niversity

of

colorado

boulder

Wednesday, 29 September

Friday, 1 October

Sunday, 3 October

Thursday, 30 September

Colloquium, 4:00 p.m.black box theater,

atlas building

with generous support from

President’s Fund for the Humanities

@

, The Atlas Institute

stockhausen

Concert, 7:30 p.m.grusin music hall,

imig music building

Concert, 7:30 p.m.black box theater,

atlas building

Concert, 4:00 p.m.black box theater,

atlas building

Sound Demonstration 2:00 p.m.

black box theater,atlas building

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The James L. D. andRebecca Roser

Visiting Artist Fund

Welcome from the Dean

Without the support of the following organizations and individuals, this festival would not have been successful. Therefore, our deepestthanks & gratitude go to:

For many years after my first personal encounter with Stockhausen in 2001, I dreamed of organizing a festival of his music in my home country. Stockhausen’s works – 375 in number at the time of his passing – constitute one of the largest, most innovative, and arguably greatest repertoires of music from the recent past. But what was immediately apparent to me nine years ago was the way that Stockhausen’s creations – for they often go far beyond the notion of “music” alone – often suggest fruitful ways for musicians, artists, scholars and technicians to come together and collaborate in concert for a common goal. This festival is not just about forging musical, artistic and social bonds; the sheer crazyiness, daring, eclecticism and exquisite beauty of his music are perfectly matched to the unique environment of Boulder, Colorado. This is music that belongs here.

Stockhausen’s works require an immense amount of preparation, technical equipment, rehearsal and committment from musicians. In today’s financial climate, it is next to impossible to organize a festival that would meet Stockhausen’s high standards in the United States. Fortunately, the University of Colorado and many generous individuals have provided a great deal of support for this project. Just as important, the College of Music has had the foresight over the years to invest in many pieces of high-quality infrastructure that have contributed to this undertaking. And, our extremely talented faculty and students are a uniquely qualified resource, never backing down from a challenge that may at first seem impossible to achieve.

The festival benefits our community far beyond the concerts and lectures you will hear. Our four invited guests, who are all deeply invested in Stockhausen’s music, come to us from Seattle, Atlanta, Pforzheim, and Berlin. They will be working alongside our students, staff, and faculty, sharing their knowledge and expertise for an entire week.

Even if you do not enjoy all the performances you experience, I hope that you will at least be able to marvel at the possibilities that Stockhausen’s music suggest, and the committment we have made to try to bring this unusual and challenging artwork to you. As Karlheinz used to say: Have a good trip!

Paul Miller

Message from the Artistic DirectorThe College of Music at the University of Colorado is proud to host the Stockhausen 2010 Festival. The programs we have assembled showcase some of the finest aspects of our College, ranging from talented faculty and student performers, to highly skilled sound engineers, to advanced scholars and researchers. But most of all, bringing Stockhausen’s music to our College demonstrates our strong committment to exploring new, challenging and unfamiliar realms of musical creation.

Our connection with Stockhausen dates back to 1958, when the composer gave a lecture here during his first breakneck tour of our country. We are delighted to be able to reconnect with the composer’s legacy by inviting four renowned experts on his music to our College. For an entire week they will perform, coach, lecture and advise us in this unusual musical repertoire. Special thanks are due to the Stockhausen Foundation for helping to sponsor the festival, and to the various funds at the University, without which none of this would have been possible.

We are confident that our festival will spark more of what the College is already known for throughout this country: excellence in performance, scholarship, experimentation, and innovation. Enjoy the show.

Dean Daniel Sher

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The President’s Fund for the Humanities, The James L. D. and Rebecca Roser Visiting Artist Fund, cmap, The Atlas Institute, and the Musicology & Music Theory Colloquium Fund.

Glenn Arndt (engineering & logistics), Gayle Boethling (scheduling & logistics), Dan Boord (Film Studies), John Drumheller (engineering & housing), Laima Haley (publicity), Eric Harbeson (library & research), Kevin Harbison (engineering), Peggy Hinton (logistics), Regina Houck (accounting), Myra Jackson (scheduling & logistics), Professors Jennings, Nguyen, and Silver (performance), Mary Jungerman (housing), Ira Liss (publicity), Kellie Masterson (design & construction), Gary McCrumb (engineering), Paul Miller (artistic director), Ron Mueller (CU opera), John Peterson & Amanda Samuelson (exhibit), Tom Robbins (design & construction), Daniel

Sher (Dean, College of Music), Stephen Slater (scheduling & logistics), Michael Theodore (engineering), and Alex Vittal & Friends (housing).

Special thanks is due to the over fifty undergraduate and graduate studentswho are performing on the three concerts. Their names are listed either in a program book insert, or at the end of the program notes for the concert on which they are performing.

Perhaps no other composer active after the Second World War has been as influential as Karlheinz Stockhausen. Artists and composers as diverse as Helmut Lachenmann, Harrison Birtwistle, Charles Mingus, The Beatles, Frank Zappa, and the Grateful Dead have all acknowledged Stockhausen’s influence on their own music. Miles Davis commented that “I had always written in a circular way, and through Stockhausen I could see that I didn’t want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars,” while Björk asserted that “when Karlheinz harnessed electricity into sound and showed the rest of us, he sparked off a sun that is still burning, and will glow for a long time.”

While many critics acknowledge the importance of Stockhausen’s music before 1970, few have recognized the numerous later works that are also worthy of attention. In making program decisions for our festival, we have sought to remedy this bias. Alongside some early classics, we also present some representative later works that we consider to be among his more important achievements.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on 22 August 1928, in Mödrath near Cologne, Germany. From 1947 – 1951, Stockhausen attended Cologne’s Musikhochschule, where he studied music education, piano, and composition. Subsequently, he studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris. While almost all of Stockhausen’s compositions employ serial techniques, his early works were often described as “point” or “constellation” music, an aesthetic which was probably inspired by Messiaen and the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts. Serialism is a compositional technique in which some continuous perceptual continuum is quantized, and the individual quantized elements are ordered according to a pre-determined row or series. In Kreuzspiel (1951), both pitch and rhythm are determined in this way, demonstrating Stockhausen’s interest in going beyond the earlier technique of twelve-tone music, where only pitch is ordered. Around this time, Stockhausen also wrote Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56), a work that many scholars believe established the viability of electronic music. In Kontakte (1959-60), Stockhausen added spatialization to the perceptual domains he tried to serialize. Spatialization, an integral part of Stockhausen’s craft, denotes the composer’s attempt to compose the movement of sound through and around the performance space.

