Karlheinz Stockhausen (22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, best known for his innovation in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.

Karlheinz Stockhausen developed the temporal theories and suggested that the entire compositional structure could be conceived as “timbre”:

since “the different experienced components such as colour, harmony and melody, meter and rhythm, dynamics, and form correspond to the different segmental ranges of this unified time”, the total musical result at any given compositional level is simply the “spectrum” of a more basic duration—i.e., its “timbre”, perceived as the overall effect of the overtone structure of that duration, now taken to include not only the “rhythmic” subdivisions of the duration but also their relative “dynamic” strength, “envelope”, etc.

Despite the strangeness and supposedly unlistenability of his music, Stockhausen, as an avant-garde composer, has influence on popular consciousness. The Beatles included his face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This reflects his influence on the band’s own avant-garde experiments as well as the general fame and notoriety he had achieved by that time (1967). In particular, “A Day in the Life” (1967) and “Revolution 9” (1968) were influenced by Stockhausen’s electronic music.

Gesang der Junglinge (“Song of the Youths”)

Karlheinz Stockhausen returned from Paris to Cologne to work in the new electronic sound studio. Beyond his initial studies, his first composition, in 1956, was Gesang der Junglinge, where he used tape recorders to carefully and seamlessly integrate electronic sounds with the human voice by matching voice resonances with pitch and creating sounds of phonemes electronically. The music is originally in five-channel sound to develop the concept of spatialization and successfully brought together the two opposing worlds of the purely electronically generated German elektronische Musik and the French musique concrète.

The concept of this music is “harmonizing sung tones with electronically generated tones.” More specifically, as noted by Karlheinz Stockhausen, “at certain points in the composition, the sung tones are understood as words; at other points, they have only the value of sounds. Between these extremes are reached different levels of word-related clarity.”

There are three basic types of electronic sounds in the music:

1. electronically generated sine tones,
2. electronically generated pulses (clicks),
3. filtered white noise

The recorded voice of a boy soprano (by 12-year-old Josef Protschka) accompanies with all
three types above:

1. vowels are harmonic spectra, which may be conceived as based on sine tones;
2. fricatives and sibilants are like filtered noises;
3. plosives resemble impulses

The text of Gesang der Jünglinge is from a Biblical story in The Book of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzar throws Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a fiery furnace but miraculously they are unharmed and begin to sing praises to God. The idea of composition is to make a mass for electronic sounds and voices.

Hymnen (“national anthems”)

Karlheinz Stockhausen also developed concepts of spatialization in Hymnen (1966–67), which is a 4-channel electronic and concrete work, with optional live performers. The substance of the work consists of recordings of national anthems from around the world. There are four movements, or “regions”, with a combined duration of two hours. The composition exists in three versions:

1. electronic and concrete music alone (region 1+2, region 3+4)
2. electronic and concrete music with soloists
3. the Third Region (only) with orchestra (composed in 1969). This version of the Third Region can be performed by itself, or together with either the first or second version of the other three regions

Each region uses certain anthems as centres:

• Region I (dedicated to Pierre Boulez) has two: “The Internationale” and “La Marseillaise”
• Region II (dedicated to Henri Pousseur) has four:
  1. the German anthem,
  2. a group of African anthems,
  3. the opening of the Russian anthem, and
  4. a “subjective centre”, consisting of the recording of a moment during the studio work, “in which the present, the past and the pluperfect become simultaneous” (Stockhausen 1971, 96).
• Region III (dedicated to John Cage) has three:
  1. the continuation of the Russian anthem (the only one made entirely from electronic sounds),
  2. the American anthem, and
  3. the Spanish anthem.
• Region IV (dedicated to Luciano Berio) has just one, but it is a “double centre”: the Swiss anthem, whose final chord turns into an imaginary anthem of the utopian realm of “Hymunion in Harmondie under Pluramon” (Stockhausen 1971, 97).

References

• intelligentarts
• theguardian
• medien art net
• wikipedia
• Aldgate, Anthony, James Chapman, and Arthur Marwick. 2000. Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key
  Texts of Media and Culture. London and New York: I. B. Taurus & Co. Ltd. ISBN 1-86064-383-3.
• Guy, Alun, and Iwan Llewelyn-Jones. 2004. Students Guide to Gcse Music for the Wjec Specification:
  English Language. London: Rhinegold Publishing. ISBN 1-904226-59-0