Originale
Encyclopedia
Originale musical theatre with Kontakte
Kontakte (Stockhausen)
Kontakte is a celebrated electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, realized in 1958–60 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk electronic-music studio in Cologne with the assistance of Gottfried Michael Koenig .-Work history:The title of the work “refers both to contacts between instrumental and...

, is a music theatre work by the German 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"...

, written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister
Mary Bauermeister
Mary Hilde Ruth Bauermeister is a German artist.-Early life and family:Mary Bauermeister was artistically influenced in secondary school by her drawing teacher, Günter Ott. She studied in 1954–55 at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and in 1955–56 at the Staatlichen Schule für Kunst und...

. It was first performed in 1961 in Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

, and is given the work number 12⅔ in Stockhausen's catalogue of works. It was influenced by the early Happenings pioneered by John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

 and Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...

.

Composition history

Originale was commissioned from Stockhausen and Bauermeister by Hubertus Durek, manager of the Theater am Dom in Cologne, and his stage director, Carlheinz Caspari, who wanted a play in which actors, painters, other artists, or just simply "authentic" (originale) people would appear freely in spontaneous actions. It was created while the pair were visiting Finland in August 1961. Stockhausen had been invited to lecture at the Summer University of Jyväskylä where, at a presentation of Kontakte, they met the piano virtuoso and Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...

 biographer, Professor Erik Tawastjerna. Together with the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto
Alvar Aalto
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware...

, a summer house north of Helsinki on Lake Saimaa was put at their disposal, and the score of Originale was completely worked out there in just two weeks. The "silence" scene, in which the events on stage and the music stop for just one minute, and then everything resumes again, was inspired by the "unearthly" effect of the northerly summer light, which remained in the sky for just two hours or so during which the sun briefly dipped below the horizon, then rose again, "as the birds began to twitter, the fish stirred again, the wind came up, and there was day" (Bauermeister 2011, 64–66; Kurtz 1992, 114).

Roles

Role Premiere cast (Cologne, 1961) New York cast (1964) San Francisco cast (1990) Sindelfingen cast (2007)
Pianist David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...

James Tenney
James Tenney
James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...

Michael Orland Aya Inokuchi
Percussionist Christoph Caskel Max Neuhaus
Max Neuhaus
American musician Max Neuhaus was a percussionist and interpreter of contemporary music of the 1960s who moved on to become a pioneer in the field of sound art, a term he rejected but with which he is nonetheless associated...

Don Baker Christian R. Wissel
Sound Engineer Leopold von Knobelsdorff David Behrman
David Behrman
David Behrman is a US composer and the producer of Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series. He was also a founding member of the Sonic Arts Union. He toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and has worked with Ben Neill. He was a part of Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether...

Wolfgang Mittermaier
Cameraman Wolfgang Ramsbott Robert Breer
Robert Breer
Robert Carlton Breer was an experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor."A founding member of the American avant-garde," Breer was most well known for his films, which combine abstract and representational painting, hand-drawn rotoscoping, original 16mm and 8mm film footage, photographs, and...

Simone Speer
Lighting Director Walter Koch (Theater am Dom) Gary Harris
Billy Klüver
Billy Klüver
Billy Klüver Johan Wilhelm Klüver was an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories who founded Experiments in Art and Technology. Klüver lectured extensively on art and technology and social issues to be addressed by the technical community. He published numerous articles on these subjects...

Nikolaus Pirchtner
Stage Director Carlheinz Caspari Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...

Henry Steele Claudine M. Kolbus (choreographer)
Action Composer Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....

Nam June Paik Robin Rhode
Child Markus Stockhausen
Markus Stockhausen
Markus Pirol Stockhausen is a German trumpeter and composer.-Biography:Born in Cologne, he is the son of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. At age four he appeared as "child at play" in his father's theatre piece Originals. He received his first piano lessons at age six, and at age twelve he began to...

 
Christel Stockhausen
Milena Meret Zyrewitz
Model Edith Sommer Olga Klüver / Lette Eisenhauer Sonja Kunz
Street Singer / String player Belina
Lilienweiß
Kenji Kobayashi (violinist)
Charlotte Moorman
Charlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...

 (cellist)
Pamela Z
Pamela Z
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and audio artist who works primarily with her voice and live electronic processing.-Music career:...

David Stützel
Hat-check woman Liselotte Lörsch Marje Strider Rita Borchtler-Kracht
Newspaper Seller Frau Hoffmann Michael Kirby an original from Sindelfingen
Conductor 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"...

Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and...

