Mantra (Stockhausen)
Encyclopedia
Mantra is a composition by the German
composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
. It was composed in 1970 and premiered in autumn of the same year in Donaueschingen
. The work is scored for two ring-modulated piano
s; each player is also equipped with a chromatic set of crotales
(antique cymbals) and a wood block
, and one player is equipped with a short-wave radio producing morse code or a magnetic tape recording of morse code.
piano duo, and by early 1969 he had become determined to do so (Blumröder 1976, 94; Toop 1986, 194). On a flight from the Northeastern United States to Los Angeles in September 1969 or shortly before, he had sketched "a kind of theater piece for two pianos" titled Vision, and in March of 1970 began to work out a score, but broke off after just three pages (Cott 1973, 222–23; Toop 1986, 195, 197). During an automobile trip from Madison, Connecticut to Boston, a melody came to Stockhausen, along with the idea of expanding such a musical figure over a very long period of time—fifty or sixty minutes. He jotted the melody down on an envelope at that time, but it only occurred to him after having abandoned Vision that this might become the basis for his new two-piano composition. Stockhausen later recalled that this was early in September 1969 (Cott 1973, 222–23), but the sketch is in fact dated 26 February (Conen 1991, 59–60). Later in the year, on 22 September 1969 at the Couvent d'Alziprato in southern France, he had composed an intuitive music
text composition, Intervall, for two pianists playing "four-hands" (on one piano), but it did not appeal to the Kontarsky brothers—especially to Alfons, who lacked the experience his brother Aloys had gained from performing text-pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen
, as a member of Stockhausen's ensemble. Intervall, eventually premiered by Roger Woodward
and J. Romaniuk, later became part of Stockhausen's second cycle of intuitive-music compositions, Für kommende Zeiten (Toop 1986, 195–97).
Stockhausen mentioned his wish to write something for the Kontarsky brothers to Heinrich Strobel, director of the Music Division of the SWF Baden-Baden
and Artistic Director of the Donaueschinger Musiktage für Zeitgenossische Tonkunst
and, toward the end of 1969, Strobel commissioned a work for two pianos for the 1970 Donaueschingen Festival (Blumröder 1976, 94). After abandoning Vision, Stockhausen took up the melody he had jotted down the previous September and on its basis made a form plan and laid out the new work's skeleton between 1 May and 20 June 1970 in Osaka
, Japan. He then completed the score in an unbroken stretch of work at his home in Kürten
from 10 July to 18 August 1970. Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky gave the premiere of Mantra in Domaueschingen on 18 October 1970, and made the first recording of the work from 10 to 13 June 1971 at the Tonstudio Kreillerstraße 22 in Munich, for Deutsche Grammophon (Stockhausen 1978, 154). The score first appeared in print only in 1975, as one of the first publications of the composer's newly founded Stockhausen-Verlag (Conen 1991, 62).
This work involves the expansion and contraction of a counterpoint
ed pair of melodies
, which the composer calls a "formula" (Stockhausen 2003, 3 and 6). In this particular work (the first of a long succession of compositions to use formula technique
), Stockhausen chose the term "mantra
" in order "to avoid the words theme, row or subject, as in a fugue" (Stockhausen 2003, 2), and "Mantra" also became the title of the entire work. In Mantra, the two-strand formula is stated near the outset of the piece by piano I. According to the composer, the mantra "has thirteen notes, and each cymbal sound occurring once in the piece indicates the large sections—you hear the cymbal whenever a new central sound announces the next section of the work" (Cott 1973, 220–22). Although "the cymbals have the same pitches as the mantra and can thus mark the 13 form cycles of the two pianists … they are not identical", and "there are also some sections in which a larger number of cymbal strokes occurs” (Stockhausen 2003, 9). Though this mantra recurs constantly, the structure of the composition is not a theme and variations as found in classical composers such as Beethoven and Bach, because the material is never varied, only expanded and contracted (both in duration and in pitch) to different degrees; not a single note is ever added, it is never "accompanied" or embellished (Stockhausen 1978, 155). The comparatively strict predetermination of the form plan is occasionally broken and altered through the use of insertions, additions, and small deviations and exceptions (Blumröder 1976, 102). Near the end of the composition there is an extremely fast section that is a compression of the entire work into the smallest temporal space; in this section, all of the expansions and transpositions of the mantra formula are summarized as fast as possible and in four layers (Stockhausen 1978, 155).
The "mantra" (melody formula) is made of an upper and lower voice; it is divided temporally into 4 segments with rests of 3, 2, 1, and 4 crotchets' duration following the segments. The 13 notes of the mantra's upper voice form a 12-tone row where the 13th note returns to the first note A. The lower voice consists of an intervallic inversion of the upper voice with transposed segments: the first segment of the lower voice corresponds to the inversion of second segment of the upper voice and vice versa; similarly, the third and fourth segments in the inverted voice are also exchanged (Blumröder 1976, 96–97). The pitches are shown in the example to the right, and the complete formula can be seen at Nordin[n.d. ].
