CDOTD 5/16/2024

 Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra (Accord)

Purchased in a Manhattan record store, possibly the midtown Tower Records

I have a lot of unread books around here. I'm trying to buy fewer, though I will indulge myself sometimes. I had been wanting to buy Robin Maconie's book Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen 1950-2007, but I decided I would not order it until I had finished several other books I have around here. Thankfully, I have access to several good libraries, and there was a fresh, barely looked-over copy in the Carnegie Mellon library. 

Karlheinz Stockhausen. There's a lot to unpack there, more than I can in a single blog post. And important and (to use a cliche) towering figure? No question. A self-absorbed lapsed Catholic quasi-mystical cult figure? Perhaps. There's nothing easy about Stockhausen, not the person or the music. 

I will credit him with created two of the truly essential works of electronic music: Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) and Hymnen (1967). The former is one of the reasons Karlheinz is depicted on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, next to W.C. Fields. 

Gesang is a topic of discussion every semester in my Electronic and Computer Music course. There are a number of reasons why: how the work figures in electronic music history, its nature as a modernist work, what the possible intentions of the composer might have been. I'm uncertain about this as a trend, but I find it increasingly difficult to solicit any reaction from my students about works such as this. I mean, do you love it, or curse my name for making you listen to it? I've been teaching at CMU for 19 years now, and I'd say I hit a plateau of being able to solicit responses from students ten years ago, maybe more. I'm thinking specifically of the composition students I see, who are largely the most opinionated on these things (good!). I loved that I could outrage some students by dropping mention of Stockhausen's Helikopter Streichquartett. "How could he do that?" "What's the point of this?" "Isn't this just a reflection of his massive ego?" I enjoy impassioned responses, even negative ones, if they're informed. These days? No passion at all. Meh.

(The Helikopter Streichquartet is a setting for a string quartet, each player in their own helicopter, connected aurally and visually. The sound is projected down to the audience. There are recordings available, and a documentary about the first staging of the work.)

Mantra is a work from 1970. Stockhausen is a mature, established (though still young) and even relatively famous artist at this time. It's a setting for two pianists, each playing occasional auxiliary percussion, voice, and shortwave radio, with two audio processing players on ring modulations. I think you need a special custom set of crotales, an octave lower than usual, to perform this work.

I associate the sound of the ring mod with Stockhausen, due to works such as this is and his ring modulated orchestral piece Mixtur. When I bought a Theremin, I knew I wanted to run it through a ring mod.

I've spent a little time with the score. Even before I did, I had a sense of the construction of this piece. It's very classical in that sense. The foundation of the piece, the formula as he puts it, is a slow, eight-measure melody that at its core is a twelve-tone row. It's not a strict row though, there are repetitions and embellishments. Some of the measures are lengths of rest. There are cross references of material between the treble and bass clefs. Each individual element of the formula is then expanded through the course of the work. For example, the first note in the treble clef is played four times, and "repetition" becomes the theme of the first expansion of the source materials. Like I wrote, very classical. 

Despite all this classicism, there are moments of surprising beauty. The most obvious example is measure 132 (the CD is tracked with the structural points of the composition) the sound processors are instructed to turn the ring modulations down to a very low Hertz, 7Hz +/-, as slow chords are played. The modulation creates a beautiful, slow tremolo effect. I'd describe it as startling, the first time you hear the piece.

If the general description of the composition sounds academic and even, to use the word again,  classical...the piece has a very clear climax. The penultimate structural section is a driving succession of notes, punctuated by cluster chords. It's not all math sounds. The ending includes a flourish on the crotales, and a slower restatement of the formula. 

The aforementioned Robin Maconie referred to this work as a "masterpiece". My friend, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, said....I forget. I think he found it uninteresting, preferring the Stockhausen Intuitive Music pieces. I strongly hesitate to use the same word, I think i come down closer to the former's opinion.