Manfred Schreier
Monkey-house Attendant a woman from the Cologne Zoo (replaced by a small lady with a dog) Jasmin Held
Painter Mary Bauermeister
Mary Bauermeister
Mary Hilde Ruth Bauermeister is a German artist.-Early life and family:Mary Bauermeister was artistically influenced in secondary school by her drawing teacher, Günter Ott. She studied in 1954–55 at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and in 1955–56 at the Staatlichen Schule für Kunst und...

Robert Delford Brown
Robert Delford Brown
Robert Delford-Brown was an American performance artist. The New York Times called him "a painter, sculptor, performance artist and avant-garde philosopher whose exuberantly provocative works challenged orthodoxies of both the art world and the world at large, usually with a big wink." Deborah...

 (1st night)
Ay-O
Ay-O
is a Japanese artist, who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s.-From Democrato to Fluxus:Probably, the best reference to understand the early years of Ay-O is the autobiographical retrospective book in the references "Ay-O, Over the Rainbow, Ay-O...

Hitomi Ikuma Steffi Stangl
Ole Aselmann
Poet Hans G Helms Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

Michael Peppe Hans G Helms
Actor Ruth Grahlmann Vincent Gaeta Chris Maher Jerry Willingham
Actor Eva-Maria Kox Gloria Graves Diane Robinson Barbara Stoll
Actor Alfred Feussner Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...

Lisa Apfelburg Birgit Heintel
Actor Harry J. Bong Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...

Traci Robinson Dorothee Jakubowski
Actor Heiner Reddemann /
Peter Hackenberger
Peter Leventhal Elena Rivera Markus Schlueter

Performance history

Performances of Originale subsequent to the twelve first performances in Cologne between 26 October and 6 November 1962 have been rare. Productions took place in New York in 1964, organized jointly by Mary Bauermeister and Charlotte Moorman
Charlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...

 (Bauermeister 2011, 161), in 1990 in San Francisco directed and organized by Randall Packer
Randall Packer
-Biography:Packer studied music composition with Mel Powell and Richard Felciano at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. He pursued post-graduate study in computer music in Paris, where he was a composer in residence at IRCAM under Pierre Boulez...

 (Kosman 1990; Tucker 1990), and on 21 January 2007 in connection with a 2006–2007 exhibition of Mary Bauermeister's tetralogy Fama FluxusMythos BeuysLegende PaikAtelier Mary Bauermeister in Sindelfingen
Sindelfingen
Sindelfingen is a German town near Stuttgart at the headwaters of the Schwippe that is the site of a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant.-History:* 1155 First documented mention of Sindelfingen...

 (Bauermeister 2011, 294). The Cologne and New York performances included video and performance artist Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....

, who influenced Stockhausen in the composition of the work. The New York performances took place at Judson Hall as part of the second annual New York Festival of the Avant-Garde, during the peak period of the avant-garde movement Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

.

Concept and form

The surreal absurdity of Originale recalls Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...

's books and film L 'année dernière à Marienbad
Last Year at Marienbad
L'Année dernière à Marienbad is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet....

, and, in its use of the commonplace, Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...

 (Harvey1975, 90). It combines the rigorous, tightly controlled compositional form of Stockhausen's 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...

 music with the loosely structured improvisational framework of the early Happenings. The score to Originale is groundbreaking for its incorporation of performance events and other assorted "actions" into a musical organization with precise "timepoints" or temporal markings, typical of Stockhausen's musical scores. Within the 94' duration of Originale is a performance of Stockhausen's Kontakte for piano, percussion, and electronics, that is woven throughout the work, providing a central unifying element to this often disjointed work. In addition to Kontakte, the Cologne performances included tape-recorded excerpts from Stockhausen's Carré
Carré (Stockhausen)
Carré for four orchestras and four choirs is a composition by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and is Work Number 10 in the composer's catalog of works.-History:...

for four orchestras and choirs, Gesang der Jünglinge
Gesang der Jünglinge
Gesang der Jünglinge is a noted electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne and is Work Number 8 in the composer's catalog of works...

, Gruppen for three orchestras, and Zyklus
Zyklus
Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, assigned Number 9 in the composer's catalog of works. It was composed in 1959 at the request of Wolfgang Steinecke as a test piece for a percussion competition at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, where it was premièred on 25...

for a percussionist (Dörstel 1993, 199).

An unusual assortment of "characters" are introduced in Originale, including a pianist, a percussionist, a sound technician, a stage director, a cameraman, a lighting technician, an action composer, an action painter, a poet, a street singer, a coat checker, a newspaper vendor, a fashion model, a child (playing with blocks), a animal handler with animal, a conductor, and five actors reading a collage of unrelated texts (Stockhausen 1964, 111). Stockhausen, as a pioneer of electronic music, brought experimental recording technique into Originale by using tape recorders to capture excerpts from the performance that were later played back as an additional layer in the complex sound texture. For the San Francisco performance in 1990, more recent technological techniques were introduced including digital sampling and live video to disrupt the linear flow of the work and enhance its surreal quality and strange juxtaposition of events.

