- •Music in the Modern World western music of the twentieth century (general survey)
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Discussion Points
- •Additional Assignments
- •Some twentieth-century composers arnold schoenberg (1874-1951)
- •The composer speaks: arnold schoenberg
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Discussion Points
- •Bela bartok (1881-1945)
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Questions about Bartok
- •Discussion Points
- •Paul hindemith: his life and work (1895-1963)
- •The composer speaks: paul hindemith
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Discussion Points
- •Electronic music
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Questions about Stravinsky
- •Additional Assignments
- •Britten's operas
- •The composer speaks: benjamin broten
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Questions about Britten
- •Additional Assignments
- •Menotti. The opera composer
- •The composer speaks: gian carlo menotti
- •Discussion Activities Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •Additional Assignments
- •Michael tippett: a child of our time
- •30 Questions on the Text
- •Experimental (avant-garde) music
- •Olivier messiaen
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Discussion Points
- •Additional Assignments
- •George ligeti (b. 1923)
- •Karlheinz stockhausen
- •35 Discussion Activities Questions on the Text about Ligeti
- •About Stockhausen and Experimental Composers
- •Questions about Western Music of the 20th Century
- •Points for Discussion and Written Compositions
- •Popular music rock
- •Points about rock
- •Discussion Activities Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •Additional Assignments
- •Elvis presley - story of a superstar
- •Discussion Activities Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •The beatles
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •English and American Musical History english music (general survey)
- •1. Opera.
- •2. Performing groups.
- •3. Festivals.
- •4. Education.
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •The golden age in england
- •The english virginal school
- •Virginal music composers. William Byrd (1542-1623)
- •Byrd in his time and ours
- •English madrigalists
- •"The british orpheus"
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •56 American music (general survey)
- •61 Charles ives, the first truly american composer (1874-1954)
- •Charles ives and american folk music
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •The relation of jazz to american music
- •Louis armstrong
- •The swing era (duke ellington)
- •Spirituals
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •The Art of Musical Interpretation the problem of interpretation
- •Discussion Activities Questions on the Text
- •Questions for Discussion
- •Additional Assignments
- •Conducting
- •The art of conducting
- •Questions on the Text
- •Some musical encounters
- •Questions on the Text
- •86 Leonard bernstein
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •Herbert von karajan
- •Interview with herbert von karajan
- •The art of piano playing: glenn gould
- •Interview with glenn gould
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •The art of violin playing: eugene ysaye
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •The world of opera handel in performance
- •Franco zeffirelli: the romantic realist
- •La divina: maria callas
- •Callas remembered
- •Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •Peter pears: ronald crichton speaks
- •Discussion Activities Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion
- •Notes Page 5
- •Page 21
- •Page 31
- •Page 32
- •Page 34
- •Page 35
- •Page 37
- •Page 39
- •Page 46
- •Page 47
- •Page 48
- •Page 49
- •Page 52
- •Page 53
- •Page 54
- •Page 57
- •Page 58
- •Page 59
- •Page 60
- •Page 61
- •Page 62
- •Page 63
- •Page 65
- •Page 66
- •Page 111
- •Page 112
- •Sources
- •Contents
Karlheinz stockhausen
K. Stockhausen (b. 1928), a German composer and theorist, is regarded as the leader of electronic avant-garde. He has pioneered electronic music, new uses of physical space in music, open forms,* live-electronic performance, "intuitive music" and many other important developments in music after 1950. In his music and in his writings, he has evolved a uniquely coherent system of generalizations from the premises of total serialism, paying attention to aesthetic and philosophical consequences as well as matters of technique and music theory. Each of his discoveries is compellingly demonstrated in his music. He has also been widely active as a teacher, and has taken part - as either conductor or performer-in many performances of his own music, forming his own performing group in 1964.
Stockhausen was born near Cologne in 1928. His education was interrupted by World War II. From 1947 to 1951 he studied piano and theory at the Cologne Music-Hochschule. He then worked for a time with Frank Martin, before going to Paris, where Milhaud and, more significantly, Messiàen were his main teachers. His earliest surviving works, which date from this period, already show the influence of Messiaen's music. But Stockhausen was already under the spell of Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrete,* and an authority of the as yet primitive techniques of electronic composition. Stockhausen undertook a close study of these techniques, and soon composed some of the earliest works using exclusively synthesised, or electronically generated sound.
In his music electronics proved to be of great importance. Not only did he pioneer the use of electronics in live performed music (Kontakte* 1959, Mikrophonie I and II, 1964-65) but he also introduced related techniques into music for conventional instruments, notably in "spatial works", such as Gruppen* for three orchestras (1957) and Carre for four orchestras (1960). In all these works sonority is of supreme importance. But in some other works of the 1950s, Stockhausen experimented with chance, or aleatoric, techniques (notably the Piano Piece No. 11, of 1956).
1957 was the year in which Stockhausen was first invited to teach composition at the Darmstadt summer courses, where he had been giving lectures since 1953. In the course of a few years he developed highly individual teaching methods which resulted in an unusual degree of collective work within the groups of composers who came to him. His renown as a teacher soon began to rival that of his own teacher Messiaen. In 1963 he founded the Cologne Courses
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for New Music, later to become the Cologne Institute for New Music. And at the end of 1958 Stockhausen embarked on the first of his concert and lecture tours of the USA.
As part of his work for Darmstadt, Stockhausen composed a test piece for percussion players in 1959.
In the concept of the "moment" Stockhausen sought a resolution of listeners' difficulties in experiencing form in serial music. Each individually characterized passage in a work is regarded as an experiential unit, a "moment", which can potentially engage the listener's full attention and can do so in exactly the same measure as its neighbours. No single "moment" claims priority, even as a beginning or ending; hence the nature of such a work is essentially "unending" (and, indeed, "unbeginning"). Significantly, each "moment" is, in Stockhausen's view, equally dispensable, rather than equally indispensable, to the listener: his unending forms are the outcome not only of his pursuit of equality among all constituents of a work, but also of his leanings towards indeterminacy, which he accurately enough attributes to the durations and intensities of his listeners' attentiveness. The listener's unpredictable ecstatic involvement with the "now" of one "moment" can be bought only at the risk of his equally unpredictable withdrawal from some other. Such "moments", grouped in succession to make up a "moment form", formed the structural constituents of Kontakte (1959-60), a work which appeared both as a purely electronic composition and as "Kontakte for electronic sounds, piano and percussion". Another example of "music in space", with four loudspeaker groups placed around the auditorium, Kontakte presents an encounter between electronic music and instrumental music with the emphasis on shared characteristics of timbre.
His major work using open form, on which he began work in 1961, is Momente for soprano solo, four choral groups and 13 instrumentalists. The work is designed as a sequence of "moments" some of which may be omitted as occasion demands. The general structure is such that additional moments have been inserted freely in subsequent versions without necessitating any alteration to the existing music. In this work, Stockhausen's imaginative range in combining words with music reaches perhaps its fullest expression; the texts are taken from many sources (the Song of Songs, Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages, passages from letters and personal names, onomatopoeic words* and samples of audience reaction), but the role of the chorus is not restricted to singing - it also makes clicking, stamping and clapping noises and performs on small percussion instruments.
From: The Dictionary of Composers; The New Grove Dictionary