Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge: Analysis

hello today I'm going to talk about karl-heinz Stockhausen and his 1955 to 1956 electronic work gazongas been many remarkable innovators in the history of music but the case of Stockhausen nevertheless remains unique he invented or prefigured many entire genres of music including most notably perhaps electronic music which he helped to develop to a very large degree spectral is music was anticipated to a large degree by Stockhausen in works such as steam oh then there's collective improvisation music that consists of verbal scores without any actual notes there are pieces that are extremely innovative in their use of musical notation there's spatial composition point composition group composition there was a time in fact where every new struggling piece that was published was almost enough to launch an entire movement in contemporary music he was enormous ly influential across the European continent and also in North America and everywhere else so he had the quality of absolute brilliance combined with an intense drive towards exploring new territories in music and allied with that was the fact that starting in the early 1950s the technical possibilities of sound were starting to explode and there was all sorts of new research being undertaken at the time and technical developments that were absolutely ripe for exploration over 60 years later works such as gazonga Union remain absolutely singular both in their breadth of vision their technical accomplishment their expressivity and even though our technology has expanded in advance considerably since then they really haven't been surpassed which in itself is something worth paying attention to gazonga Union was recorded and created entirely an underground shelter cologne using what is by today's standards very elementary equipment the amount of labour involved in creating pieces such as this almost defies belief so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to start by presenting a background of the piece I'm going to talk about how it functions technically I'm going to present an analysis of the first section of the work and I'm also going to show some of the techniques that stuff I wasn't used in order to create the piece so to start off with here are some basic biographical elements concerning Stockhausen he was born in 1928 near Cologne and he had a very difficult childhood so when he was 13 years old his mother was officially killed or euthanized by the Nazi regime as she was mentally ill his father was killed on the front when Stockhausen was 17 years old just before the end of the Second World War so he was orphaned before he was 18 in addition to this he was forcibly conscripted and made to work in military hospitals throughout the Second World War and he witnessed and experienced horrible things he was made to receive the mortally or very seriously wounded fresh from the front and administered to them he was made to collect cadavers as well all sorts of awful experiences but the remarkable thing about all of this is that despite the horrific suffering that he must have endured throughout his adolescence he has hid himself that all of these experiences and everything that was taken away from him during this time only made him stronger that really shows you something about the extraordinary intensity and strength of character of someone like Stockhausen he was able to experience such horrific suffering and transcendence as far as music goes he studied musical pedagogy in Cologne and later went to Paris where he studied composition with Olivier mesothelin and then after that remarkably although he could have possibly finished his studies at that point he decided to continue at the University of Bonn where he studied phonetics amongst other subjects with vandermeyer Epler my are Epler taught such subjects as communications phonetics and synthetic language production all of which of course ended up being extremely significant in the production of gazelle no human it's worth considering also that during the period that South Ozone was writing this work which entailed a colossal amount of work he was also simultaneously writing site masa which is a wind quintet which is similarly innovative and extraordinary and then immediately after finishing these pieces he embarked upon the composition of grouping so grouping is a work for three orchestras each of which is playing in separate Tempe it's an amazing achievement and to have done all of this in the space of barely two years and then gone on after that to compose a very very long series of important works culminating in a seven opera cycle called leashed consisting of no less than twenty nine hours of music well it's absolutely phenomenal from any point of view so let's just have a close look at this one particular work and see what we can determine about Stockhausen x' work and his processes so I'd like to provide a bit of historical background on this piece and on what was going on in Europe in terms of electronic music at the time that Stockhausen was working on it so starting in the late 1940s around 1948 to be precise - asa was developing a concept known as musical ket and music quintet is essentially a manner of producing music using recordings of sounds actual acoustic events that happen in the world and then variously transforming them in transfiguring them so for example Shiva and the composers associated with his music studio in Paris would record things such as a coin falling into a pot or they would record individual notes on a piano and then editing the tapes they would chop off the attacks and keep only the resonance and the decay of the piano sounds and then played them backwards and things like this so basically all of their experiments involved using real sounds and then modifying them later on in the studio and then trying to make pieces out of this so all sorts of contemporary composers at one point went through Chappell studio and attempted to make pieces in this matter gibbehhhhh's yogi Ligety Olivier Messiaen and so on so Stockhausen began his initial experiments in electronic music around 1952 when he made a series of short electronic etudes so these pieces are actually quite interesting in the sense they point towards his later development and they