Instead of determining the events themselves, a serial “number square” determines the degree of transformation from one event to another in Kontakte. This idea of determining the amount of change from one event to the next inspired Stockhausen’s “process compositions,” which involve a score that acts as a blueprint for the performer. The score, sometimes consisting only of plus, minus, or equal signs, describes the transformations the performer is to make to the musical material, allowing for many different “correct” performances of a work. Indeed, the complexity involved in realizing Plus-Minus (1963), the first such process composition, usually prompts the performer to make a more conventionally

notated score using Stockhausen’s “blueprint.” Later process compositions, such as Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen (1968), and Spiral (1968) employ simpler notation, and eventually led Stockhausen to explore “intuitive music.” The earliest example of Stockhausen’s intuitive music, Aus den Sieben Tagen (1968), employs a collection of texts that describes abstract processes without the use of any signs at all.

By the end of the 1960s, Stockhausen’s reputation had grown outside avant-garde circles, and he returned to more conventionally notated scores. In many works of the next decade, such as Mantra (1970), a singable melodic complex governs the work. This complex, or “formula,” may be comprised of a single-, double-, or triple-line melody that also specifies other musical parameters such as pitch, dynamics, duration, timbre, and tempo. Licht (1977 – 2003), Stockhausen’s monumental operatic cycle comprised of seven individual operas each based on a day of the week, is an example of the extreme to which Stockhausen took formula composition; a one-minute “superformula” is expanded to over twenty-nine hours of music. The flexibility of this technique is perhaps best demonstrated in the Helicopter String Quartet (1993) from the Wednesday opera, in which each member of the string quartet performs in a helicopter that completes an individual flight plan near the theater. Live audio and video are transmitted to the audience in the concert hall. Following the completion of Licht, Stockhausen began another ambitious project in 2003. Klang was to be a cycle of twenty-four compositions, one for each hour in the day. Stockhausen noted that Klang represented a return to “moment form,” a technique that he pioneered in the 1960s with compositions such as Momente (1961-64), Mixtur (1964), and Telemusik (1966). Perhaps as a way of responding to the teleological aspect of most earlier music, moment form involves composing episodes that are not necessarily temporally related to one another, and may even sometimes be reordered in a performance. In practice, however, one particular ordering is usually chosen. After completing twenty-one of the pieces of his Klang cycle, Stockhausen died suddenly at his home in December 2007.

Brian Ferneyhough, an important twentieth-century English composer who is still active, doubts that there has been a single composer of the last half of the twentieth century “who, even if for a short time, did not see the world of music differently thanks to the work of Stockhausen.” Even today, Stockhausen’s music continues to be influential, which is perhaps due in part to the theatricality that pervades much of it. Whether it is this theatricality, the innovative soundscapes Stockhausen creates, or some other aspect of his work that endures, we hope you enjoy this unique and exciting festival!

John Peterson

Introduction to the Festival

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internal rhythm of breathing. All of this is to say that the duration of musical elements in these works is a function of the resonating qualities of the instrument, the hall, and the performer’s own body. Stockhausen believed that he was on the path to discovering something new in Natural Durations because the time spans that many different pianists found were often very similar. The first of the pieces we will hear tonight, Natural Durations 10, was dedicated to our pianist, Frank Gutschmidt.

The American composer John Cage (1912 – 1992) grew up in Los Angeles and attended Pomona College in Claremont. After studying with Henry Cowell in New York City, Cage returned to Los Angeles where he worked under Arnold Schoenberg in 1934; it was probably this encounter with the inspiring elder European composer that ultimately drove Cage to pursue a career in composition. Stockhausen invited Cage to give a lecture in Darmstadt in 1958, and the two immediately began a long and fruitful friendship. Unfortunately, Stockhausen’s measured support of the American led to rifts with his European colleagues Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono. Stockhausen felt close to Cage’s music even in his later years, and some of the more lighthearted moments of their friendship are documented in photographs in our exhibition.

Cage’s work Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is a piece for twelve radios. Each radio is controlled by two performers: one operates the tuner and the other regulates the volume. The work is a brilliant demonstration of the way in which specific sounds can be irrelevent within a rhythmic structure. It seems like Cage is trying to tell us that even sounds drawn from the electromagnetic waves around us can be integrated into a musical composition merely by their ordering in time.

Earle Brown (1926 – 2002) began his career as a jazz musician and hoped to pursue studies in aeronautics. He studied engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University and subsequently joined the Army Air Corps. During his studies at the Schillinger School of Music in Boston from 1946 – 50, Brown became interested in the art of Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder. Brown moved to Denver in 1950 with his wife, and taught composition here until 1952. Subsequently, he moved to New York where he collaborated extensively with John Cage.

