Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge

Stockhausen became increasingly fascinated during the late 50s with the spatial projection of medicament in the performance space. It can be said that Stockhausens Gesang der Jnglinge tag the setoff of the end of classic musique concrete. For Kontakte in 1958, exploitation four-track tape, he devised a clever way make the enunciate of his tape music everywhererefinement around the audience at various speeds. He did this in the studio using a rotating platform with a loudspeaker mounted on top. He could manually rotate the speaker up to four measure a second.Stockhausen also apply a specialized tape fipple flute called the Springer. Originally developed to leng whence or shorten radio encompassingcasts, it used a rotating matrix of four to six playback heads that spun in the opposite perplexity as the tape transport. As the tape passed the rotating playback array, one of the playback heads was in edge with it at all times. The output was equal to the sum of the rotating heads.It was trait of him that he could not be satisfied with Boulezs and Berios derivation of music from verbal sounds and social structure there must be some general principle, which a private st stratagem would be enough to demonstrate completely some arranging which a work could bring into being. Such a system he found in the organization of degrees of comprehensibility, across a range from the drabness of language to the total incomprehensibility of wordless music.This would require electronic means. He mandatory to arrange everything separate into as smooth a continuum as possible, and then to extricate the diversities from this continuum and compose with them, and he found the way to do that by dint of attending, between 1954 and 1956, classes in phonetics and information theory given at Bonn University by Werner Meyer-Eppler. Since, as he there discovered, vowel sounds are distinguished, whoever is speaking, by characteristic formants (emphasized bands of frequenci es), it awaited it ought to be possible to create synthetic vowels out of electronic sounds, so that synthesized music could begin to function as language. nominateing from the other end, the self-colored repertory of tape transformations was available to alter spoken or sing real(a) and so move it towards pure, meaningless sound.Around the time that Stockhausen was formulating these criteria for electronic music, the record of his work began to change dramatically. After completing the two electronic Studien, he returned to instrumental writing for about a year, completing several unkeyed works for piano and woodwinds, as well as the ambitious orchestral work Gruppen.Gruppen, written for three complete orchestral groups, each with its own conductor, marked Stockhausens first major experiment with the spatial deployment of sound. He positioned the separate orchestras at three posts around the audience so that their sounds were physically segregated in the listening space. The groups called to each other with their instruments, echoed back and forth, sometimes played in unity, and sometimes took turns playing alone so as to move the sound around the audience.Gruppen and his other instrumental experiments of that time were Stockhausens bridge to his next electronic work. By the time he embarked on the creation of Gesang der Jnglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955-56), his views on the control of dynamic elements of electronic music had broadened considerably.In this creation the synthesized electronic sounds are composed according to principles analogous to those direct in vocal sounds, and the recorded voice, that of a boy treble, is carried into the electronic rain cats and dogs by studio alteration and editing superimpositions creating virtual choruses, reverberations to suggest neat distance, scramblings of words and helpings of words, changes of speed and direction.Nothing on either side, therefore, is quite outside(prenominal) to the other, and Stoc khausen invites his audience to attend to degrees of comprehensibility by using a text with which he could expect them (the work was intended for projection in cologne Cathedral) to be familiar the German translation of the prayer sung in the Apocrypha by three young Jews in Nebuchadnezzars furnace (hence the title, Song of the Youths). Stockhausens electronic cull Gesang der Jnglinge thus attempts to integrate its biblicalGerman text with all the other materials in the piece of writing (Morgan 442). Even so, the choice of this particular prayer cannot charter been unaffected by what Stockhausen could have envisioned would be the imagery of the piece, with the boys notification ring by flames of electronic articulation.Gesang der Jnglinge is perhaps the most significant work of electronic music of the 50s because it broke from the aesthetic dogma that had preoccupied the heads of the genus Paris and Cologne studios. It was a work of artistic dtente, a sensible break from th e purely electronically generated music of WDR, in which Stockhausen dared to include acoustical sounds, as had composers of musique concrte in France.Yet the piece is entirely unlike eitherthing that preceded it. Stockhausens Gesang der Jnglinge draws on unorthodox audio materials (Bazzana 74). Stockhausens objective was to fuse the sonic components of recorded passages of a youth choir with equivalent tones and timbres produced electronically. He treasured to bring these two different sources of sound together into a single, legato musical element, interlaced and dissolved into one another rather than contrasted, as had been the tendency of most musique concrete. Stockhausen created some stir with works of very newborn spirit and imaginative form (Collaer 395).Stockhausen practiced his newly formed principles of electronic music composition, setting forth a plan that required