Alphabet für Liège
Encyclopedia
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
) by Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
, and is Work Number 36 in the composer's catalog of works. A performance of it lasts four hours.
The fundamental idea underlying Alphabet is the notion that sound vibrations can affect both living beings and inanimate matter (Maconie 2005, 341). There are thirteen scenes, or musical images, each illustrating the physical effects of sound, ranging from making acoustic vibrations visible to a demonstration of Asian mantra
Mantra
A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that is considered capable of "creating transformation"...
techniques. These ideas were developed in conversations with the British biophysicist and lecturer on mystical aspects of sound vibration Jill Purce, who also called Stockhausen's attention to the work of Hans Jenny
Hans Jenny (cymatics)
Hans Jenny was a physician and natural scientist who is considered the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena.-Life and career:Jenny was born in Basel, Switzerland...
(Kurtz 1992, 192–93; Jenny 1967). In a radio interview three months before the premiere, Stockhausen explained his purpose was to show "how sound waves always change the molecules, even the atoms of a being who listens to music, making them vibrate. And that is what we want to make visible, because most people only believe what they see" (Stockhausen and Lichtenfeld 1972).
History
Alphabet was created as a commission from the City of LiègeLiège
Liège is a major city and municipality of Belgium located in the province of Liège, of which it is the economic capital, in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium....
on the initiative of Philippe Boesmans
Philippe Boesmans
-Life:Boesmans was born in Tongeren and studied piano at the Conservatory in Liège, where he was also introduced to serial composing techniques by Pierre Froidebise. However, it was only after coming into contact with the "Liège Group" in 1957 that he began to write music, as a self-taught composer...
, for the Nuits de Septembre festival, and was premiered during a "Journée Karlheinz Stockhausen" on 23 September 1972. Stockhausen envisaged the work for performance in a labyrinth-like building. The venue chosen for the premiere consisted of fourteen still-empty areas, all leading off of a central corridor, in the basement level of the half-completed radio and television building in the Liège Palais des Congrès, before the wall coverings, doors, and office partitions had been installed. The bare concrete and breeze-block surfaces were whitewashed especially for the performance, and the rooms were all open to each other through open doors and windows. In this world premiere, only eleven of the thirteen situations were included (Kurtz 1992, 193; Stockhausen 1978a, 193). Performers included members of the British group Gentle Fire (Hugh Davies
Hugh Davies
Hugh Seymour Davies was a musicologist, composer, and inventor of experimental musical instruments.Davies was born in Exmouth, Devon, England. After attending Westminster School, he studied music at Worcester College, Oxford from 1961 to 1964. Shortly after he traveled to Cologne, Germany to work...
, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Stuart Jones), five of the six members of the Collegium Vocale Köln
Collegium Vocale Köln
Collegium Vocale Köln is a German vocal ensemble, founded in 1966 as a quintet when its members were still students at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne. It is directed by Wolfgang Fromme, who also sings tenor in the ensemble...
(Wolfgang Fromme, Dagmar von Biel, Hans-Alderich Billig, Karl O. Barkey, and Helga Hamm), Rosalind Davies, fish expert Dr. Johannes Kneutgen, Joachim Krist, Michael Vetter
Michael Vetter
Michael Vetter is a German composer, novelist, poet, performer, calligrapher, artist, and teacher.-Biography:Vetter was born in Oberstdorf in the Allgäu region of Germany, and received a conventional school education...
, Atsuko Iwami, Herbert Henck, Jill Purce, with Peter Eötvös
Peter Eötvös
Péter Eötvös is a Hungarian composer and conductor.Eötvös was born in Odorheiu Secuiesc/Székelyudvarhely, Szeklerland, Transylvania . He studied composition in Budapest and Cologne. From 1962, he composed for film in Hungary. Eötvös played regularly with the Stockhausen Ensemble between 1968 and...
as "musical leader" (Stockhausen 1971; Stockhausen 1978a, 185–92).
Form and content
Stockhausen himself recognized in Alphabet a precedent for the theatrical conceptions he would explore later in LichtLicht
Licht , subtitled "The Seven Days of the Week," is a cycle of seven operas composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2003. In total, the cycle contains over 29 hours of music.-Origin:...