Because of his contact with Cage and the American pianist David Tudor, Brown soon became known in Europe. During a trip to Europe in 1956 and subsequent lectures at Darmstadt in 1964 – 65, Brown became friends with Stockhausen. Later, Brown held faculty positions at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, SUNY Buffalo, the California Institute of the Arts, and Yale University. He also directed the Fromm Weeks of New Music in Aspen, Colorado from 1985 – 1990. Brown won many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Module I/II is a work in which two groups of instrumentalists each have a repertoire of twenty cells. Each cell can contain

Natürliche Dauern 10 (2005/6)Frank Gutschmidt, piano

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951)Alejandro Gomez, conductor

Karlheinz Stockhausen[10:00]

Concert 1With Pendulum

Wednesday, 29 September, 7:30 p.m.Grusin Hall, Imig Music Building

John Cage[5:30]

Gesang der Jünglinge (1955/6) Stockhausen[13:00]

Natürliche Dauern 15Frank Gutschmidt, piano

Stockhausen[8:30]

Intermission

Module I/II (1967)Paul Miller & Alejandro Gomez, conductors

Earle Brown[~10:00]

Fantasy-Improvisation on“Poem for Chairs, Tables,Benches, Etc.” (1960/2010)

La Monte Young/Elizabeth Comninellis/

Mary Mixter[~5:37.68]

Komet (1994/1999)Stuart Gerber, percussion

Stockhausen[16:00]

The first concert of the Stockhausen Festival presents a variety of Stockhausen’s own music, intertwined with works of American composers who knew him personally. Most of Stockhausen’s American students encountered him at the Darmstadt Courses, which still take place near the city of Frankfurt. We hope that by presenting these works side-by-side, it will be possible to hear relationships among the different composers’ pieces. Also, Stockhausen’s music may be better understood when set into relief with his colleagues.

Natürliche Dauern [Natural Durations] is a cycle of twenty- four pieces for piano which Stockhausen composed in 2005 and 2006. It is the third “hour” of his last work-cycle, called Klang. Many of Stockhausen’s earlier piano pieces from the 1950s were dense, complex and chromatic works. It came as something as a shock – and ultimately, revelation – to many listeners when they heard the first piece in the cycle, which was premiered in New York City on a frigid February day in 2006. Unlike his earlier piano pieces, Natural Durations was restful, medatative, and at peace with itself; almost remeniscent of the lucious harmonies Messiaen used to paint a picture of the sun rising in his monumental cycle of piano pieces Catalogue d’Oiseaux [Catalogue of the Birds].

The idea behind Natural Durations is to delay the entries of new tones until previous sounds die away. In some pieces from the cycle, the durations are determined by the performer’s own

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Meyer-Eppler. Although some critics have taken Stockhausen to task for making the boy’s voice sound “unnatural,” the composer envisioned the technique as a way of liberating sound from the singer’s natural limitations. The text reads:

O all works of the Lord, praise (exult in) the Lord –laud Him and exalt Him above all forever.

O angels of the Lord, praise the Lord –O heavens, praise the Lord.

O all waters that be above the heavens,praise the Lord –O all hosts of the Lord, praise the Lord.

O sun and moon, praise the Lord –O stars of heaven, praise the Lord.

O every shower and dew, praise the Lord –O all winds, praise the Lord.

O fire and heat of summer, praise the Lord –O cold and hard winter, praise the Lord.

O dew and storms and rainfall, praise the Lord –O ice and frost, praise the Lord

O hoar frost and snow, praise the Lord –O nights and days, praise the Lord.

O light and darkness, praise the Lord –O lightning and clouds, praise the Lord.

Stockhausen’s work Komet [Comet] is an adaptation of a section of his Friday opera, called Kinderkrieg [Children’s War]. In this scene, two opposing armies of children fight a horrific battle on stage. One group carries modern weapons, while the other employs more simple weapons such as spears, sticks, bows, clubs and stones. After several minutes of battle, a gigantic rhinoceros comes barreling onstage and chases the children away, ending the scene.

In Comet, the childrens’ parts are sung by Kathinka Pasveer, one of Stockhausen’s longtime collaborators. The percussionist must choose several recorded samples, which are played during the piece. Stockhausen directed the percussionist to choose samples of the sounds of children’s toys. Based on the toy sounds and the pitches audible in the electronic music, the percussionist improvises new music.

In earlier days, the appearance of a comet in the sky often suggested impending doom. The bells that toll in Comet also bring to mind the idea of the apocalypse. Despite this, Stockhausen often remarked that he wished the percussion version of Comet to have an element of playfulness. Certainly the samples chosen by our percussionist tonight, Stuart Gerber, reflect the composer’s desire.

notes or rest. However, neither the specific ordering of the cells, nor their dynamic balance or playing techniques are determined. For our performance, we held true to Brown’s precise musical instructions in the score, but slightly reconceptualized the theatrical aspect. Whereas the original score calls for a rather inconspiculous slider to indicate the correct page to play, we use placards reminiscent of political protests. By analyzing the structure of Brown’s chords, we were able to trace a path through the composition that makes effective use of the dissonant or consonant qualities of the given musical material. While Brown’s innovative use of indeterminacy is remeniscent of some of Cage’s ideas, his own approach to composition ultimately leaves less to chance than his older American colleague, and opens up opportunities for a stimulating encounter with his well-crafted musical material.

La Monte Young (b. 1935) grew up in Idaho where he learned cowboy songs on the guitar from his aunt. He also played music with his father, Dennis, who was a sheep-herder. Young attended college in Los Angeles and performed in blues and jazz bands throughout the 1950s. After studying counterpoint with Leonard Stein and Robert Stevenson, Young composed his Trio for Strings (1958). This work, which consists entirely of long notes and rests, is considered one of the first pieces in which traits of American “Minimalism” can be recognized.

Young encountered Stockhausen in 1959 at Darmstadt. He also met David Tudor there. Subsequently, he studied in New York City, where he organized a concert series at Yoko Ono’s studio. Young’s fascination with and research into extremely long musical notes – called drones – resulted in his epic masterpiece The Well-Tuned Piano, which (at its last performance in 1987) lasted approximately 384 minutes.

Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. is a challenging work. Performers determine the length of the piece through random processes; it can last anywhere from 0 minutes to several days. Since the range of durations is impractical for our concert performance, we have decided to create a “Fantasy-Improvisation” on the work, perhaps taking inspiration from Liszt’s masterful improvisations on works of Italian lyric opera. By reconceiving the Poem primarily as a theatrical piece, we will be making musical structures with colorful chairs, tables and benches throughout Grusin Hall. It seems to us that Young’s piece provides a wonderful opportunity to open up and explore our newly reinvogorated and renovated concert space in a way that probably did not occur to its designers.

