Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge

Stockhausen became increasingly fascinated during the late 50s with the spatial projection of medication in the performance space. It can be said that Stockhausens Gesang der Jnglinge marked the beginning of the dying of classic musique concrete. For Kontakte in 1958, use four-track tape, he devised a cagy way make the sound of his tape music spin 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 times a second.Stockhausen also apply a specialized tape recorder called the Springer. Originally developed to leng wherefore or shorten radio broadcasts, it used a rotating matrix of four to six-spot playback heads that spun in the opposite direction as the tape transport. As the tape passed the rotating playback array, one of the playback heads was in contact with it at all times. The output was equal to the tally of the rotating heads.It was characteristic of him that he could not be satisfied with Boulezs and Berios derivation of music from verbal sounds and structure there must be some general principle, which a single work would be enough to demonstrate completely some system which a work could bring into being. Such a system he found in the organization of degrees of comprehensibility, across a range from the plainness of speech to the total incomprehensibility of wordless music.This would require electronic means. He needed to cause 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 through 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 ar distinguished, whoever is speaking, by characteristic formants (emphasized bands of frequencies), it seemed it ought to be possible to ca-ca synthetic vowels out of electronic sounds, so that synthesized music could begin to function as phraseology. Working from the other end, the whole repertory of tape transformations was available to transfer spoken or birdcall material and so move it towards pure, meaningless sound.Around the time that Stockhausen was formulating these criteria for electronic music, the nature of his work began to change dramatically. After completing the 2 electronic Studien, he returned to instrumental writing for about a year, completing several atonal works for piano and woodwinds, as well as the pushy 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 compete 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 nigh 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 operating in vocal sounds, and the recorded voice, that of a boy treble, is carried into the electronic stream by studio alteration and alter superimpositions creating virtual choruses, reverberations to suggest great distance, scramblings of speech and parts of words, changes of speed and direction.Nothing on either side, therefore, is quite foreign to the other, and Stockhausen 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 composition Gesang der Jnglinge thus attempts to integrate its biblicalGerman text with all the other materials in the composition (Morgan 442). Even so, the choice of this particular prayer cannot have been uninfluenced by what Stockhausen could have envisioned would be the imagery of the piece, with the boys singing surrounded 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 Paris and Cologne studios. It was a work of artistic dtente, a conscious break from the 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 anything 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 consort with equivalent tones and timbres produced electronically. He wanted to bring these two different sources of sound together into a single, fluid musical element, interlaced and dissolved into one another(prenominal) earlier than contrasted, as had been the tendency of most musique concrete. Stockhausen created some stir with works of very new spirit and imaginative form (Collaer 395).Stockhausen practiced his newly create principles of electronic music composition, setting forth a plan that required the modification of the speed, length, loudness, softness, density and compositeity, the width and narrowness of pitch intervals and differentiations of timbre in an direct 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 anterior 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 resolvent was an astonishingly beautiful and haunting work of sweeping, moving 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 values. 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 dressing on his part. He wanted the sung parts to closely match the electronically produced tones of the piece. His composition notes fr om the time explain how he made this happen fifty-two pieces of paper 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 subsequent 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 aesthetically between the Paris and Cologne schools of thought. The maturity of Stockhausens approach to composing the work, blending acoustic and electronic sounds as equivocal raw materials, signified a maturing of the medium.The work successfully cast off the cloak of novelty and audio experiments that had preoccupie d so many tape compositions until that time. Stockhausens concept 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 except nominally present, no formal repetition of motifs existed in the work, and its theme was the continuous evolution of sound shapes and dynamics rather than a pattern of developing 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 exuberance is greatly enhanced by antiphonal effects. Stockhausen himself was to apply in many later works the discoveries he had made here in the treatment of languag e and of space, of which the latter was already claiming his attention in Gruppen for three orchestras. But perhaps the deepest lesson of Gesang der Jnglinge was that music of all kinds, whether innate(p)ly or electronically produced, is made of sounds rather than notes, and that the first task of the composer is to listen. More than ever before, 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 development of the studio, for against all the teachings of the establishment the piece was structured around recordings of a boys voice, do by and integrated with electronic sounds. In Stockhausen Gesang der Jnglinge electronic sounds take on a disturbing otherness when set in relief by the humanity of a boys voice, racked at times out of intelligibility, but never out o f recognition, by the dissection of its speech elements.Effects such as the distant murmur of multitudinous equal 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 crucial aspect of electronic composition and has helped to combat the faintly ridiculous sensation with which an audience concentrates on sounds emanating from a single pseudo-instrument. Stockhausens fanatical devotion to this art is sustained by a vision of public music rooms (spherical ideally) giving continuous performances of spatial mu sic. 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 actor in the Work A Study in Performance Practice. Oxford University Press, 1997.Collaer, Paul and Abeles, Sally. A History of Modern Music. World Publishing, 1961.Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth-Century Music A History of musical Style in Modern Europe and America. New York. Publication, 1991.Stockhausen Actualia, Die Reihe, 1 (1955, English edn. 1958), 45-51, (see also his Music and Speech ).