show that he's already adopting a rather innovative and unusual approach to electronic music however they are fairly limited and they are by no means comparable to the Zambian lingo the initial electronic etudes are just that they are a choose they are experiments and they're Stockhausen trying to work out a problem of some kind according to very specific parameters whereas in Zambia huming which he started working on around 1954 is a work that is actually a fully fledged piece of music so in 1954 Stockhausen formulates a very interesting project he wants to make a piece of religious music based on the apocryphal some of the youths from the book of Daniel this work would be performed in Cologne Cathedral using live voices and electronic sounds together which is something that nobody had attempted to do up to that point unfortunately the Cathedral felt that it was not appropriate to present electronic sounds in a Cathedral and the project never got off the ground however he reformulated it as a somewhat more practical and compact piece of music and decided to do away essentially with the live voices so what happened is on the illumina is he has a boy soprano singing in a studio and then incorporates these sounds into the electronic sounds of the piece so the piece is actually intended to be performed entirely on loudspeakers it's what you would today call an X's Matic piece in other words the the sound source or the production of the actual sound is invisible to the audience you just see loudspeakers or in some cases you don't actually show the loudspeakers at all and you have people sitting in a concert hall listening to these sounds being projected through space so one of the more important aspects of giseong gaming is that it is made to be played back in a concert hall across five different loudspeakers so the idea is that the sounds can move around in space and this at the time was considered to be one of the most innovative aspects of the piece so instead of just having a monaural or a stereo recording you actually have five speakers which allows you the possibility again of having move around in the concert hall from a technical perspective because on the evening it is innovative across multiple dimensions simultaneously so on the one hand it integrates the so called total serial technique with electronic music and I'm going to go into a little bit more detail in terms of explaining exactly what the total serial technique is but up to that point it had being essentially associated exclusively with instrumental music it was a radical new compositional technology that Stockhausen and some of his contemporaries such as Beulah's Moderne nono and others were developing furthermore goes on during Langer associates electronic and song sounds and not only does it have both in the same piece I mean it would have been one thing to simply juxtapose the two and to sort of have these two separate worlds coexist in one piece but he goes a step further and he decides to create a situation in which there will be a seamless continuum between the vocal sounds and the electronic sounds on the other end of the spectrum and so what he attempts to do is to find a sort of analogous mode of sound production in the electronic world - what happens in speech and again here he was certainly informed by the courses that he took with Verner and Meyer up ler and this is one of the things of those Stockhausen he's not only a brilliant musician but he also understood multiple dimensions of sound and phonetics in communications and all sorts of things and he's all informed his word so he was a brilliant guy with a very wide-ranging intellect in order to create this continuum between vocal and electronic sounds he needed to work with materials that would be extremely flexible so in other words it wouldn't be enough simply to record actual acoustic events in the world using a microphone and then modify them and filter them afterwards he needed sounds that could be extremely malleable and flexible and that he could transform across time across multiple different parameters so in order to do that really he had to work with extremely basic and simple categories of sound and basically generate them in a studio from scratch all of the sound elements in gazonga Union are situated somewhere along a continuum so they're not just isolated events there are steps on a curve that can lead from point A to point B and so in order to do this he uses basically three categories of electronic sounds in the word and they actually progress from very pure simple sounds to very complex chaotic noisy sounds basic impulses created by an impulse generator in a studio and these impulses are just very short little sound so basically sine waves but with pronounced attack and decay characteristics so that the sounds are very short and then he would filter them and and create different timbres next you have sine tones sine tones are just pure pitched sounds produced by a sine tone generator that have no overtones they're the purest and simplest pitch sounds that you can possibly create and then he would create very complex overall timbers and harmonies and chords using multiple different sine waves each of which would be minutely calculated in terms of its frequency in its intensity so you would have chords in which each separate sine tone would be a different frequency and would have a different intensity which is what allowed him to create our official Tambor's effectively finally you have white noise so white noise which you've heard already even if you don't know what it's called is basically the sorts of sound you'll hear on a radio when it's stuck between two channels or on a test pattern on a television and this sort of thing and so white noise is basically the audio equivalent of pure chaos so in white noise you have every element of the audible spectrum present simultaneously so you have all the possible low frequencies and all the possible high frequencies and they're all present at equal power in the sound the interesting thing about white noise is that because it contains every frequency you can carve things into it so you can take X amount of time of white noise and pass it through a bandpass filter and only extract out a tiny portion of the audible frequency and in so doing you can create a