(Tannenbaum 1987, 82). The title originates from a programme of actions associated with the letters of the alphabet: Anrufen (call, appeal, implore), Begleiten (accompany), Chaos, Dudeln (tootle), Eintönig (monotone), etc. There are thirty "letters" in all: the familiar twenty-six of the English alphabet, plus SCHnell (rapid), SPringen (leap), STören (disturb), and Übergang zu (transition to) (Stockhausen 1978a, 195). Each is written on a little card, and the performers of each group draw two of these cards from the deck. These become the basis for excursions by the performers of each "situation" to visit one of the other situations and exchange tonal information—each group therefore does this twice in the course of a performance (Kurtz 1992, 193).
Events are coordinated by acoustic signals given by a "musical leader": Japanese chimes (kane
Kane (musical instrument)
The is a type of bell from Japan.Often accompanying Japanese folk music, or Min'yō, is a dish-shaped bell called a . It is often hung on a bar, and the player holds the bell in place with one hand, and beats the Kane with a specialized mallet with the other...
and rin
Singing bowl
Singing bowls are a type of bell, specifically classified as a standing bell. Rather than hanging inverted or attached to a handle, singing bowls sit with the bottom surface resting...
) mark each minute; sustained tones mark the sequence of moments (the ends of which are "erased" by the sound of shaken bundles of Indian pellet bells); twice in every hour the coordinator runs through the space shaking strings of camel bells, which causes all activity to cease (Maconie 2005, 342). These cessations occur five times over the four-hour span (Stockhausen 1978a, 198).
Alphabet consists of thirteen "situations" (Stockhausen 1978a, 193–95):
- No special function, a composition by Stockhausen, Am Himmel wandre ich, twelve songs on American Indian poems, for two amplified singers and sound projectionist
- Tone vibrations made visible in liquids, light rays, and flames. Generate visible models in fluids by the influence of specific sound vibrations (play a polyphonic sound structure into two or three containers) and project them on a screen.
- Make sound spectra visible in solid material (powder, iron filings, etc.) as a composed program with renewals and variation in duration of about half an hour:
- With tones, cause glass to break.
- Magnetize food with tones. Make the magnetization visible by means of a pendulum. Composition in the manner of the Indianerlieder, that is, a succession of melodies that produce a whole, if they are distributed over a period of four hours.
- Massage a human body with sounds (vibrations of a musical instrument are translated by a dancer into her body. Her body is a living loudspeaker for the instrument).
- Self-extinguishing tones (e.g., play a trumpet closely or at varying distances against a wall that is either bare or hung with a variety of surface materials, in order to achieve extinctions).
- "Make love" with tones (e.g., with two recorders and/or voices generate beat frequenciesBeat (acoustics)In acoustics, a beat is an interference between two sounds of slightly different frequencies, perceived as periodic variations in volume whose rate is the difference between the two frequencies....
and perhaps display the beat fequencies on oscilloscopes). - Using tones, harmonize the seven centres of the body (mantra technique).
- Use tones to repel thoughts and keep thinking at bay
- Use tones to speed up and slow down the respiration and heartbeat of living creatures (fish). Make the respiration rate of the fish visible on oscilloscopes, and at the same time make them audible. Project enlargements of the fish, from above and from the side, onto a screen (electronic camera, large-screen TV). In addition, hang up explanatory texts in large letters: Rhythm of gill movements, Rhythm of pulses (no conversing with the audience). An underwater loudspeaker in the aquarium; connect to it two pulse generators and two narrow-band tuned-resonance filter/amplifiers [abstimmbare Anzeigeverstärker] (a synthesizer with pre-programmed sound textures).
- Invoke and supplicate the spirits of the dead in tones (until in a trance).
- Pray using tones (sometimes intelligibly); study sung prayers of all religions (listen to tape recordings).
