Stimmung
Encyclopedia
Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, is a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen
, written in 1968 and commissioned by the City of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale Köln
. Its average length is seventy-four minutes, and it bears the work number 24 in the composer's catalog. It is at the same time a serial
and a tonal
composition (Toop 2005, 39; Stuppner 1974).
word "Stimmung" has several meanings, including "tuning
" and "mood
". The word is the noun formed from the verb "stimmen", which means "to harmonize, to be correct", and related to "Stimme" (voice). The primary sense of the title "implies not only the outward tuning of voices or instruments, but also the inward tuning of one's soul" (Hillier 2007, 4).
. Six singers amplified
by six microphone
s tune to a low B1 drone
, inaudible to the audience, and expand upwards through overtone singing
, with that low B's harmonic
s 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 (B2, F2, B3, D3, A↓3, and C4) becoming in turn fundamentals
for overtone singing. It is composed using what the composer calls moment form, and consists of 51 sections (called "moments"). It is "the first major Western composition to be based entirely on the production of vocal harmonics" (Rose and Ireland 1986) or, alternatively, the first "to use overtones as a primary element" (Rose and Emmerson 1979, 20). An additional innovation is "the unique kind of rhythmic polyphony which arises from the gradual transformation/assimilation of rhythmic models" (Toop 2005, 48).
According to the 1986 Hyperion Singcircle liner notes:
The order of the rhythmic models and the distribution of the poems and "magic names" are decided by the performers, but the sequence of pitches in the 51 moments is fixed (Stuppner 1974; Rose and Emmerson 1979; Rigoni 1992). Though the 1968 "Paris version" used by the Collegium Vocale Köln
at the world première has been published (as No. 24½ in Stockhausen's catalog), the 1977 "Singcircle version" has been well documented in Rose and Emmerson 1979, and both versions have been performed throughout the world. Singcircle's performance at the 2005 City of London Festival was recorded and broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now on 20 August 2005. In 2003, Paul Hillier
made a "Copenhagen version" for the Theatre of Voices
, which he directs. This version, too, has been performed on tour, and a recording has been released on CD. Other groups that have performed Stimmung include the London Sinfonietta Voices
, Ensemble Belcanto, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, the Aquarius Consort, and the Dunedin Consort, according to the performance database of Universal Edition.
Some writers have seen the possible influence of Stockhausen's student La Monte Young
and his mid-1960s drone music
with The Theater of Eternal Music:
, on the other hand, traces Stimmungs one-note idea back to Henry Purcell
's Fantasy upon One Note, and its time-scale to Wagner's
Götterdämmerung
, while at the same time observing that this time-scale "indicates the need of a musical equivalent to the parking meter" (Stravinsky and Craft 1969, 94–95).
Stimmung has been cited as an important influence on the French spectralists
, such as Tristan Murail
and Gérard Grisey
(Rigoni 1992, 83).
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 and commissioned by the City of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale Köln
Collegium Vocale Köln
Collegium Vocale Köln is a German vocal ensemble, founded in 1966 as a quintet when its members were still students at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne. It is directed by Wolfgang Fromme, who also sings tenor in the ensemble...
. Its average length is seventy-four minutes, and it bears the work number 24 in the composer's catalog. It is at the same time a serial
Serialism
In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...
and a tonal
Tonality
Tonality is a system of music in which specific hierarchical pitch relationships are based on a key "center", or tonic. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840...
composition (Toop 2005, 39; Stuppner 1974).
Title
The GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
word "Stimmung" has several meanings, including "tuning
Musical tuning
In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:* Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice.* Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases.-Tuning practice:...
" and "mood
Mood (psychology)
A mood is a relatively long lasting emotional state. Moods differ from emotions in that they are less specific, less intense, and less likely to be triggered by a particular stimulus or event....
". The word is the noun formed from the verb "stimmen", which means "to harmonize, to be correct", and related to "Stimme" (voice). The primary sense of the title "implies not only the outward tuning of voices or instruments, but also the inward tuning of one's soul" (Hillier 2007, 4).