very wide variety of [Music] so I mentioned at the outset that this is an explicitly religious work and in fact she'll cousin was a religious man and in this particular piece he uses a text taken from the song of the use so the story here is that there were three youth so Shadrach Meshach and Abednego who refused to bow before a statue of King Nebuchadnezzar and were punished by being thrown into a fiery furnace to be burned to everyone's astonishment they were absolutely unscathed and indeed they emerged singing a beautiful song of praise to the Lord and all of his creations so Stockhausen was very taken with his poem and said at the time that he identified with these three youth not only because of the horrible childhood that heating turd but also more specifically because of the somewhat hostile and uncomprehending reception that a lot of his pieces received during the 1950's so from this 20 verse poem Stockhausen has extracted nine verses so we can have a look at the text here one of the things that you notice about it immediately from the formal point of view is that it has a refrain in it in other words there is a phrase that you hear in every single verse which is praise ye the Lord so in each verse we have a command for all of the various elements of the earth to praise their creator and then this is followed with crazy the Lord so this type of structure lent itself perfectly to Stockhausen cereal technique in the sense that it had a very simple recursive structure and that allowed him to have varying degrees of comprehensibility in other words because the structure of the poem is quite simple he was able to take individual elements of it and reorder them so in gazonga looming this text which was recorded and sung by the eleven-year-old boy soprano Yosef tochka-u' who incidentally went on to have extraordinary international career as a singer we have three levels of permutation of the text in other words three levels of distortion of the initial poem one is the word order so another words instead of housing oh ye angels Stockhausen might permutate the order of the words so you might end up with Oh angels ye for example the second level of permutation is the level of the syllable so that you have something where you can kind of recognize that it's the same words more or less but the syllables are presented out of order anyway end up with something like gels and Yi oh there's a still further level of permutation which is the level of the phoneme so the phoneme is even smaller than the syllable and it's more or less the level of the individual sound or the individual letter and then you would end up with something that is purely unintelligible so for example yogin s Li the idea that he had was to have seven degrees of intelligibility or unintelligibility and to be able to move seamlessly from one to the other throughout the work so there are phrases of the text that appear with absolute clarity where you understand every word perfectly and there are sections also where you can't understand anything and then there's everything in-between so again with everything in this piece he situated his elements along a continuum so that he could have continuous transformations from one state to another so you'll note that the German phrase PI's it ding hem so praise the Lord is the refrain that you hear throughout the work and it is heard very clearly in each section of the piece so whereas the other elements of the text are often subjected to these permutations that I mentioned earlier this one refrain every time that it appears it is heard in a very clear manner so when you're listening to the work it acts almost as a kind of signpost you can always pick it out it's always present and it's always very clear one thing I talked about earlier is the fact that the piece uses three basic categories of electronic sounds in order to generate the entire sound world of the piece so I'd like to just have a look at how that actually functions in the work so basically you have three categories of vocal sounds and three categories of electronic sounds and Stockhausen has a continuum that operates across two dimensions that allows them to get from one to the so on the one hand you have the continuum between local production and electronically generated sounds and on the other dimension of the continuum you have a progression from pure sounds too complex or noisy sounds so in the vocal end of the spectrum stall callosum takes all of the different aspects of vocal production and enumerates them so you have bowels you have fricatives / sibilants and you have consonants and for each of these he establishes some form of electronic analog which allows him to create similar sounds in the electronic domain so for vowels for example the corresponding electronic sound would be held sine tones so vowels in speech are the closest thing to pure pitched sounds so using a contemporary piece of software called max/msp i'm going to show you just very quickly how you might reproduce some of these sound techniques so in this program max/msp i can create a little sign tone generator and this will just generate a very very simple infantry signing tone any filtering and then I can simply alter the pitch the sine wave by changing America values up or down which results in a sound effect with Nirmal lower [Music] next you have fricatives or sibilance so sounds like F or s and Stockhausen establishes a connection between these and white noise and incidentally it's very interesting thing to note that you could actually produce white noise very easily using your voice just by holding these sorts of fricatives so or our elements that are extremely similar to white noise and basically by switching from an F sound to an epsilon you are filtering the sound you are in other words you are controlling the presence or the intensity of certain frequency zones so if I were to move from F to s and so on and so forth all I am doing is selectively filtering the sounds and again this is very easy to do in the electronic domain by taking white noise and filtering it so for example if I wanted to generate some white noise I could just go into this program and create a little noise object here a little noise white noise generator and then using different elements from the software I can variously filter it and