Stockhausen’s electronic work Gesang der Jünglinge [Song of the Youths] is based on the story from the Book of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzer throws Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a firey furnace. The three are miraculously perserved and sing praises to God. In Stockhausen’s piece, a boy soprano sang texts which were recorded onto tape. The tape was then cut and reassembled according to a scale of seven degrees of intelligibility. This idea probably came from Stockhausen’s studies in Bonn with the phoneticist Werner

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school of music. In the piano version, the score specifies that the musician must “demonstrate his ability to quickly change expression and his art of polyphonic interpretation.” Of course, in the opera, Michael impresses the judges and easily wins entry to the conservatory.

The cycle of fifteen pieces of “intuitive” music called Aus den sieben Tagen [From the Seven Days] arose after several years of Stockhausen’s experiments with so-called “process” music. In process compositions, the exact musical material is not always specified; rather, transformations to that material form the score. Sometimes, scores of process music contain little more than plus, minus, and equal signs. But, after years of performing process music with his close-knit group of collaborators, Stockhausen decided to eliminate even the plus, minus and equal signs from his next work; all that was left was a poem, or text, that described a particular musical process. Musicians were supposed to play together intuitively, as opposed to intellectually. By avoiding any kind of musical cliché, the musicians could – in theory – rise up to a higher level of existence, communicating almost telepathically with one another through space.

The text from Setz die Segel zur Sonne [Set Sail for the Sun] seems to describe just such a musical process.

play a tone for so longuntil you hear its individual vibrations

hold the toneand listen to the tones of the others

– to all of them together, not to individual ones –and slowly move your tone

until you arrive at complete harmonyand the whole sound turns to gold

to pure, gently shimmering fire

As our ensemble of extremely talented graduate students rehearsed this piece, it occured to them that Set Sail for the Sun is possibly made up of at least four distinct processes which direct the player to gradually expand his or her awareness or conciousness. First, the direction to “play a tone” seems to be aimed at the individual player alone. But once the individual’s tone is set, the musician must listen to the tones of others, and, for the first time focus attention on others. Next, the players fuse their tones together in “complete harmony;” attention is directed now on the group as a whole. Finally, the enigmatic instruction to turn the whole sound to gold seems somehow to suggest that the players aim for something even higher than the group itself; for something universal, cosmic, transcendent. Perhaps “the sun” here refers not only to our own local star, but to stars around us in the local universe as well.

During our ensemble’s many rehearsals of Set Sail for the Sun, I witnessed an astonishing growth in the way our four exceptional musicians listened to each other, reacted, created, and grew themselves. These texts, which seem strange at first, seem to contain the seeds for something quite profound.

Klavierstück XII (1979/83)Frank Gutschmidt, piano

Karlheinz Stockhausen[22:00]

Concert 2Friday, 1 October, 7:30 p.m.

Black Box Theater, ATLAS Building

Stockhausen[~10:00]

Toccatina (1986)Sarah Wood, violin

Helmut Lachenmann[4:00]

Kontakte (1958–60) Stockhausen[35:30]

Intermission

Where does a composer leave off, and an interpreter take over? This question comes up many times in the historical canon of Western music. Early Medieval singers were known to embellish and elaborate upon melodies to such an extent that manuscript versions of the same chant often differ in many details of transcription. In the early days of polyphony, musicians improvised counterpoint (e. g. Tinctoris’s cantare super librum, English faburdon, etc.) Closer to our own time, composers may leave a considerable amount of their musical creation to chance; the most notorious example, of course, is John Cage’s 4’33”. For many people, Cage’s work already crosses the line beyond which the word “work” has little meaning. Many so-called popular repertoires, such as Appalachian fiddling, rely more on the aural transmission of information than the reading of musical scores. It may actually seem the exception, rather than the rule, that a composer produces a score, with all the notes written down, set in ink , on some semi-permanant non-volatile medium such as paper. Tonight’s concert involves several works which barely, if at all, seem to exist in any sort of traditional way; as “intuitive music,” or with extremely unconventional notation, or as electronically generated sounds.

Perhaps the most traditional work is first on our program: Klavierstück XII [Piano Piece 12]. Stockhausen had not written a work in his cycle of piano pieces since 1957, with the famously polyvalent Piano Piece 11. Piano Piece 12 originated as a scene from Stockhausen’s Thursday opera (1978 – 80) called Examen [Examination]. The whole Thursday opera is concerned with the archangel Michael, who – in Stockhausen’s view of the cosmos – is an important spirit-personality. The story of Michael is cast as a semi-autobiographical tale of Stockhausen’s youth. The section called Examination is really a lengthy trumpet piece that Stockhausen composed for his son, Markus. Here, Michael is played by three performers simultaneously: a tenor, trumpeter, and a dancer. The other personalities in Licht – namely, Eve and Lucifer – are also played by multiple artists at the same time. In Examination, Michael plays an audition to obtain admission to an advanced

Setz die Segel zur Sonnefrom Aus den sieben Tagen (1968)CU Boulder Ensemble for Intuitive Music

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Helmut Lachenmann is considered by many as one of the leading composers of our time. Born in Stuttgart in 1935, Lachenmann studied primarily with the Italian composer Luigi Nono, but also worked with Stockhausen at Darmstadt. In 1997, he won the Ernst Siemens Music Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize” of composition. He describes his music as musique concrète instrumentale, indicating that it opens up a world of sound made possible through unconventional playing techniques. In what scholars such as Claus-Steffan Mahnkopf see as an important characteristic of a second avant-garde, Lachenmann often specifies an action in his score, but not necessarily a result.

The violinst playing Lachenmann’s Toccatina must read a special violin clef, where the staff lines no longer indicate the notes to play, but rather the place on the violin to play*. Sometimes the violinst taps on the string with the metal part of the bow-screw; sometimes she bows on the pegs or tailpiece. Although this can seem somewhat disorienting at first, Lachenmann’s ideas have been highly influential among a younger generation of musicians, such as the JACK quartet. Composers such as Aaron Cassidy have pursued his ideas even further with considerable critical success.

