Sound-Cocktails All Around!!

“And at a stroke I became aware that all the differences in cultures and languages, and in the compositions of individual composers, are dialects, and that the fundamental measure of them all is the same: the intervals.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

The French school of electronic music which relied on pre-recorded samples as raw material stood in staunch opposition to the German school which relied on purely electronic source material (oscillators and whatnot). It wasn't quite East Coast v. West Coast. No one got shot or anything, but there was a yawning gap between the two, one that seems silly in hindsight.

Actually, it seemed silly the moment people heard Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) [1956], which deftly used both techniques. (Not so deftly, it was an attempt at the total serialization that would choke off musical innovation for decades to come. This was almost entirely Stockhausen's invention/fault, but more on that later.)

There are a lot of legends surrounding the piece, many of which expand on the whole French/German 'feud'. Another ripe one is that Karlheinz's son Markus is the boy heard in the recording, even though he'd yet to exist.

The text is affiliated with the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three Jews who get thrown into a furnace by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. But the text is obliterated by Stockhausen's processes. The dialect is torn apart, as the furnace was meant to do to those young men. Of course, after old Temple-destroying Nebuchadnezzar sees those three Jews walking around in the fire that was supposed to kill them, a fire he'd ordered them into because they wouldn't worship his pagan idol, he orders everyone to worship their Jewish God.

It was 4 years before the 60's, and a solid decade before hippies were anything close to a movement, but the essential elements of the movement are all there: the destruction of traditional values (time, space, language, religion), and the free loving we-are-all-one aesthetic. Stockhausen, more than just about any other modern composer, would become the darling of the movement. He is, after all, fifth from the left, top row on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, between Lenny Bruce and WC Fields (Hang on a tic, was KS a comedian? Did he amuse the Beatles?!). John Lennon was so enamored of the genre that he would pay tribute to it on The White Album with "Revolution 9"



Originally composed for five channels of sound, a stereo recording wasn't released until the 60's, and in reviewing it, Kurt Stone aptly summed up the piece:

"...there is no denying that in addition to being the work of an unusually ingenious mind, it is the realization of a deeply serious and imaginative artistic vision. Whether one calls it "music" or something else is immaterial; what is important is that the work makes a strong impression on its listeners. Whether one considers it an entertaining tour de force, a maddening yet arresting, an irritating yet occasionally indavertently funny sound-cocktail, or a work of religious fervor and devotion, it commands one's attention. Its sound and general character are unique; its details, the timbre, the stereophony, the dynamic range, the levels of distance, the spliced, chopped-up, and multiplied boy's voice, all come through with almost awesome perfection."