMKMA04

Michael's Riese

More orchestral work, a large part of one of the operas. Holds up pretty well on it's own. Features Stockhausen's son on trumpet. Amazon says it's pretty accessible, personally I can't remember...just that it was pretty good.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=T2WM9QKD

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Stimmung can be found as part of the 2008 Proms at this blog


inconstantsol (http://inconstantsol.blogspot.com/2008/09/stockhausen-day-2008-proms.html)

Personally not one of my favorites but worth checking out either way..

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re-up of all please?