Stockhausen’s Kontakte [Contacts] is a work that can be performed in several different ways. First, it is an all-electronic piece for four-channel quadrophonic projection. Second, it can be heard with live piano and percussion. In this version, Stockhausen tried to relate the sounds of live musicians with electronic sounds, an idea which is reflected in the work’s title. Third, a version exists for theatrical production, called Originale [Originals]. According to one critic who heard the premiere, this version contains several traits of the controversial absurdist Dada theater.

One of the most spectacular aspects of Kontakte is its use of the space around listeners. The electronic sounds recorded on the four-channel electronic tape spin around listeners, or cut across the performance space from one end to another. Sounds which begin in one area vanish and reappear in another. Stockhausen accomplished many of these effects with a special rotation table. A single directional speaker is mounted on a large circular table. Pre-recorded electronic music is played through the speaker. Four microphones are placed around the table. When the table is turned, the microphones record the spatialized sound. This innovative design eliminated phase problems in the spatialization which plagued composers in the days before digital synthesis.

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A memorable moment in Kontakte comes about seventeen minutes through the piece. A sound begins as a high-frequency pitch; then, as it slides downwards in frequency, it disintegrates into clicks, or rhythm. A further stage in the process begins when reverberation is added to the clicks, and it is lengthened out in time; here, it becomes timbre, or sound color. With this dramatic gesture, Stockhausen tried to show “contacts” among different perceptual domains. What better way to accomplish this than to have a single event cross several realms of auditory perception!

A part of the score to Kontakte

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* The entire score for Lachenmann’s Toccatina can be viewed in our exhibition, located in the Imig Music Building, room c-113.

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CU Boulder Ensemble for Intuitive Music

Stephanie Mientka, viola; Daniel Miller, trumpet;Andrew Stonerock, saxophone; Matthew Witherow, piano;

Paul Miller, coach

listening to change in Stockhausen’s music. Is there some energetic, motivating factor that causes movement from one element in the series to another? Does change occur gradually, or suddenly? One useful lens through which we may approach these questions may be found in the theories of biology and morphology developed by Kielmeyer, Goethe and others in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century. These pre-Darwinian theories of change in the natural world suggest musical analogies to understanding works that Stockhausen himself described as being like an organism – for example, the process pieces of the 1960s, including Kurzwellen [Short Waves]. Biological theories of metamorphosis are also useful in understanding the theory of formula composition that Stockhausen developed. By exploring Stockhausen’s theories through the ideas of morphology, we will gain a better understanding of one of Stockhausen’s important compositional techniques.

Stockhausen, Serialism and Style John Peterson[~20:00]

ColloquiumThursday, 30 September, 4:00 p.m.

Black Box Theater, ATLAS Building

Paul Miller[~25:00]

Short Break

From Here to Where? Transition and Morphology inthe Compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen

Jackson Pollock, Stockhausen, and theCosmic Voyage to Paradise

Jerome Kohl[~40:00]

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John Peterson, “Stockhausen, Serialism and Style.”

Totaling more than 370 individually performable works, one of the most intriguing aspects of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s compositional output is its range of stylistic diversity. Although almost all of his music is serial, much of it uses additional techniques that determine the way in which the music will be organized or realized. While these techniques are widely acknowledged within the scholarly literature that discusses Stockhausen’s music, they are not generally known outside academic circles. In my presentation, I will investigate a number of Stockhausen’s compositional styles by discussing the techniques that create such a diverse stylistic range. The broad scope of my paper will also allow me to introduce many of the important works in Stockhausen’s career. It is my hope that as the festival progresses, audience members may be able to identify some of the techniques that I discuss in my lecture.

Paul Miller, “From Here to Where? Transition and Morphology in the Compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen.”

Stockhausen’s art of transformation and musical metamorphosis range over a broad field of techniques and a long list of works. In Stockhausen’s concept of serialism, two extremes could be mitigated by inserting a set of intermediary points between them. How, though, does one “get” from one point to another on such a continuum? This lecture will offer some ideas for

Jerome Kohl, “Jackson Pollock, Stockhausen, and the Cosmic Voyage to Paradise.”

When Jackson Pollock’s paintings were described as “chaos,” he reacted angrily: “No chaos, damn it!” While numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the methodical nature of his techniques, the question of the viewer’s reception remains open. Stockhausen’s last electronic work, Cosmic Pulses, has similarly been described as chaotic, and moreover has been compared to Pollock’s work. An examination of both Pollock’s paintings and Stockhausen’s music, including the “analytical” series of eight solo pieces with electronic music that follow Cosmic Pulses in the Klang cycle, throw some light on the nature of chaos in art, and suggest some strategies for listening to music of such overwhelming density as Cosmic Pulses.

Spherical auditorium, Osaka, Japan (1970). Stockhausen’s works were performed here for 183 days to over a million listeners.

1. Stockhausen listening to music (at IRCAM, 1985)2. Michael sign, spiral work list3. Creating Hymnen, Friday sweater4. Quites from Sri Aurobindo and the Urantia Book5. Helicopter Quartet, studio work in 19556. Stockhausen & the Chickens; Lucifer sign7. Klang circle; Natural Durations8. Stockhausen with friends; La Monte Young9. Earle Brown's Module I/II10. Gesang der Jünglinge11. Stuart Gerber; Komet12. Superformula; Piano Piece 1213. Aus den sieben Tagen: photos, scores14. Stockhausen in the caves of Jeita, Lebanon (1969)15. Stockhausen & the spherical auditorium (Osaka, 1970)16. Originale (theatrical version of Kontakte)17. Helmut Lachenmann & Toccatina18. Kontakte: photos and score19. Electronic Study No. 2: score, texts20. Flautina: score, texts21. Score and sketch of Kreuzspiel22. Telemusik: score, Gagaku circuit, Temple photo

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Please come visit the exhibition in the Imig Music Building, room c-113.

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23. Formscheme of Cosmic Pulses24. Sketches and photograph from Cosmic Pulses25. Eve sign; credits.