the passing of the speed, length, loudness, softness, density and complexity, the width and narrowne ss of pitch intervals and differentiations of timbre in an take and precise manner. There was nothing accidental about this combination of voices and electronic sounds. At thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds, Gesang der Jnglinge was longer than any previous worked realized at the Cologne studio.It was a composed work, using a visual score showing the placement of sounds and their dynamic elements over the course of the work. The result was an astonishingly beautiful and haunting work of sweeping, go tones and voices. The text, taken from the Book of Daniel, was sung by a boys choir as single syllables and whole words. The words were sometimes revealed as comprehensible sounds, and at other times merely as pure sound determine. Gesang der Jnglinge deals with a much greater variety of sonic material than did the earlier studies (Morgan 466).Stockhausens assimilation of a boys singing voice into the work was the result of painstaking preparation on his part. He wanted the sung par ts to closely match the electronically produced tones of the piece. His composition notes from the time explain how he made this happen Fifty-two pieces of newsprint with graphically notated melodies which were sung by the boy, Josef Protschka, during the recording of the individual layers.Stockhausen also produced these melodies as sine tones on tape loops for the circa 3-hour recording sessions. The boy listened to these melodies over earphones and then tried to sing them. Stockhausen chose the best result from each series of attempts for the accompanying synchronization of the layers.Gesang der Jnglinge is historically important for several reasons. It represented the beginning of the end of the first period of tape composition, which had been sharply divided esthetically between the Paris and Cologne schools of thought. The maturity of Stockhausens approach to report the work, blending acoustic and electronic sounds as equivocal raw materials, sentiency a maturing of the med ium.The work successfully cast off the cloak of nicknack and audio experiments that had preoccupied so some tape compositions until that time. Stockhausens model of composing the soundsplitting it, making the changing parameters of sound part of the theme of the workwas first exercised in Gesang der Jnglinge. Rhythmic structures were just nominally present, no formal repetition of motifs existed in the work, and its theme was the round-the-clock evolution of sound shapes and dynamics rather than a pattern of create tones.Gesang der Jnglinge was composed on five tracks. During its performance, five loudspeakers were placed so that they surrounded the audience. The listener was in the eye of the sonic storm, with music emanating from every side, moving clockwise and counterclockwise, moving and not moving in space.Gesang der Jnglinge was originally prepared for five tape channels, later reduced to four, and its enthusiasm is greatly enhanced by antiphonal effects. Stockhausen hi mself was to apply in many later works the discoveries he had made here in the sermon of language and of space, of which the latter was already claiming his attention in Gruppen for three orchestras. provided perhaps the deepest lesson of Gesang der Jnglinge was that music of all kinds, whether immanently or electronically produced, is made of sounds rather than notes, and that the first task of the composer is to listen. More than ever ahead, Stockhausen wrote, we have to listen, every day of our lives. We draw conclusions by making tests on ourselves. Whether they are valid for others only our music can show. (Stockhausen 45-51).Stockhausens Gesang der Jnglinge provided a major turning-point in the artistic maturation of the studio, for against all the teachings of the establishment the piece was structured around recordings of a boys voice, treated and integrated with electronic sounds. In Stockhausen Gesang der Jnglinge electronic sounds take on a disturbing distinctness w hen set in relief by the humanity of a boys voice, racked at times out of intelligibility, but never out of recognition, by the dissection of its speech elements.Effects such as the distant murmur of multitudinous identical voices have a dramatic impact far more direct than Stockhausens comments on the work would suggest his concern is to incorporate vocal sounds as natural stages (complemented electronically) in the continuum that links tone to noise, vowel to consonant. His vivid imagination for broad effects is further revealed in the spatial direction and movement of the sound by distribution.Stockhausen was the most representative composers of a period which is still in its analytic phase (Collaer 48). Gesang der Jnglinge has subsequently become a of the essence(p) aspect of electronic composition and has helped to combat the faintly ridiculous paladin with which an audience concentrates on sounds emanating from a single pseudo-instrument. Stockhausens fanatical devotion to t his art is sustained by a vision of public music board (spherical ideally) giving continuous performances of spatial music. However reminiscent this may seem of some deplorable cinematic techniques, complex stereophony is an altogether natural development of machine music and may help it to achieve a persuasive idiom owing nothing to instrumental practice.Works CitedBazzana, Kevin. Glenn Gould The Performer in the Work A Study in Performance Practice. Oxford University Press, 1997.Collaer, Paul and Abeles, Sally. A memorial of Modern Music. World Publishing, 1961.Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth-Century Music A History of Musical call in Modern Europe and America. New York. Publication, 1991.Stockhausen Actualia, Die Reihe, 1 (1955, incline edn. 1958), 45-51, (see also his Music and Speech ).