alter the sound so I'm going to show you how this works so I've created just a little patch here in max/msp and what I have is a gain control so if I raise the gain control then I start to have some white noise beginning to appear then I have two other parameters that I can modify so one is the resonant in other words I can ask the program to focus on a specific frequency alone in this noise and then cut away the rest so basically that allows me to carve a pitched sound into the white noise by simply selectively resonating one area of the sound and discarding the rest and I can also modify the central frequency of the area that I wish to resonate by altering this parameter here next we have consonants which of course take many forms you have occlusives and voiced and unvoiced consonants and so on sounds like too good buh doo and so on and Stockhausen creates a parallel between these and these short impulsions that are created by an impulse generator in the studio so these would be just very very short sounds so using these three categories of sounds he's able to create an analogy between vocal and electronic sounds and again to travel between one and the other from a technical perspective gazonga tuning is a work of total serial ISM so I'd like to explain a little bit about what that means so in total serialism you can take basically any parameter of sound and subject it to an ordering principle of some kind so this is actually a logical outgrowth or extension of the twelve-tone or delta chthonic technique in which you take the twelfth chromatic semitones and you put them into an arbitrary order of some kind and then you use this new order of the semitones in order to construct your piece this is a technique that was developed by Arnold Schoenberg and developed also later by his students vagrant and bear in total surrealism you can take this technique and apply it to such parameters as rhythm Tambor you can actually apply it to anything that can be ordered and anything where you could have discrete steps in the case of gazonga Union doesn't started out with a series of seven values which he then put into an arbitrary order which in this case is three seven one six five two four and this forms the basic ordering material for all of the temporal aspects of the piece how long a given section would be how long you would spend on a particular type of material how long a specific sound would be within a more complex array of events and so on and so forth and he used this series or similar ordering principles in order to determine how much of a certain texture would be present in a given section what the ratio would be between vocal and electronic sounds and and so forth so basically these numbers in and of themselves are absolutely meaningless we we can't really derive anything of aesthetic consequence from a series of numbers necessarily so we don't really care too much about what the actual numbers are it doesn't really matter however what you should know and what you should understand about this way of working is that it allows or Stockhausen to have an endless series of different variations on these textural possibilities in the piece basically it makes everything absolutely fluid so you can have an endless variety of different textures different shapes different combinations of the different parameters and so on without anything ever necessarily repeating and indeed one of the sort of Cardinal aesthetic and technical features of music of this period is it's noted absence of explicit repetition so you have a principle of generalized variation in which every aspect of the music can be modified and probably will be modified at any given second and you have this constantly shifting relationship between the different sound aspects of the piece one of the consequences of the total serial technique is that it tends to level out any hierarchy so that for example in a classical work total serialism in every every individual element so if it's the pitch domain then every semitone will appear equally frequently in the course of the work if it's a question of rhythm then every rhythmic value that's used in the piece will appear an equal number of times and no one value essentially is allowed to predominate so really the main aim here is to create new forms new forms of life in a sense and to create an entirely new musical language from the ground up so this technique can really be used in an infinite number of ways and in fact it's the most open-ended technique imaginable in a sense because really the composer can use it very flexibly very strictly very rigidly and can also combine it with a much more intuitive approach so for example you could determine an overall shape of a piece and you could determine the number of sections that you want and what you want each section to do and what the basic directional tendency will be of the materials but then in order to manage the sort of micro ordering and events within that you can use Cirie's there's all sorts of approaches that you can take so I'd like to just have a look at how this particular series is used in the work socialism starts out by choosing his seven numbers series and incidentally this principle of having the number seven is actually quite significant from a structural point of view throughout the entire piece gazonga looming though was initially intended to have seven sections ABCD efg but owing to time constraints in the simple fact that the work was taking a colossal amount of time to finish he ended up not finishing section G so the work as it stands contains six sections but anyway he started out with these seven values which he placed in the order three seven one six five two four so he starts out by laying out these seven numbers horizontally and then he takes the same numbers and puts them down vertically so you end up with this and so what's happening now is that what was the second element of the horizontal list of numbers so the number seven becomes the first element of a second row the third element of the horizontal series one becomes the first element of the third row and so on and so forth so what this allows is 2,000 to do is to basically transpose the series upon itself and it becomes a function of functions effectively this was actually a technique that was developed by was initially