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first, which has been the most thoroughly analyzed, employs a novel serial technique. In a six-step process, pitches from the beginning and end of the twelve-element row “migrate” to the center of the next row, pushing the remaining elements outwards. By the time we hear the sixth row, the original order has been permuted so thoroughly that it is hard to hear any connection with the beginning. But then the process happens in reverse, and in a second six-step process, order is recreated out of seeming chaos. The result of the entire twelve-step “crossplay” is that the first and last six-note segments of the original row are swapped. At the same time this is happening, the durations assigned to each pitch are permuted in a similar way, as is the rhythmic structure of the percussion.

In addition to determining pitch and rhythm, Stockhausen also ordered the register of the pitches in his rows. Towards the beginning of the first section, he employed the extremes of high and low, which are only playable by the piano. But as the crossplay continues, the registral disposition moves towards the middle range. More notes fall into the range of the oboe and bass clarinet, and so the timbral profile shifts towards these instruments. As the first section winds down, pitches migrate back towards registral extremes, and the sound of the piano again dominates.

The second and third parts of Kreuzspiel are essentially variations. In the second, slow movement, the process works much like the first, except the oboe and bass clarinet begin and end in the central register and the piano reaches its extremes of high and low in the middle. The piano interjects widely-spaced chords that create a new timbral effect. To help set the second section apart from the first, the percussionists shift from tom-toms and tumbas to cymbals. The third section is the most complex of the three. Here, the process from the first section happens backwards, but elements from the second section are superimposed around a central inversional axis. By combining tom-toms and cymbals, the percussionists literally blend sounds from the two earlier sections.

Stockhausen’s attention to the spatial location of the instruments in Kreuzspiel is noteworthy. By placing the oboe near the piano’s bass strings and the bass clarinet close to the treble, Stockhausen set up a registral checkerboard. From the audience’s perspective, the registral disposition is approximately (from left to right) high, low, high, low. The percussion instruments, located near the piano, are meant to create sympathetic resonance with it. Careful attention to the physical location of instruments within the performing space continued to be a major factor in Stockhausen’s compositional trajectory.

Telemusik [Telemusic] was a commission from the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation. With the help of several studio technicians, Stockhausen composed it in about a month in early 1966. Stockhausen’s encounter with Japanese culture during his first trip to Japan was profound and life-altering. His experiences of the tea ceremony, temple music, and Noh theater changed his way of thinking about music. The sounds of Japanese temple instruments can be heard in Telemusik, as

Elektronische Studie II (1954) Karlheinz Stockhausen[3:50]

Spatialization Demonstration & Concert 3Sunday, 3 October, 2:00 and 4:00 p.m.Black Box Theater, ATLAS Building

Stockhausen[11:00]

Flautina (1989)Christina Jennings, Flute

Stockhausen[6:00]

Cosmic Pulses (2007) Stockhausen[32:00]

Intermission

The works at the beginning and end of tonight’s program function something like bookends in the history of Stockhausen’s electronic composition. Interspersed are two instrumental pieces – both from very different times in Stockhausen’s life – which remind us that electronic music was only one part of the composer’s enormous creative output.

Elektronische Studie II [Electronic Study No. 2] may seem at first to be an entirely synthetic work of electronic music. Indeed, it was one of the earliest pieces composed entirely out of sine waves. Each sound in Study No. 2 is made up of five sine waves. However, these sounds are treated in a very unusual way. Stockhausen cut five segments of tape, each with a different sine wave on it. Then, he spliced these together in a loop, and played back the sound in a very reverberant room. Even though the work is made up of synthetic sounds, the imprint of a room’s acoustic is felt throughout the piece.

There are five distinct sections in Study No. 2. Perhaps the third one is the most memorable; here, each sound starts or ends with a very strong attack. The texture can seem “pointillistic” at times during this section. The last complex of sounds also suggests a dramatic interpretation; it has been remarked by many that the piece ends with a kind of “low tympani roll.” For many, Stockhausen’s deft fusion of mathematical rigor and his keen sense of drama is what makes pieces like Study No. 2 worth listening to.

Kreuzspiel [Cross-Play] is made of three distinct sections. The

Kreuzspiel (1951)

Telemusik (1966) Stockhausen[17:30]

Spatialization Demonstration Bryan Wolf[60:00]

2:00 p.m.

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4:00 p.m.

Break

Performers of Kreuzspiel

Aaron Bagby, Bryan Bolen and Jason Johnston, percussion;Tenly Williams, oboe; Daniel Silver, bass clarinet;Alexandra Nguyen, piano; Paul Miller, conductor

Program notes & booklet design by Paul Miller

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Artist Biographies

Aaron Bagby is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree from CU Boulder where he studies with Dr. Doug Walter. Mr. Bagby has performed with many well-known and diverse musicians including Jeff Coffin, Sarah Morrow, Mark Pender, Michael Spiro, and Jack Schantz. He is currently the principal percussionist in the Longmont Symphony Orchestra, and has also held a residency at Carnegie Hall in May of 2008 performing with the National Wind Symphony. Bagby received his Bachelor’s in performance from Ohio University where he was a student of Mr. Roger Braun and Mr. Guy Remonko.

A native of Denver, Colorado, Bryan Bolen is a third-year Music Education major and percussionist at CU Boulder. Mr. Bolen is not only a performer of classical repertoire, but has also extensively studied traditional African dance, Indian percussion, jazz, and contemporary music. He hopes to pursue a career using music to help others.

Elizabeth Comninellis is pursuing a master’s degree in music composition at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her previous studies were at the University of Missouri (Kansas City) where she worked with acclaimed composers Chen Yi and Paul Rudy. Most recently she received the Levy Graduate Composition Award at CU Boulder.