According to the musicologist Karl Heinz Wörner, "Originale is a musical composition. The macrorhythm of scene continuity and the ordering of moments are musical. The individual scenes are composed musically, regardless of whether or not there is any 'music' in them. The verbal counterpoint is musical, as are the 'monodic' word melodies and the polyphony of speaking voices" (Wörner 1973, 192). Originale is constructed in 18 scenes, grouped into seven self-sufficient "structures", which may be performed in any order, either successively or with as many as three structures simultaneosly, on three separated stages (Stockhausen 1964, 110). Each character's actions are specified to take place within a specified number of seconds or minutes, and at one point the actors even speak in what Stockhausen calls "formant rhythms": in a span of four minutes one actor speaks three equally spaced words, a second actor has five equally spaced words, a third has eight, and yet another has thirteen, while a fifth provides a "noise band" of completely irregular rhythms (Harvey 1975, 90).

In the chronicles of 20th-century theater and performance art, Stockhausen's Originale stands alone as a work that dismantles all traditional notions of music theater, an important precedent to experimental forms of contemporary multimedia performance that have emerged in the digital age.

Further reading

  • Anon. 1964. "Avant-Garde: Stuffed Bird at 48 Sharp". Time (18 September): 81.
  • Custodis, Michael. 2004. Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 54, edited by Albrecht Riethmüller, with Reinhold Brinkmann, Ludwig Finscher, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Wolfgang Osthoff, and Wolfram Steinbeck. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 3-515-08375-8.
  • Fricke, Stefan. 1998. "Attacken auf Karlheinz Stockhausen: Fluxus im 'Kampf gegen das musikalische Dekor des Faschismus'", Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 159, no. 4 (July-August): 38–41.
  • Fricke, Stefan. 2004. "Inklusieve Vergnügungssteuer: Karlheinz Stockhausens Originale und Fluxus". In Experimentelles Musik- und Tanztheater, edited by Frieder Reininghaus, Katja Schneider, and Sabine Sanio, 161-165 Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, no. 7. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89007-427-6; 3-89007-427-8.
  • Goodman, Susan. 1964. "Anti-Art Pickets Pick on Stockhausen." Village Voice (10 Sept.)
  • Griffiths, Paul
    Paul Griffiths (writer)
    Paul Griffiths is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.-Biography and career:Paul Griffiths was...

    . 1981. "Review: 4711". The Musical Times 122, no. 1664 (October): 685.
  • Kirby, Michael, and Richard Schechner. 1965. "An Interview with John Cage". Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter): 50–72.
  • Krones, Hartmut. 2008. "Sprachkompositionen in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, inbesondere am Beispiel Österreich". In Музички модернизам—нова тумачења: Зборник радова са научног скупа одржаног од 11. до 13. октобра 2007 [Rethinking Musical Modernism: Proceedings of the International Conference Held from October 11 to 13, 2007], edited by Dejan Despić, Melita Milin, and Danica Petrović, 231–45. Naucni skupovi, no. 122; Odelenje likovne i muzicke umetnosti, no. 6. Belgrade: Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti. ISBN 978-86-7025-463-3.
  • Ruppel, Karl Heinz. 1961. "Neodadisten". Süddeutsche Zeitung (3 November).
  • Oren, Michel. 1993. "Anti-Art as the End of Cultural History". Performing Arts Journal 15, no. 2 (May): 1–30.
  • Rich, Alan. "Stockhausen's 'Originale'". New York Herald Tribune (9 September).
  • Rigoni, Michel. 1998. Stockhausen: ... un vaisseau lancé vers le ciel, 2nd edition, revised, corrected, and enlarged. Lillebonne: Millénaire III Editions. ISBN 2911906020.
  • Schonberg, Harold C. 1964. "Music: Stockhausen's 'Originale' Given at Judson". New York Times (9 September).
  • Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1964. "Originale (1961), musikalisches Theater". In his Texte zur Musik 2, edited by Dieter Schnebel, 107–29. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.
  • Straebel, Volker. 1995. "'...that the Europeans become more American': Gegenseitige Einflüsse von Europa und Nordamerika in der Geschichte der Musikperformance". In Musik, Labyrinth, Kontext: Musikperformance, 80–94. Schriftenreihe Offenes Kulturhaus, no. 13. Linz: Offenes Kulturhaus des Landes Oberösterreich. ISBN 978-3-85307-003-1; 3-85307-003-5.

External links

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