Each of the 13 notes of the mantra has an attached characteristic, or "pitch form" (Cott 1973, 227; Stockhausen 2003, 4); the 13 notes of the upper voice have in order the following characteristics:
In addition to its articulative characteristic, each of the thirteen notes is assigned a particular dynamic, in approximate inverse proportion to its duration—that is, the softer a note's dynamic is, the longer is its duration. The very first note is the sole exception to this rule (Blumröder 1976, 97 and 104):
a. with constant intensities:
b. with crescendo or decrescendo:p > : 7 x ♩ = character X
The thirteen cycles of the composition are based on the 13 notes of the mantra and the 13 characteristics detailed above. Each cycle is dominated by its corresponding note and characteristic. In this way, a single statement of the mantra is spread over the length of the entire composition, though the durations of the mantra notes are not incorporated into this overall plan (Conen 1991, 86).
The sounds of each piano are picked up by microphones and fed into an apparatus at the player's left side. This consists of a microphone amplifier, a compressor, a filter, a ring modulator, a scaled sine-wave generator, and a volume control. By means of this device, each piano's sounds are ring modulated with a sine tone tuned to the central pitch corresponding to the note of the mantra formula governing each of the thirteen large segments of the composition, and the modulated sound is played over loudspeakers placed behind and above the performers. The first pianist presents the upper thirteen tones, the second pianist the lower thirteen tones. Because the starting/ending pitch of the mantra is successively transposed onto these central pitches, they sound completely "consonant", like ordinary piano tones. The other mantra pitches sound "dissonant" to varying degrees, and differ also from a normal piano to varying degrees in their timbre
. "Hence one perceives a continual 'respiration' from consonant to dissonant to consonant modulator sounds, resulting from the precisely tuned relationships between the modulating sine tones and the modulated piano notes" (Stockhausen 1978, 155–56).
Two recordings were supervised by the composer:
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
composer 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"...
. It was composed in 1970 and premiered in autumn of the same year in Donaueschingen
Donaueschingen Festival
The Donaueschingen Festival is a festival for new music that takes place every October in the small town of Donaueschingen...
. The work is scored for two ring-modulated piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
s; each player is also equipped with a chromatic set of crotales
Crotales
thumb|right|Crotales are often used with other mallet percussionCrotales , sometimes called antique cymbals, are percussion instruments consisting of small, tuned bronze or brass disks. Each is about 4 inches in diameter with a flat top surface and a nipple on the base. They are commonly...
(antique cymbals) and a wood block
Wood block
A woodblock is essentially a small piece of slit drum made from a single piece of wood and used as a percussion instrument. It is struck with a stick, making a characteristically percussive sound....
, and one player is equipped with a short-wave radio producing morse code or a magnetic tape recording of morse code.
History
Stockhausen had been interested for several years in writing something for the KontarskyAloys and Alfons Kontarsky
Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky were German duo-pianist brothers who were associated with a number of important world premieres of contemporary works. They had an international reputation for performing modern music for two pianists, although they also performed the standard repertoire and they...
piano duo, and by early 1969 he had become determined to do so (Blumröder 1976, 94; Toop 1986, 194). On a flight from the Northeastern United States to Los Angeles in September 1969 or shortly before, he had sketched "a kind of theater piece for two pianos" titled Vision, and in March of 1970 began to work out a score, but broke off after just three pages (Cott 1973, 222–23; Toop 1986, 195, 197). During an automobile trip from Madison, Connecticut to Boston, a melody came to Stockhausen, along with the idea of expanding such a musical figure over a very long period of time—fifty or sixty minutes. He jotted the melody down on an envelope at that time, but it only occurred to him after having abandoned Vision that this might become the basis for his new two-piano composition. Stockhausen later recalled that this was early in September 1969 (Cott 1973, 222–23), but the sketch is in fact dated 26 February (Conen 1991, 59–60). Later in the year, on 22 September 1969 at the Couvent d'Alziprato in southern France, he had composed an 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...
text composition, Intervall, for two pianists playing "four-hands" (on one piano), but it did not appeal to the Kontarsky brothers—especially to Alfons, who lacked the experience his brother Aloys had gained from performing text-pieces from 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...
, as a member of Stockhausen's ensemble. Intervall, eventually premiered by Roger Woodward
Roger Woodward
Roger Woodward AC OBE is an Australian classical concert pianist.-Biography:Roger Woodward was born in 1942 in Chatswood, a suburb of Sydney, the youngest of four children to Gladys and Frank Woodward...
and J. Romaniuk, later became part of Stockhausen's second cycle of intuitive-music compositions, Für kommende Zeiten (Toop 1986, 195–97).