The verbal instructions for most of the scenes are either descriptions for physically inspired sound installations (e.g., situation 2: "Make sound vibrations visible") or appear to be intuitive music
Intuitive music
Intuitive music is a form of musical improvisation based on instant creation in which fixed principles or rules may or may not have been given. It is a type of process music where instead of a traditional music score, verbal or graphic instructions and ideas are provided to the performers...
texts like those of Aus den sieben Tagen
Aus den Sieben Tagen
Aus den sieben Tagen is a collection of 15 text compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in May 1968, in reaction to a personal crisis, and characterized as "Intuitive music"—music produced primarily from the intuition rather than the intellect of the performer...
and Für kommende Zeiten, composed not long before Alphabet (Straebel 1995, §3.2.2). Situation 10, in particular, strongly resembles Es from Aus den sieben Tagen: "Think NOTHING … / as soon as you start to think, stop / and try to reattain / the state of NON-THINKING …" (Maconie 2005, 342).
Two performers each are required for situations 1, 5, 6, and 8. This brings the total number of performers, including the musical leader, to eighteen.
Potential hazards
Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology
The former Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology was located in Seewiesen, Bavaria, Germany. It was one of 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society ....
in Seewiesen, conducting research on the physiological effects of music or rhythm on the body and nervous system. He reported that there was a physical danger in the case of fish:
For fish, the change of rhythm can be fatal. Normally fish breathe by opening and closing their gills. The lowest rate to which their gill movement can be reduced and still maintain life is 43 "breaths" per minute. If a clock ticks only 40 times per minute, the fish gill movement slows down too much, and the fish strives convulsively to breathe faster but cannot. It swims rapidly to escape the ticking noise, but if it cannot retreat to a quiet area, it expires. (Anon 1965)
Another writer has recalled an "infamous" French series of experiments with a "super-whistle" in the 1960s that demonstrated that very powerful low-frequency sounds (in the 5–8 Hz range) could interfere with the biorhythms of living creatures, to the extent of killing cattle, and warns that Alphabets situation 9 ("harmonize the seven centres of the body") could prove similarly hazardous if done "scientifically … with physical vibrations coordinated to biological and brain rhythms" (Maconie 2005, 342 & 344).
Indianerlieder
The Indianerlieder (American Indian Songs)—also known by the opening words of the first song, "In the sky I am walking", and by their German translation "Am Himmel wandre ich"—constitute the only fully worked-out component of the Alphabet. It is also the only part capable of performance independent of the larger work, and the only part to have been published. The score is dedicated to its first performers, Helga Hamm-Albrecht and Karl O. Barkey, and bears the work Number 36½ in the composer's catalog of works.The texts employed are (Stockhausen 1978b, 201):
- twelve short poems, sayings, or prayers of various American Indian tribes, in English translations from an anthology called Indian Prose and Poetry (Astrov 1962)
- Onomatopoetic vocal sounds (bird songs, wind, war cries, etc.),
- "unusual vocal sounds" and "favourite names", freely chosen by the performers
- heckling
- free intimate texts (something erotic, whispered to a beloved, which could never be spoken directly)
- a freely chosen fairy tale dealing with tones
- names such as Jillina, Jika, Jillaika (all pet names for Jill Purce), or Eagloo (a bird-man name, one of many used by the composer)
- purely sonorous vowel and consonant constructions, interspersed with finger snaps, claps, foot taps, etc.
It consists of twelve scenes, each of which includes one American Indian song, for a pair of singer-actors. The scenes follow one another without interruption (Stockhausen 1978b, 205). The first song is intoned on a single note, C, the next song adds a second note to the first, the F above, the third adds the G a semitone higher still, the fourth descends to E, and so on, until reaching a twelve-tone row in the final song, but with the notes in fixed registers: the basic formula
Formula composition
Formula composition is a serially-derived technique encountered principally in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, involving the projection, expansion, and Ausmultiplikation of either a single melody-formula, or a two- or three-voice contrapuntal construction .In contrast to serial music, where the...
of the work (Frisius 2008, 255; Kurtz 1992, 193). The songs were originally conceived for two women's voices, but then the composer decided they could be performed (as they were at the premiere) by a man and a woman. They have also been performed by two male singers (Stockhausen, Conen, and Hennlich 1989, 307).
In a long version, such as is used in the four-hour-long Alphabet für Liège, the twelve scenes are sung straight through four times (with a pause of about fifteen minutes between each performance), with variations each time in dynamics and tempos. For an extremely long version (possibly alternating two different pairs of singers or exchanging singer combinations), the twelve scenes can be sung twelve times each, in the sequence: 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, … 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12, and then 2–12, 3–12, etc., down to 10+11+12, 11+12, and ending with 12. In such a performance, each song should be varied upon each repetition in dynamics and tempo (Stockhausen 1978b, 208).