Described as having “consummate virtuosity” by The New York Times, percussionist Stuart Gerber has performed extensively throughout the US, Europe, Australia, and Mexico as a soloist and chamber musician. He is currently Associate Professor of Percussion at Georgia State University in Atlanta. As an active performer of new works, Stuart has been involved in a number of commissions and world-premiere performances. Most notably he has given the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Heaven’s Door, and recorded a number of percussion works for the Stockhausen Complete Edition. He has been the solo/faculty percussionist for the annual Stockhausen Courses in Germany since 2005. Stuart has worked with many other notable composers, including Kaija Saariaho, Tristan Murail, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, George Crumb, Ricard Zohn-Muldoon, and John Luther Adams. He can be heard on recordings released by Bridge Records, Capstone Records, Telarc, Code Blue Records, Mode Records, Wesleyan University Press, Albany Records, and Vienna Modern Masters.

Violinist and conductor Alejandro Gómez-Guillén is a native of Columbia. He holds a Master’s degree in violin performance from CU Boulder, having studied with Judith Ingolfsson and Lina Bahn. Currently, Alejandro is pursuing a Master’s degree in Orchestral Conducting with Professor Gary Lewis. He is the conductor of the Colorado Youth Philharmonia in Denver, the Mountain View Chancel Choir, an associate conductor of the Boulder Symphony Orchestra, and co-conductor of the CU Campus orchestra.

Frank Gutschmidt was born in 1971 in Brandenburg/Havel, Germany. As a soloist and in ensemble he devotes himself primarily to works of contemporary music. Several composers wrote piano works for him which he performed in world premières. At the Stockhausen Courses Kürten 2001 and 2002 he received prizes from Stockhausen for the performances of Piano Pieces X, XII and XIV. Since then he performed all of the piano works of Stockhausen in many concerts, working alongside the composer until his passing in 2007. Since 2003, Frank has served on the faculty of the annual Stockhausen Courses in Kürten. Together with Benjamin Kobler he performed Natural Durations 1 - 15 (world première of 2 - 15) in a concert on July 12th 2006 in Kürten and recorded seven pieces from this cycle which are dedicated to him for the Stockhausen Complete Edition (CD 85).

well as recorded samples of traditional Etenraku music. In addition, Stockhausen mixed together music of Bali, Vietnam, China, the Amazons, Spain and Hungary, “intermodulating” the samples in various ways. Intermodulation describes a process in which one aspect of a sound is transformed by another, yielding a result which is (hopefully) greater than the sum of the two parts. For example, the pitch of one sound can be intermodulated with the rhythm of another.

Despite the use of many kinds of world music, Stockhausen did not think of Telemusik as a collage. He wrote, “Rather – through the process of intermodulation between old ‘found’ objects and new sound events which I made using modern electronic means – a higher unity is reached: a universality of past, present and future, of distant places and spaces: TELE-MUSIC.”

According to Stockhausen, “the person Flautina is a flute-spirit in human costume: bewitchingly enchanting.” In this short piece, the flutist plays each of the twelve notes of one of the three melodies used in Stockhausen’s enormous Licht opera cycle. However, these notes are placed in radically different registers and each elaborated upon at some length. Because some notes are very high and others low, the flutist must use three different flutes to perform the piece: the piccolo, the standard concert flute, and the alto flute. To make it easier to switch between these instruments rapidly, a “flute belt” is necessary. Flautina was a birthday present to the Dutch flutist Kathinka Pasveer, who was one of Stockhausen’s longtime collaborators.

After he finished his massive cycle of seven operas – one for each day of the week – Stockhausen embarked on a project of composing one piece for each hour of the day. Cosmic Pulses (2006 – 7) became the thirteenth work in that cycle, called Klang [Sound]. Concerning the Klang cycle, Stockhausen wrote that “It seems that I am listening again more for moments, atmospheres, rather than formulas with their limbs, transpositions, transformations.” At the time of his passing, Stockhausen had completed twenty-one of the projected twenty-four works in Klang.

Stripped down to its most fundamental level, Cosmic Pulses employs a basic double tone-row which appears throughout works in the Klang cycle. However, Stockhausen added slight pitch variations to the pitches, and sent each tone spinning around space in a wild trajectory. The work starts with the lowest-frequency “loops,” gradually building up to a kind of superdense texture, which includes twenty-four superimposed layers of sound. After a considerable amount of time, a process of thinning-out begins. This process leaves only one high and low layer of electronic music at the end. Some have described this scheme – of growth, steady state, and then release – as a metaphor for human life.

Hidden in Cosmic Pulses is a secret numerical reference. Stockhausen composed 241 loops in the space around listeners. In a long list, Stockhausen indicated how each loop moves through eight locations around the audience. 241 × 8 = 1928. This was the year of Stockhausen’s birth. 11

Flutist Christina Jennings has appeared as a concert soloist with over fifty orchestras, countless chamber ensembles, and even with jazz great Marian McPartland on a shared CD for Albany Records. The Houston Press declared, “Jennings has got what it takes: a distinctive voice, charisma, and a pyrotechnic style that works magic on the ears.” In great demand as a teacher, Ms. Jennings is Assistant Professor of Flute at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and on the summer faculty of the Texas Music Festival. She has presented master classes at the Julliard School, Rice University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Peabody Institute, and the Longy School of Music. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Julliard School, and lives in Boulder with her husband, violist Matthew Dane, and their twin sons.

Jason Johnston received his Bachelor of Music degree in percussion performance at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. In addition to performing, Mr. Johnston also composes and arranges works for various solo and ensemble combinations. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in percussion performance under the direction of Dr. Douglass Walter at CU Boulder.

Jerome Kohl received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1981 with a dissertation on “Serial and Non-Serial Techniques in the Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1962–1968.” He has published extensively on Stockhausen’s music, and currently has a book in press from Ashgate on Stockhausen’s early wind quintet Zeitmaße. He is the editor and chief translator of the English edition of Stockhausen’s Texts on Music, forthcoming from the Stockhausen-Verlag. For sixteen years he was the Managing Editor of Perspectives of New Music, for which he also guest-edited a two-part collection of articles on microtonal music, and a three-part 70th-birthday Festschrift for Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1998–99. He has appeared several times as a studio guest on BBC Radio 3’s new-music program Hear and Now, and in November 2008 was an invited speaker at the week-long Klang Festival, curated by Oliver Knussen at the Southbank Centre in London. In the summers of 2009 and 2010 he was invited to present analysis seminars on a number of Stockhausen’s works at the Eleventh and Twelfth Stockhausen Courses for Music in Kürten, Germany.