Stockhausen mentioned his wish to write something for the Kontarsky brothers to Heinrich Strobel, director of the Music Division of the SWF Baden-Baden
Südwestrundfunk
The Südwestrundfunk is a public broadcasting company for the southwest of Germany, specifically the states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. The company has main offices in three cities: Stuttgart, Baden-Baden and Mainz, with the director's office being in Stuttgart. It is an...
and Artistic Director of the Donaueschinger Musiktage für Zeitgenossische Tonkunst
Donaueschingen Festival
The Donaueschingen Festival is a festival for new music that takes place every October in the small town of Donaueschingen...
and, toward the end of 1969, Strobel commissioned a work for two pianos for the 1970 Donaueschingen Festival (Blumröder 1976, 94). After abandoning Vision, Stockhausen took up the melody he had jotted down the previous September and on its basis made a form plan and laid out the new work's skeleton between 1 May and 20 June 1970 in Osaka
Osaka
is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...
, Japan. He then completed the score in an unbroken stretch of work at his 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...
from 10 July to 18 August 1970. Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky gave the premiere of Mantra in Domaueschingen on 18 October 1970, and made the first recording of the work from 10 to 13 June 1971 at the Tonstudio Kreillerstraße 22 in Munich, for Deutsche Grammophon (Stockhausen 1978, 154). The score first appeared in print only in 1975, as one of the first publications of the composer's newly founded Stockhausen-Verlag (Conen 1991, 62).
Structure
The piece is the first determinate work (that is, the score is completely written down, though there are some passages involving a modest degree of improvisation) that Stockhausen composed after a long phase of indeterminate compositions (Blumröder 1976, 98).This work involves the expansion and contraction of a counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
ed pair of melodies
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
, which the composer calls a "formula" (Stockhausen 2003, 3 and 6). In this particular work (the first of a long succession of compositions to use formula technique
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...
), Stockhausen chose the term "mantra
Mantra
A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that is considered capable of "creating transformation"...
" in order "to avoid the words theme, row or subject, as in a fugue" (Stockhausen 2003, 2), and "Mantra" also became the title of the entire work. In Mantra, the two-strand formula is stated near the outset of the piece by piano I. According to the composer, the mantra "has thirteen notes, and each cymbal sound occurring once in the piece indicates the large sections—you hear the cymbal whenever a new central sound announces the next section of the work" (Cott 1973, 220–22). Although "the cymbals have the same pitches as the mantra and can thus mark the 13 form cycles of the two pianists … they are not identical", and "there are also some sections in which a larger number of cymbal strokes occurs” (Stockhausen 2003, 9). Though this mantra recurs constantly, the structure of the composition is not a theme and variations as found in classical composers such as Beethoven and Bach, because the material is never varied, only expanded and contracted (both in duration and in pitch) to different degrees; not a single note is ever added, it is never "accompanied" or embellished (Stockhausen 1978, 155). The comparatively strict predetermination of the form plan is occasionally broken and altered through the use of insertions, additions, and small deviations and exceptions (Blumröder 1976, 102). Near the end of the composition there is an extremely fast section that is a compression of the entire work into the smallest temporal space; in this section, all of the expansions and transpositions of the mantra formula are summarized as fast as possible and in four layers (Stockhausen 1978, 155).
The "mantra" (melody formula) is made of an upper and lower voice; it is divided temporally into 4 segments with rests of 3, 2, 1, and 4 crotchets' duration following the segments. The 13 notes of the mantra's upper voice form a 12-tone row where the 13th note returns to the first note A. The lower voice consists of an intervallic inversion of the upper voice with transposed segments: the first segment of the lower voice corresponds to the inversion of second segment of the upper voice and vice versa; similarly, the third and fourth segments in the inverted voice are also exchanged (Blumröder 1976, 96–97). The pitches are shown in the example to the right, and the complete formula can be seen at Nordin
Each of the 13 notes of the mantra has an attached characteristic, or "pitch form" (Cott 1973, 227; Stockhausen 2003, 4); the 13 notes of the upper voice have in order the following characteristics:
- periodic repetition at the beginning (on A in the original transposition)
- accent at the end of a duration on B
- G-sharp without any characteristic
- a turn around the beginning of the note E
- slow tremolo between F and D
- an accented chord at the end of the F–D oscillation
- a sharp accent (with a single repetition) at the beginning of a duration on G
- a descending chromatic scale connecting the G to the following E-flat
- staccato (very short duration) on D-flat
- irregular repetition ("Morse code") of the note C
- an inverted (upper-note) mordentMordentIn music, a mordent is an ornament indicating that the note is to be played with a single rapid alternation with the note above or below. Like trills, they can be chromatically modified by a small flat, sharp or natural accidental...