Overview
Stimmung is in just intonationJust intonation
In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...
. Six singers amplified
Amplifier
Generally, an amplifier or simply amp, is a device for increasing the power of a signal.In popular use, the term usually describes an electronic amplifier, in which the input "signal" is usually a voltage or a current. In audio applications, amplifiers drive the loudspeakers used in PA systems to...
by six microphone
Microphone
A microphone is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1877, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter...
s tune to a low B1 drone
Drone (music)
In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout most or all of a piece. The word drone is also used to refer to any part of a musical instrument that is just used to produce such an effect.-A musical effect:A drone...
, inaudible to the audience, and expand upwards through overtone singing
Overtone singing
Overtone singing, also known as overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.The partials of a sound wave made by the human voice can be...
, with that low B's harmonic
Harmonic
A harmonic of a wave is a component frequency of the signal that is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, i.e. if the fundamental frequency is f, the harmonics have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, . . . etc. The harmonics have the property that they are all periodic at the fundamental...
s 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 (B2, F2, B3, D3, A↓3, and C4) becoming in turn fundamentals
Fundamental frequency
The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated f0, is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In terms of a superposition of sinusoids The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated f0, is defined as the...
for overtone singing. It is composed using what the composer calls moment form, and consists of 51 sections (called "moments"). It is "the first major Western composition to be based entirely on the production of vocal harmonics" (Rose and Ireland 1986) or, alternatively, the first "to use overtones as a primary element" (Rose and Emmerson 1979, 20). An additional innovation is "the unique kind of rhythmic polyphony which arises from the gradual transformation/assimilation of rhythmic models" (Toop 2005, 48).
According to the 1986 Hyperion Singcircle liner notes:
- In each section a new overtone melody or 'model' is introduced and repeated several times. Each female voice leads a new section eight times, and each male voice, nine times. Some of the other singers gradually have to transform their own material until they have come into 'identity' with the lead singer of the section . . . by adopting the same . . . tempo, rhythm and dynamics. When the lead singer feels that 'identity' has been reached, he or she makes a gesture to another singer who leads the next section. Each model is a set of rhythmic phonetic patterns, often with actual words used as their basis, such as 'Hallelujah' or 'Saturday'.
- In 29 of the sections, 'magic names' are called out. These are the names of gods and goddesses from many cultures—Aztec, aboriginal and Ancient Greek, for instance—and have to be incorporated into the character of the model. The erotic and intimate love-poems that are recited were written by Stockhausen 'during amorous days' in 1967. (Rose and Ireland 1986)
The order of the rhythmic models and the distribution of the poems and "magic names" are decided by the performers, but the sequence of pitches in the 51 moments is fixed (Stuppner 1974; Rose and Emmerson 1979; Rigoni 1992). Though the 1968 "Paris version" used by the Collegium Vocale Köln
Collegium Vocale Köln
Collegium Vocale Köln is a German vocal ensemble, founded in 1966 as a quintet when its members were still students at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne. It is directed by Wolfgang Fromme, who also sings tenor in the ensemble...
at the world première has been published (as No. 24½ in Stockhausen's catalog), the 1977 "Singcircle version" has been well documented in Rose and Emmerson 1979, and both versions have been performed throughout the world. Singcircle's performance at the 2005 City of London Festival was recorded and broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now on 20 August 2005. In 2003, Paul Hillier
Paul Hillier
Paul Douglas Hillier is a conductor, music director and baritone. He specializes in early music and contemporary art music, especially that by composers Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music, beginning his professional career while a...
made a "Copenhagen version" for the Theatre of Voices
Theatre of Voices
Theatre of Voices is a vocal ensemble founded by baritone Paul Hillier in 1992; it focuses on early music and new music.The ensemble was formed by Paul Hillier while he was teaching at the University of California, Davis, as an avenue to performing more contemporary music while his other group, the...