Stephanie Mientka, violist, is in her fourth year of pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in music performance at CU Boulder. She studies with Erika Eckert and Geraldine Walther. Ms. Mientka has performed with numerous orchestras throughout Colorado, but also enjoys chamber music and improvisation. In her spare time, she performs with her family’s Celtic band “Feast.”

Daniel Miller has had a varied background in music that has taken him all over the United States as a performer and teacher. He has performed with the Houston Symphony, the Symphony of Southeast Texas, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Daniel holds degrees from the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music and the Peabody Conservatory. Daniel is committed to performing the music of our time, and to that end he has worked with many young composers, premiering dozens of new works for the trumpet.

Paul Miller is a native of Poughkeepsie, New York. A music theorist and a performer of baroque and contemporary music, he has appeared with baroque ensembles in Toronto, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Paul has been invited to give recitals at the Metropolitian Museum of Art in New York City, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in Munich, Germany. He has premiered several new works at the International Vacation Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany, where he won a Stipendiumpreis for his viola and viola d’amore performances in 2004. In 2005 he gave the world premiere of the viola version of Stockhausen’s solo work In Freundschaft in Kürten, Germany, under the composer’s direction. As a music theorist, he has presented research at several national and international conferences. Paul holds a Master’s degree in viola performance, and a Ph.D. in music theory, both from the Eastman School of Music. His undergraduate studies were at Vassar College, the New England Conservatory, and Harvard University. Currently Paul is an Instructor of Music Theory at the Unversity of Colorado, Boulder.

Mary Mixter was raised on the Western Slope of Colorado. Her performance background includes the 2006 Sound of America tour and the 2008–9 Denver Young Artists’ Orchestra. She is currently studying trombone performance and composition at CU Boulder.

Alexandra Nguyen maintains a diverse career as a collaborative pianist, teacher and arts administrator. She has appeared as a pianist throughout the United States and Canada, including performances at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, BargeMusic (Brooklyn, New York), the Dame Myra Hess series (Chicago, IL), and the 2000 Bartok International Congress (Austin, TX). She is a founding

member of two active chamber ensembles, Trio Encantar and Duo Solaris. As Assistant Professor of Collaborative Piano at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Dr. Nguyen co-directs the graduate programs in collaborative piano, teaches the undergraduate accompanying curriculum and oversees accompanyingservices for the College of Music. She completed her graduate degrees under the guidance of Jean Barr at the Eastman School of Music where she was awarded the first Performer’s Certificate in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music. She also holds degrees from McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec a Montréal.

John Peterson received a Bachelor of Music degree in theory and composition from the University of Western Ontario in 2008. He is currently a Master’s student in music theory at CU Boulder, where his research interests include Schenkerian analysis, theories of musical expression, meaning & gesture and the music of Carl Nielsen. John intends to continue his study of music theory as a PhD program next year.

Amanda Samuelson is pursuing a Master’s degree in Music Theory at CU Boulder. She graduated in 2009 cum laude with a Bachelor’s degree in music from Black Hills State University in Spearfish, SD. Amanda looks forward to furthering her understanding of music through the “reverse engineering” approach that theory study provides. She is working towards a career as a professor of music theory.

Daniel Silver is active as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral performer, clinician and teacher. He served as principal clarinet of the Baltimore Opera Orchestra, the Washington Chamber Symphony (Kennedy Center) and the National Gallery Orchestra. From 1980 to 1987 he was the principal clarinet of the Hong Kong Philarhamonic. From 1988 to 2000 he was a member of the Contemporary Music Forum in Washington, D.C. Mr. Silver’s performances have received wide critical acclaim: the Washington Post praised his “sense of freedom and extraordinary control.” A graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, he currently serves as Associate Professor of Clarinet at CU Boulder.

Andrew Stonerock is a doctoral candidate in Saxophone Performance and Pedagogy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a performer he has had the privilege of performing with the Ft. Collins Symphony, the Lonestar Wind Orchestra, the Niwot-Timberline Symphony, and the Colorado Music Festival Symphony. He is also an advocate of new music, often premiering pieces with various ensembles.

Tenly Williams is a member of the Boulder Philharmonic, principal oboist of the Steamboat Springs Orchestra, and co-founder of the Mountain Music Ensemble. Tenly completed her Bachelor of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music, and her Master of Music degree at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches at the Parlando School for the Arts (Boulder) and the Rocky Mountain Center for Musical Arts (Lafayette).

A native of Pollock, Louisiana, Matthew Witherow earned a Bachelor of Music in piano performance from the Univeristy of Louisiana at Monroe. There, Witherow received several prestigious awards and honors, and in 2007 and 2008 he won the National Federation of Music Clubs “Lucille Parrish Ward Veterans Award.” A former U.S. Marine and Iraq War vereran, Witherow is currently a member of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War. Witherow is completing his master’s degree in piano performance from CU Boulder in the studio of Andrew Cooperstock. He and his wife Joy reside in Boulder.

Bryan Wolf was born in Michigan in 1960, where he studied organ and composition. He continued his composition studies with Milko Kelemen and Erhard Karkoschka at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart from 1987 to 1992. He has received awards and scholarships from the Province of Baden-Württemberg, the Darmstadt «Ferienkurse» and the Experimental Studio of the Heinrich-Strobel-Foundation of Southwest German Radio (SWR). As Karlheinz Stockhausen’s personal sound engineer for nearly ten years, Bryan engineered countless performances and premieres across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the USA in major concert halls, opera houses, and unconventional venues. He has served on the faculty of the School of Design in Pforzheim, Germany since 1992.

Sarah Wood is originally from Northern California, where she began studying the violin at the age of 4. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in violin performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is currently pursuing a DMA at CU Boulder. Her areas of interest include solo violin repertoire, violin pedagogy, and chamber music. In February she will be performing a concert of Baroque chamber music with the newly-formed Ensemble Pearl at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, Colorado.

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