and later taken up by Stockhausen so if we were to continue the series and then transpose all of the numbers in the manner that I just described we would end up with what's known as a serial square so the way that this works is fairly simple to get from three to seven in the top line here we have to add 4 to get from 7 to 1 we have to subtract 6 to go from 1 to 6 we have to add 5 and so on and so forth he retains this same series of differentials between one number and the next and simply applies it to each successive row in the serial square starting with the second the third the fourth the fifth and so on element of the initial series so the second row that starts with while we add for and we end up with the number four we subtract six and we end up with five we add five and we end up with three and so on and so forth and you can see that it's very straightforward to complete the square using this procedure so what we end up with here is a series of series in which each one has the same basic proportions or differentials between the elements but the actual curve or shape of the series is different in every single row so whereas with a classical sort of transposition of a twelve-tone row you retain the same shape of the melody each time it's just a semitone higher with this procedure you actually go to a sort of deeper structural level so you have constantly varying outlines or shapes of this basic series but you have the same series of proportions within it so I'd like to just walk you through section a of the piece [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so one of the first things that I can say about the piece from a formal perspective is that each of the sections lasts a different amount of time and this is again in keeping with the principle of serial ordering where you have the elements that are constantly shifting so section a is a relatively short section of the work it lasts from the beginning to one minute and ten seconds but it already presents a lot of the basic sound material of the work even though some of them don't come into play until later so for example a series of bass impulsions that doesn't start to occur until section C of the work and the white noise element also starts to come in a little bit later but already in section a we have a number of important sonic events the first thing that you hear in the work is an ascending impulse complex so in this impulse complex we have basically a swarm of thousands of little individual tiny little sounds that have varying pitches and varying degrees of intensity and different spacings between them this initial swarm was something that Stockhausen games had to calculate entirely by hand so these sorts of things were enormous ly laborious to generate you really had to do it frequency by frequency and then pile them up and then combine them later but the main thing you want to retain from this is that he was taking these sonic categories and applying them to extremely simple different little shapes so in the case of these impulse complexes there are four basic shapes that you hear throughout the work one is that it starts in the high register and then zooms downwards another one is that it starts low and then progresses up to the high register the third shade is that it starts high goes low and then ends up high again at the end and the fourth is that you start low go high and then go back down again so the very first thing you hear in this piece is an ascending impulse complex so you'll notice that we start in a medium register and then these sounds get higher and higher until we end up with only a single frequency that is held [Music] so the important thing to retain about this from an expressive and aesthetic point of view is that it is an explicitly religious gesture in other words from the very opening seconds of the word Stockhausen is signalling to us that we are leaving the earthly realm and ascending into a heavenly realm and then as soon as this low high dialectic has been established we hear an Angelica boy soprano voice entering on the words you belt or exalt and from a purely classical contrapuntal point of view this is interesting also in the sense that we have a very simple elementary form of contrary motion so you have the ascending gesture in the electronic sounds and then you have a descending fourth in the vocal part a further duality is established between electronics and vocal sounds and a third one is established between solo voice and massed voices so I mentioned at the outset that this was initially intended to be a work for voices and electronics and so one technique that Stockhausen exploits throughout the work is he superimposes individual recordings of the boy soprano singing individual pitches in order to form chords and other more complex polyphonic textures so immediately after the entrance of the word you vote at the outset of the work you hear these sort of choral masses in which the boy soprano is singing fragments of the text and this fragment of text is sometimes presented in a very straightforward way in the original order sometimes with the words permutated and so on and so forth according to the procedure that I outlined earlier then he would have as many as seven individual lines and superimposed them and using his serial determination he would figure out what words would be predominant of the degree of incomprehensible ax T or comprehensibility of the text the number of different voices that would be superimposed and so on and so forth so here we have a series of different choral masses that follow the entry of the word you been following this the next sonic event we have in the piece is a seven voice vocal cord on the word in which means him if you listen closely to it you'll notice that each individual component or note or or held sound within the cord is subjected to various degrees of permutation so in other words in one voice it starts very softly and gets louder and then get soft again and other voices you'll have different dynamic curves so superimposed you have actually a relatively complex sonic event so it's it's significant also that the Stockhausen is choosing to have this lengthy 22 second long vocal cord on the word him which of course refers to the Lord [Music] finally the piece ends with a defending and then a sending