, which he directs. This version, too, has been performed on tour, and a recording has been released on CD. Other groups that have performed Stimmung include the London Sinfonietta Voices
London Sinfonietta
The London Sinfonietta is an English chamber orchestra founded in 1968 and based in London. The ensemble specialises in contemporary music and works across a wide range of genres, performing modern classics alongside world premieres, and includes music by electronica artists as well as folk and...
, Ensemble Belcanto, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, the Aquarius Consort, and the Dunedin Consort, according to the performance database of Universal Edition.
Influences and reception
Stockhausen himself attributes a month spent walking among ruins in Mexico as his primary influence, Stimmung recreating that 'magic' space. On the other hand, he also describes the snow on frozen Long Island Sound in February and March 1968 (when he was composing Stimmung in Madison, Connecticut), as "the only landscape I really saw during the composition of the piece" (Cott 1974, 163). In a letter to Gregory Rose written on 24 July 1982 (printed in the liner notes to Hyperion CDA66115), he describes how, in the small house his wife Mary had rented it was only possible for him to work at night because their two small children needed quiet during the day. He could not sing aloud, as he had done initially, but began to hum quietly, listening to the overtone melodies. Mary reports that Stockhausen first discovered the technique when listening to their small son Simon producing multiple tones while humming in his crib after falling asleep. In this way, Stockhausen became "the first Western composer to use this technique of singing again—in the Middle Ages it had been practiced by women and children in churches, but was later entirely supplanted by masculine Gregorian music" (Bauermeister 2011, 217–18).Some writers have seen the possible influence of Stockhausen's student La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
and his mid-1960s drone music
Drone music
Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics...
with The Theater of Eternal Music:
[Young's] influence on already established composers who were themselves his student mentors is not, however, confined to Cage. Karlheinz Stockhausen's exploration of the harmonic series, notably in Stimmung (1968), has often been linked to Young's example. [...] The German composer seems to have visited Young and Zazeela when in New York, in 1964 or 1965, and listened to a rehearsal of The Theatre of Eternal Music. He requested tapes of the group's performances which, perhaps surprisingly, Young gave him. Stockhausen's own musicians visited Young and Zazeela's Dream House installation in Antwerp in 1969. (Potter 2002, 89)
I didn't hear any of Feldman's music until 1962, when I heard a piece of Stockhausen's called Refrain. I only realized later that this was Stockhausen's “Feldman piece” just as Stimmung was his “LaMonte Young piece”. (Reich 2002, 202)However, another precedent for Stimmung is an unfinished work by Stockhausen himself, begun in 1960 and titled Monophonie, which was to have consisted of the single note E (Toop 2005, 39). Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
, on the other hand, traces Stimmungs one-note idea back to Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...
's Fantasy upon One Note, and its time-scale to Wagner's
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
Götterdämmerung
Götterdämmerung
is the last in Richard Wagner's cycle of four operas titled Der Ring des Nibelungen...
, while at the same time observing that this time-scale "indicates the need of a musical equivalent to the parking meter" (Stravinsky and Craft 1969, 94–95).
Stimmung has been cited as an important influence on the French spectralists
Spectral music
Spectral music is a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer-based sound spectrum analysis using tools like DFT, FFT, and spectrograms...
, such as Tristan Murail
Tristan Murail
Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...
and Gérard Grisey
Gérard Grisey
Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...
(Rigoni 1992, 83).
Discography
- Stockhausen: Stimmung (Paris Version). Collegium Vocale KölnCollegium Vocale KölnCollegium Vocale Köln is a German vocal ensemble, founded in 1966 as a quintet when its members were still students at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne. It is directed by Wolfgang Fromme, who also sings tenor in the ensemble...
