New Vocal Soloists of Stuttgart will perform Karlheinz Stockhausen's exuberant Stimmung at the Louth Contemporary Music Society's 10th Annual Festival this June.
Known as the "father of electric music", Stockhausen is one of the most lauded and controversial composers for the 20th and 21st centuries.
Below, renowned critic Paul Griffiths introduces a musical masterwork of the modern age.
Fifty years have gone by. More. Karlheinz Stockhausen had come over to London with his chosen musicians for four concerts. He was not such a rare visitor in those days. The Beatles, putting him on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, had made him popular. Well, not exactly popular, but guaranteed, vouched for. Many of us who were of student age knew about him anyway. He was the grand master of electronic music when that was still new. Like a lot of us, he had taken the road east. His music was hot.
The concerts were a mixed bag, but one shines still in the memory: the night we saw and heard Stimmung. Stockhausen gave a talk beforehand and invited questions. Someone asked him about the world-soul, but that was off his radar. He was building his own mythology at the time, and it came out of the combat between angels over the future of the universe, as described in The Urantia Book, and his own growing sense of mission as messenger.
In the concert hall we found six people, dressed in white and sitting on cushions on the floor, in a circle, looking in to the middle. A cosmic hum was playing from a tape: stationary overtones of a deep, deep B-flat. The six performers began to tune their voices to these overtones. "Stimmung", in German, means "tuning", but it can also have the sense of "feeling" or "atmosphere", as in the Stimmung of a room or of a group of people. There was plenty of that sort of Stimmung here from the get-go. We, too, were sitting on the floor, in circles of silent vibration around the performers. We were being led to tune ourselves in to this universal harmony.
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Of course, we knew something of what to expect, especially if we had read the programme note. The music would go on for an hour and a quarter. It would glide and shift within the wide space of the overtones. The singers' ululation on specified vowel sounds would open up, from within the cavities of their mouths, overtones on the overtones. And this abstract vocalization would be altered now and then by the articulation of "magic names" and of gently erotic poems by the composer. For Stimmung is a love song as well as a ritual, and a work of as much joy and humour as otherworldliness. For the sound, though, there had been no preparation. In that important respect, we knew nothing of what to expect, and the surprise, the blissful surprise, must have helped seal the event in the memory.
The performers on that occasion were the group from Cologne Radio for whom Stockhausen had composed the piece. Now the prime outfit is a sextet from the radio station in Stuttgart. They will be performing Stimmung during the midsummer festival of the Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, equally accessible from Dublin and Belfast. Will I go? There are some things you cannot or should not revisit. But you have to be there once.
New Vocal Soloists of Stuttgart will perform Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung at the Louth Contemporary Music Society's 10th Annual Festival, at St. Nicholas Church of Ireland, Dundalk on June 15th - find out more here.
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