Kurzwellen - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Kurzwellen for six players with shortwave

Shortwave

Shortwave radio refers to the upper MF and all of the HF portion of the radio spectrum, between 1,800–30,000 kHz. Shortwave radio received its name because the wavelengths in this band are shorter than 200 m which marked the original upper limit of the medium frequency band first used...

receivers and live electronics, is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

, written in 1968. It is Number 25 in the catalog of the composer’s works.

Conception

Kurzwellen is one of a series of works dating from the 1960s which Stockhausen designated as "process

Process music

Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed. Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process...

" compositions. These works in effect separate the "form" from the "content" by presenting the performers with a series of transformation signs which are to be applied to material that may vary considerably from one performance to the next. In Kurzwellen and three subsequent works (Spiral

Spiral (Stockhausen)

Spiral , for a soloist with a shortwave receiver, is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1968. It is Number 27 in the catalogue of the composer’s works.-Conception:...

for a soloist, Pole

Pole (Stockhausen)

Pole , for two performers with shortwave receivers and a sound projectionist, is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1970. It is Number 30 in the catalogue of the composer's works.-Conception:...

for two, and Expo for three), this material is to be drawn spontaneously during the performance from short-wave radio broadcasts (Kohl 1981, 192–93). While this separate treatment of the genetic rules for development had existed in Stockhausen's earlier compositions, the emphasis on the process of transformation and less specificity of what is to be transformed is taken further than ever before in Kurzwellen (Stockhausen 1989, 114). The overall formal process is therefore fixed, whereas the sound materials are extremely variable (Frisius 2008, 224). The processes, indicated primarily by plus, minus, and equal signs, constitute the composition and, despite the unpredictability of the materials, these processes can be heard from one performance to another as being "the same" (Kohl 2010, 137). While the use of radios in concert works dates back at least to 1942 with John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

's Credo in Us, and Stockhausen may well have gotten the idea of using radios from Cage, their approaches could not have been more different. For Cage, the type of radio is a matter of indifference, since their purpose is merely to fill in prescribed time units with any sort of sound at all. Stockhausen, on the other hand, prescribed short-wave receivers because of their capability of bringing in broadcasts from far away, and for the rich variety of available sounds. These sounds are also not used indiscriminately: the performers are to search for and select only materials suitable for improvisational transformations (Kohl 2010, 135–37).

History

Kurzwellen was initially sketched during a tour of Czechoslovakia made by Stockhausen’s ensemble in late March and early April 1968, and was completed soon afterward (Kohl 1981, 199–200). The premiere took place on 5 May 1968 in the television studios of Radio Bremen

Radio Bremen

Radio Bremen , Germany's smallest public radio and television broadcaster, is the legally mandated broadcaster for the city-state of Bremen...

, as part of the Pro Musica Nova festival, and is dedicated to Hugo Wolfram Schmidt, the initiator of the Cologne Courses for New Music. The performers at the premiere were Aloys Kontarsky

Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky

Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky were German duo-pianist brothers who were associated with a number of important world premieres of contemporary works. They had an international reputation for performing modern music for two pianists, although they also performed the standard repertoire and they...

, piano, Alfred Alings and Rolf Gehlhaar

Rolf Gehlhaar

Rolf Gehlhaar in Breslau , is an American composer.Gehlhaar is the son of a German rocket scientist, who emigrated to the United States in 1953 to work at a rocket-development research centre in New Mexico...

, tamtam, Johannes Fritsch

Johannes Fritsch

Johannes G. Fritsch was a German composer.At the age of seven, Fritsch found a violin in the attic of his uncle's house in Bensheim-Auerbach, Germany, and began lessons with a village music teacher named Knapp...

, viola, Harald Bojé, electronium, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, filters and potentiometers (Stockhausen 1971a, 114, 116).

Performance practice

The composer explained that in pieces like this, "the first step is always that of imitating something and the next step is that of transforming what you're able to imitate" (Cott 1973, 33). Each performer plays a series of events separated by pauses. An event may be played either with the radio or with an instrument, and it is also possible for a player to accompany an event on an instrument with the radio or vice-versa, or to blend both together. Each event has a distinct duration defined by its subdivision into segments with a characteristic rhythm (Rigoni 1998, 235).

Each plus, minus, or equal sign indicates that, upon repetition of an event, the performer is to increase, decrease, or maintain the same level in one of four musical dimensions (or "parameters"): overall duration of the event, number of internal subdivisions, dynamic

Dynamics (music)

In music, dynamics normally refers to the volume of a sound or note, but can also refer to every aspect of the execution of a given piece, either stylistic or functional . The term is also applied to the written or printed musical notation used to indicate dynamics...

level, or pitch register/range. It is up to the performer to decide which of these dimensions is to be affected, except that vertically stacked signs must be applied to different parameters. Despite this, a large number of plus signs (for example) will result in successive events becoming longer, more finely subdivided, louder, and either higher or wider in range; a large number of minus signs will produce the reverse effect (Kohl 2010, 137).

Opus 1970

For the Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...

bicentennial in 1970, Stockhausen created a version of Kurzwellen that supposed a special case in which all radio stations just happened to be broadcasting material by Beethoven. This version is known variously as Kurzwellen mit Beethoven, Kurzwellen mit Beethoven-Musik, Stockhoven-Beethausen, and Opus 1970 (Hopp 1998, 263). In order to produce this situation, Stockhausen replaced the radios with four different tape collages of excerpts from Beethoven compositions interspersed with readings (by Stockhausen) from the Heiligenstadt Testament

Heiligenstadt Testament

The Heiligenstadt Testament is a letter written by Ludwig van Beethoven to his brothers Carl and Johann at Heiligenstadt on 6 October 1802....

, subjected to a variety of electronic transformations to simulate the effect of short-wave transmissions. These tapes could be "tuned in and out" by the performers, just like radio transmissions (Maconie 2005, 304–305).

Structure

Everything in Kurzwellen is governed by permutations of four-member sets. For example, the whole of the piece is divided into four large sections with increasing numbers of events, proportioned as 4:5:7:10.2 (Kohl 1981, 204). Within each of these progressively larger segments, the numbers of planned ensembles (synchronous or alternating duos, trios, and quartets) also increases: 5:6:7:14 (Hopp 1998, 87).

Discography