impulse complex so its bookended by these primary shapes on either side [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] gazonga Union actually gets more and more complex as the piece progresses and we have more and more elements that come into play across the works duration so this culminates in Section F the sixth and final section of the work which is actually the longest and by far the most complex and indeed this section alone contains over 900 in two individually numbered sonic events so in order to work all of this out the Stockhausen had to produce a very considerable number of sketches and I've been able to have a look at them because the Stockhausen foundation has produced a lavish facsimile of the composer's sketches and it's an absolutely amazing document to behold so I just like to have a look thousands work process and show you how much labor was involved in producing this particular piece so here are just a couple of sketches so you can have a quick idea and bear in mind that there are literally hundreds of these sketches in existence so in the first sketch here you have a list of Sonic events that are being used in a particular section of the work and he describes their characteristics how long they're to last it describes their technical characteristics and he checks them off as he produces each individual one in this sketch you can see a basic layout of how each individual element is to be positioned and how long it's meant to last and these are basically editing notes to show your Stockhausen hell yes to edit each of the five separate tracks that go into making this multi-channel work so I'd like to have a look at just one tiny little portion of a very large sketch page and just show you just again how this actually was worked out and again just show you how this was actually worked out so one of the remarkable things about gazonga you know from a technical perspective is that instead of thinking in terms of pitch and rhythm sort of conventional categories of music you have to think rather in terms of centimeters in other words the specific length of tape that would be required to produce a certain duration and Hertz in other words the specific frequency of a sound so you see this coming up again in the game in many sketches and the other thing is that he created a sort of shorthand that allowed him to refer quickly to the different sonic elements that are being used in the piece so I've got a list of some of the elements there's I believe 11 or 12 of them altogether that are used in the work and in his sketches he uses this shorthand to refer to them and also indicates their specific technical characteristics so he had to write every single one out by hand and calculate them and then these would be realized in this studio by Stockhausen himself along with his assistants so on this particular sketch page we have the abbreviation I K which refers to infos complex or impulse complexes which are the ascending or descending shapes that I mentioned earlier so here on the left hand column of the sketch page you see the number of each Sonic event so from the number 93 and so on and then next we have in the second column the material type so this is where he uses these abbreviations I K and so on next we have a check mark just showing that he's he's successfully managed to create this sound and then finally we have the tape length measured in centimeters so bearing in mind that at the time the standard was that for one second of sound you would need seventy six point two centimeters of tape so these are extremely short sound so some of them would be just a fraction of a second and again each one had to be calculated by hand and then measured off with a tape measure and then physically cut and spliced using editing tape in studio so you have to imagine this procedure being carried out for tens of thousands of sounds in the course of this individual work so the other sound categories that are described in a sketch are I'm some that inputs so cords made out of single impulses so created by an impulse generator and then superimposed in a studio next we have seen is complex so sine wave complexes so these would be chords made out of individual sine tones that would be variously filtered and with different dynamic curves next we have house vendôme so these are individual bands of white noise that have been filtered to 2% of their original width using bandpass filters lauda and Sinden which means speech sounds and syllables so these are individual vocal recordings by joseph coschka which are then cut up and edited and then reinsert it back into the work so this was just a very partial expose of gazonga you mean it would be possible to talk about the work literally for hours there are many aspects of it which I haven't even had time to touch upon but really the main thing that you should do at this point if you found any of this intriguing is just go and listen to the piece and don't be surprised if you're not able to hear everything initially because it's a very very complex word in my case I've listened to it probably hundreds of times and each time I'm still hearing new things in it so the first few hearings will be useful in terms of gay a sense of the overall sound world being the sort of expressive sound world of the piece but in order to get a more detailed sense of the individual elements and components that go into it you will have to hear it again and so one thing I would recommend is listen to it two or three times then put it away come back to it in a week or two weeks or something listen to it again and you'll notice that you'll already be hearing quite a lot more into it one of the tell-tale signs of a great work is that you can return to it multiple times you don't get tired of it you find new things in it and it's rich enough that it will reward multiple hearings and then it's certainly the case with this work which as far as I'm concerned is a bonafide masterpiece [Music]

Channel: Samuel Andreyev

Views: 54,106

Keywords: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stockhausen, Gesang der Jünglinge, Samuel Andreyev, Music Analysis, Music Theory, Contemporary music, Avant garde, Modern composition, 20th century

Id: zv-I-CNv3JI

Length: 42min 0sec (2520 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2017