: Dagmar Apel, Gaby Rodens, Helga Albrecht, Wolfgang Fromme, Georg Steinhoff, Hans-Alderich Billig (recorded 1969). Deutsche Grammophon 2543 003 (LP), and in Avant Garde Vol. 3 DG 2720 025(6LP boxed set). - Stockhausen: Stimmung (Paris Version). Collegium Vocale Köln: Dagmar von Biel, Gaby Ortmann-Rodens, Helga Hamm-Albrecht, Wolfgang Fromme, Helmut Clemens, Hans-Alderich Billig (recorded 1982). In Deutscher Musikrat: Zeitgenössische Musik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 7. Harmonia Mundi DMR 1019-21 (3LP boxed set).
- The above two recordings together have been rereleased on CD in the Stockhausen Complete Edition CD 12 A-B (2 CDs).
- Stockhausen: Stimmung (Singcircle Version). Singcircle, directed by Gregory Rose (recorded 1983). Hyperion CDA66115.
- Stockhausen: Stimmung (Copenhagen Version). Theatre of VoicesTheatre of VoicesTheatre of Voices is a vocal ensemble founded by baritone Paul Hillier in 1992; it focuses on early music and new music.The ensemble was formed by Paul Hillier while he was teaching at the University of California, Davis, as an avenue to performing more contemporary music while his other group, the...
: Else Torp, Louise Skovbæch, Clara Sanabras, Wolodymyr Smishkewych, Kasper Eliassen, Andrew Hendricks; Ian Dearden, sound diffusion; directed by Paul HillierPaul HillierPaul Douglas Hillier is a conductor, music director and baritone. He specializes in early music and contemporary art music, especially that by composers Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music, beginning his professional career while a...
(recorded 2006). Harmonia Mundi CD HMU 807408.
Sources
- Adlington, Robert. 2009. "Tuning in and Dropping out: The Disturbance of the Dutch Premiere of Stockhausen's Stimmung". Music and Letters 90, no. 1:94–112.
- Bauermeister, Mary. 2011. Ich hänge im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen. Munich: Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann. ISBN 978-3-570-58024-0.
- Cott, Jonathan. 1973. Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Frisius, Rudolf. 2008. Karlheinz Stockhausen II: Die Werke 1950–1977; Gespräch mit Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Es geht aufwärts". Mainz, London, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Toronto: Schott Musik International. ISBN 9783795702496
- Hillier, Paul. 2007. Liner notes to Harmonia Mundi CD HMU 807408.
- Potter, Keith. 2002. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, first paperback edition with minor revisions. Music in the Twentieth Century 11. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521015011 (Previous clothbound edition 2000, ISBN 052148250X)
- Reich, Steve. 2002. Writings on Music, 1965-2000, edited by Paul Hillier. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195111710 (cloth), ISBN 0195151151 (pbk)
- Rigoni, Michel. 1992. "Karlheinz Stockhausen: Stimmung: Six chanteurs en quête d’harmonie”. Analyse Musicale 4e trimestre:75–83.
- Rose, Gregory, and Simon Emmerson. 1979. "Stockhausen 1: Stimmung". Contact, no. 20 (Autumn): 20–25.
- Rose, Gregory, and Helen Ireland. 1986. Liner notes to Hyperion CDA66115.
- Smalley, Roger. 1969. "Reports: Paris". The Musical Times 110, no. 1512 (February): 184.
- Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 2009. Kompositorische Grundlagen Neuer Musik: Sechs Seminare für die Darmstädter Ferienkurse 1970, edited by Imke Misch. Kürten: Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik. ISBN 978-3-00-027313-1
- Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1969. Retrospectives and Conclusions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Stuppner, Hubert. 1974. "Serialità e misticismo in Stimmung di K. Stockhausen". (Nuova) Rivista Musicale Italiana 8, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar.): 83-98.
- Toop, Richard. 2005. "Stimmung". In Richard Toop, Six Lectures from the Stockhausen Courses Kürten 2002, 39–71. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag. ISBN 3-00-016-185-6
External links
- Braddell, Rory. STIMMUNG for 6 vocalists (1968)
- Sandow, Greg. 2007. The Magic of Stockhausen's 'Stimmung'". Wall Street Journal (20 September).
- Audio extract of performance at British Library, 2007