Aus den sieben Tagen is a collection of 15 text compositions 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"...

, composed in May 1968, in reaction to a personal crisis, and characterized as "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...

"—music produced primarily from the intuition

Intuition (knowledge)

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. "The word 'intuition' comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is often roughly translated as meaning 'to look inside'’ or 'to contemplate'." Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify...

 rather than the intellect

Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in different ways, including the abilities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and problem solving....

 of the performer(s). It is Work Number 26 in the composer's catalog of works.

History

The seven days of the title were 7–13 May 1968. Although this coincided with the beginning of the May 1968 protests and general strike in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Stockhausen does not appear to have been aware of them at the time. These texts were written at Stockhausen's home in Kürten

Kürten

Kürten is a village and a municipality in the Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.-Neighbouring places:Nearby cities include Bergisch Gladbach, Overath, Wermelskirchen, and Wipperfürth...

 during the first five of those days, at night or late in the evening (Stockhausen 1978, 149 and 529). During daylight hours, including the remaining two days, Stockhausen wrote “many poems,” as well as reading Satprem

Satprem

Satprem was a French author and an important disciple of The Mother.-Life and work:Satprem was born Bernard Enginger in Paris and had a seafaring childhood and youth in Brittany. During World War II he was a member of the French Resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo in late 1943 and spent one...

’s book on Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo , born Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose , was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress...

, and experienced “many extraordinary things” (Stockhausen 1978, 528–29). Some of the poems appear in Stockhausen 1971, 368–76.

Content

Often regarded as meditation

Meditation

Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....

 exercises, all but two of these texts nonetheless describe in words specific musical events: "I don't want some spiritistic sitting

Séance

A séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word "séance" comes from the French word for "seat," "session" or "sitting," from the Old French "seoir," "to sit." In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma"...

—I want music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

! I don't mean something mystical

Mysticism

Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...

, but rather everything completely direct, from concrete experience" (Stockhausen, quoted in Ritzel 1970, 15). Despite the manner of notation, Stockhausen's approach remains essentially serial

Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

:

In his cycle FROM THE SEVEN DAYS Stockhausen attempts to find musical answers to such fundamental questions regarding the conditions of a harmonious interplay of spirit and matter, which correspond to his serial process thinking and to the maxims of the experimental production of the sound material by composing temporally ordered pulses. . . . As a composer he wants to mediate between the extremes rather than to just follow the preconception of a linear development from the fragmentary and dissonant to the whole and harmonious. (Peters 2003, 226)

The fifteen constituent pieces are:

1. Richtige Dauern (Right Durations), for ca. 4 players
2. Unbegrenzt (Unlimited), for ensemble
3. Verbindung (Connection), for ensemble
4. Treffpunkt (Meeting Point), for ensemble
5. Nachtmusik (Night Music), for ensemble
6. Abwärts (Downward), for ensemble
7. Aufwärts (Upward), for ensemble
8. Oben und Unten (Above and Below), theater piece, for a man, a woman, a child, and 4 instrumentalists
9. Intensität (Intensity), for ensemble
10. Setz die Segel zur Sonne (Set Sail for the Sun), for ensemble
11. Kommunion (Communion), for ensemble
12. Litanei (Litany), for speaker or choir
13. Es (It), for ensemble
14. Goldstaub (Gold Dust), for ensemble
15. Ankunft (Arrival), for speaker or speaking choir

The most detailed text is the central one, Oben und Unten, which gives instructions for three actors and a group of instrumentalists. Twelve of the other pieces describe musical processes or states, in three different general types, and the remaining two, Litanei and Ankunft are more in the nature of manifestos, to be read aloud either by a single speaker or a speaking choir (Kohl 1978; Bergstrøm-Nielsen 1997). In 1997, Stockhausen made a performing version of the former text, under the title Litanei 97, for a speaking choir with occasional sung interjections.

Related works

Between 1968 and 1971, Stockhausen composed a companion set of 17 text pieces, titled Für kommende Zeiten (For Times to Come). These pieces are:

1. Übereinstimmung (Unanimity), for ensemble
2. Verlängerung (Elongation)
3. Verkürzung (Shortening)
4. Über die Grenze (Across the Boundary), for small ensemble
5. Kommunikation (Communication), for small ensemble
6. Intervall (Interval), for piano four-hands
7. Ausserhalb (Outside), for small ensemble
8. Innerhalb (Inside), for small ensemble
9. Anhalt (Halt), for small ensemble
10. Schwingung (Vibration), for ensemble
11. Spektren (Spectra), for small ensemble
12. Wellen (Waves), for ensemble
13. Zugvogel (Bird of Passage), for ensemble
14. Vorahnung (Presentiment), for 4–7 interpreters
15. Japan, for ensemble
16. Wach (Awake), for ensemble
17. Ceylon, for small ensemble

Further reading

• Boberg, Johan. 2002. "Through the Eye of the Golden Needle: Personal Experiences of Stockhausen’s GOLDSTAUB". Translated from Nutida Musik/Tritonus 2002:4.
• Bojé, Harald. 1978. "Aus den sieben Tagen: 'Text'-Interpretationen". Feedback Papers, no. 16 (August): 10–14.
• Frisius, Rudolf. 2008. Karlheinz Stockhausen II: Die Werke 1950–1977; Gespräch mit Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Es geht aufwärts". Mainz, London, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Toronto: Schott Musik International. ISBN 9783795702496.
• Kurtz, Michael. 1988. "Aus den Sieben Tagen: Points de vue biographique et historique sur les compositions-textes de mai 1968". In Karlheinz Stockhausen (programme booklet). Paris: Contrechamps/Festival d'Automne à Paris.
• Nakaji, Masatsune. 1994. "Karlheinz Stockhausens Intuitive Musik: c'est Le Dispositif Chaosmique de Transformation”. Genesis (The Bulletin of Kyoto University of Art and Design) vol. 1. HTML versions 1995.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 2009. Kompositorische Grundlagen Neuer Musik: Sechs Seminare für die Darmstädter Ferienkurse 1970, edited by Imke Misch. Kürten: Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik. ISBN 978-3-00-027313-1.
• Wilms, Holger. 2000. "Wie kommt der Kosmos in den Konzertsaal? Karlheinz Stockhausen im Gespräch". A Tempo 6 (June).