Performance history and reception
Sainte-Baume
The Sainte-Baume is a mountain ridge spreading between the départements of Bouches-du-Rhône and Var in southern France...
in Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
, with the theme "Music and Magic". This performance was in a particularly beautiful natural setting:
At the foot of the great cliff of Sainte-Baume, high above a Provence cut up by highways, magic took precedence over futuristic technology. A calm, gentle, tender magic, in agreement with the Mediterranean night, all fragrant with the scent of the garrigueGarrigueGarrigue or phrygana is a type of low, soft-leaved scrubland ecoregion and plant community in the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub biome. It is found on limestone soils around the Mediterranean Basin, generally near the seacoast, where the climate is ameliorated, but where annual summer...
. A reassuring magic speaking primarily through music.
Very soon, indeed, from one to another of the twelve "cells" where the musician-celebrants were operating, sounds converged, answered one another, intersected, developed, weaving an unpredictable and subtle symphony of space. From the barn which opens onto the fields, fields that abut on the mountain, the music flowed into the evening air in a light aura all splashed with echoes. It was, revealed to the ear, like the very breathing of nature. And there were many of us there, lying prostrate for four hours on end, inside this music that had neither beginning nor end, nor any function other than to generate itself in the cyclical process of eternity. (Fleuret 1974)
The component Indianerlieder, on the other hand, had many successful performances in the years following the Liège premiere by the artists who had premiered the work, Helga Hamm-Albrecht and Karl O. Barkey. For example, they performed them in 1973 at the Metz
Metz
Metz is a city in the northeast of France located at the confluence of the Moselle and the Seille rivers.Metz is the capital of the Lorraine region and prefecture of the Moselle department. Located near the tripoint along the junction of France, Germany, and Luxembourg, Metz forms a central place...
Festival, in 1974 at both the Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikfest in Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and in 1978 in Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Luxembourg , officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland in the south...
. They also recorded the work several times for various German radio stations (Frisius 2008, 253). The Indianerlieder have also been recorded twice commercially, and have been viewed as the "key piece" within Alphabet (Kurtz 1992, 193–94). However, one critic who had previously heard the Indianerlieder in the context of Alphabet found, after hearing them separately at the Metz festival in November 1973, that the "somewhat artificial religiosity and falsely naïve Indian Songs suffer from being given in a theatre, without the 'mystical' atmosphere and ambulatory meditation of Alphabet" (Lonchampt 1973).
Filmography
- Alphabet pour Liège. Réalisation de Georges Yu. Colour, Commentary in French. Film of the world premiere, 23 September 1972. Liège: Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté FrançaiseRTBFRadio Télévision Belge Francophone is the public broadcasting organization of the French Community of Belgium, the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium...
, 1972. DVD release, Kürten: Stockhausen Verlag. [A one-hour documentary of filmed segments from the dress rehearsal for the premiere, with commentary in French by Jacques Dès.] Transcription by Heidi Fritz of the French commentary; English translation by Jayne Obst of the commentary.
Discography (Indianerlieder)
- Stockhausen, Karlheinz. "Am Himmel wandre ich …" (Indianerlieder) / "In the Sky I am Walking …" (American Indian Songs) /"Dans le ciel jeme promène …" (Chants indiennes) . Helga Hamm-Albrecht (mezzo-soprano), Karl O. Barkley (baritone), Karlheinz Stockhausen (sound direction). Recorded February 1977. LP recording. DG 2530 876. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 1977. Reissued on CD, Stockhausen Complete Edition CD 20. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag, 1992.
- Voxnova (musical group). In the Sky I Am Walking: Songs of the Native Americans. Isabelle Soccoja (mezzo-soprano), Nicholas Isherwood (bass-baritone) in the Stockhausen, with Valérie Chouanière (soprano) and Thierry Fouré (tenor). CD sound disc. Mode 68. New York: Mode Records, 1998. [With nine pieces of Native-American music, and Pascal Dusapin, Red Rock, the scene "Après" from the opera Roméo et Juliette.]