(trill nucleus) on the beginning of B-flat - sharp attack with an echo: sfz (fp), on G-flat
- arpeggio connecting the previously articulated pitch (E flat in the other voice, an augmented eleventh lower) upward to A
In addition to its articulative characteristic, each of the thirteen notes is assigned a particular dynamic, in approximate inverse proportion to its duration—that is, the softer a note's dynamic is, the longer is its duration. The very first note is the sole exception to this rule (Blumröder 1976, 97 and 104):
a. with constant intensities:
- pp: 5.5 x ♩ = character V
- p : 6 x ♩ = character XIII
- p : 4 x ♩ = character IV
- p : 1 x ♩ = character I (exception)
- mp : 4 x ♩ = character XI
- mp : 3 x ♩ = character III
- mf : 1 x ♪ = character VI
- f : 1 x ♩ = character IX
b. with crescendo or decrescendo:p > : 7 x ♩ = character X
- < mf : 2 x ♩ = character VIII
- sfz (fp) : 2 x ♩ = character XII–f : 2 x ♩ = character II, where f = 1 x 𝅘𝅥𝅯
- ff > : 5 x ♩ = character VII, where ff = 1 x 𝅘𝅥𝅯
The thirteen cycles of the composition are based on the 13 notes of the mantra and the 13 characteristics detailed above. Each cycle is dominated by its corresponding note and characteristic. In this way, a single statement of the mantra is spread over the length of the entire composition, though the durations of the mantra notes are not incorporated into this overall plan (Conen 1991, 86).
The sounds of each piano are picked up by microphones and fed into an apparatus at the player's left side. This consists of a microphone amplifier, a compressor, a filter, a ring modulator, a scaled sine-wave generator, and a volume control. By means of this device, each piano's sounds are ring modulated with a sine tone tuned to the central pitch corresponding to the note of the mantra formula governing each of the thirteen large segments of the composition, and the modulated sound is played over loudspeakers placed behind and above the performers. The first pianist presents the upper thirteen tones, the second pianist the lower thirteen tones. Because the starting/ending pitch of the mantra is successively transposed onto these central pitches, they sound completely "consonant", like ordinary piano tones. The other mantra pitches sound "dissonant" to varying degrees, and differ also from a normal piano to varying degrees in their timbre
Timbre
In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...
. "Hence one perceives a continual 'respiration' from consonant to dissonant to consonant modulator sounds, resulting from the precisely tuned relationships between the modulating sine tones and the modulated piano notes" (Stockhausen 1978, 155–56).
Recordings
- Rosalind Bevan, Yvar Mikashoff, Ole B. Ørsted (sound engineer: Mats Claessen; producer: Geir Johnson; executive producer: Foster Reed). CD recording. New Albion Records NAR 025. 1990.
- Andreas Grau, Götz Schumacher, Bryan Wolf (Tonmeister: Udo Wüstendörfer; sound engineer: Rüdiger Orth; producer: Ernstalbrecht Stiebler) – 1995,
- Janka Wyttenbach, Jürg Wyttenbach, Thomas Kessler (enregistrement: Jürg Jecklin; montage: Malgorzata Albinska; producer: Samuel Muller; mastering: Tritonus Studio [Peter Länger]) – 1997, Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra. Accord 4642692 (202252)
- Pascal Meyer, Xenia Pestova, Jan Panis (engineer and editor: Jarek Frankowski; recording supervisor: Andrew Lewis; producer: Remy Franck) - 2010,
Two recordings were supervised by the composer:
- Aloys and Alfons KontarskyAloys and Alfons KontarskyAloys and Alfons Kontarsky were German duo-pianist brothers who were associated with a number of important world premieres of contemporary works. They had an international reputation for performing modern music for two pianists, although they also performed the standard repertoire and they...
, Karlheinz Stockhausen (sound engineer: Klaus Hiemann; producer: Rudolf Werner) – 1971, Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra DG LP 2530 208. Reissued 1991, - Ellen Corver, Sepp Grotenhuis, Hans Tutschku (sound engineers: Bert Kraaijpoel, Jan Panis; producer: Maarten Hartveldt; digital editing: Chapel Studio Tilburg [Jan Panis, Hans Tutschku, Maarten Hartveldt]) – [1995], Stockhausen: Mantra, Supervised by Karlheinz Stockhausen TMD 950601. This recording received an Edison Classical AwardEdison Classical Music AwardsThe Edison Classical Music Awards are a collection of awards given annually to honor the best of the year's classical music recordings in eleven categories. The award is issued from Amsterdam, Netherlands....
in 1996.