Stockhausen in the NY Times -- 1961

CONCERT STRESSES PERCUSSIVE SOUND; Works by Messiaen, Boulez and Others From Europe Heard at New School
ERIC SALZMAN.
February 6, 1961, Monday

Devotees of the beaten drum, the crashed cymbal, the tapped vibes, the clucking wood block and the gravelly guiros ahd another good time yesterday afternoon at the New School for Social Research. If you count the piano as a percussive, practically all the New Music From Europe on the prgoram fell into the category. Percussion is definitely In.

The international array of composers represented are all up-to-date types. They naturally use the latest and hottest idea: let the performer do it. Give him a few general notions on what to do, written in code on some large pieces of cardboard that can be shuffled at will. Then turn him loose on the battery to raised a virtuoso storm.

The casualties yesterday were two toppled wood blocks, a big drum that crashed over, the peace of mind of the performers who had to stop and rescue the instruments, and an undetermined number of busted eardrums.

Paolo Castaldi's "Frase" for piano and one percussion player, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's "Liaisons" for vibra-marimbaphone, Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Zyklus" for one percussion player and Gilbert Amy's Invention I for flute, piano and vibra-marimbaphone happened to go one way. They might not have. It didn't matter very much.

It gave the performers an excuse for doing something. It did little more. Music like this is quite beyond criticism; it is so intended to be. If the composer won't take responsibility for his own piece, the bystander can hardly offer any comment except to call him a coward.

DELIA CALAPAI PLAYS PROGRAM FOR PIANO
ERIC SALZMAN
March 19, 1961, Sunday

The most convincing part of Delia Calapai's Town Hall piano program yesterday afternoon was the Klavierstueke I-IV of Karlheinz Stockhuasen.

Amid the fast-moving pace of the post-war modern music world, these pieces qualify only as early Stockhausen--elaborate, fractured serial pieces in the post-Webern "punkt-musik" style in fashion a few years ago. Miss Calapai took all these matters in hand and delivered a serious, effective reading that quite grasped the style.

Don Ellis Is an Eclectic of Jazz; His Trio Offers New Approaches to Old and Modern Ideas Trumpeter Makes an Impressive Debut at Village Vanguard
By JOHN S. WILSON
March 30, 1961, Thursday

...Mr. Ellis, in his playing, reveals a spread of influences that range from Louis Armstrong to the German avant-garde composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

SICILIAN SOIL INFLUENCES THE MODERN SEED
By ARTHUR BERGER
June 25, 1961, Sunday
PALERMO

The marriage of the old and new is another fillip Palermo can provide. Such was the case when an itinerant musician's pipe or a pedlar's cry penetrated the closed windows of the conservatory hall to add unexpected counterpoint to the fabulous flute-playing of Severino Gazzelloni, stellar virtuoso of the occasion, or to the drones of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Kontakte," a lengthy, uneven four-channel electronic piece that has made the rounds in Europe in but a year of its existence.

4th Year of WQXR's Show on New Music
LISA HAMMEL
July 3, 1961, Monday

Titled "What's New in Music?" the enterprising program is heard Saturday afternoons on radio station WQXR...

The first Saturday in each month is set aside for new recordings. Last Saturday's interesting melange included Ernst Toch, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Richard Yardumian and a brief excerpt from a new "space" opera by the Swedish composer, Karl-Birger Blomdahl

RECITAL OFFERED BY PAUL JACOBS; Pianist Interprets Music of the Twentieth Century
By ERIC SALZMAN
November 19, 1961, Sunday

From Germany and Austria there was a whole series of landmark pieces: ...Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstueck V of 1954, a post-Webern, number-organized, maize, gruel and serial sort of piece, and the same composer's Klavierstueck XI of 1956, the first of a series of non-determined, non-serial pieces...

A word or two about the Stockhausen might be in order. Klavierstueck V is a solid somewhat arbitrary-sounding work as impressive as any work in the rather stiff, complicated, post-war, serial genre.

Klavierstueck XI comes out of a tube in the form of a rolled-up piece of cardboard containing nineteen musical snippets. Following some instructions, which will not be given here, the pianist skps around from one bit to another, more or less at random. The results are not likely to be the same twice--at least not within one lifetime. It is not easy to have an opinion about such a peice, although it is easy to have an opinion about the idea.

Stockhausen in the NY Times -- 1960

MUSIC POSES PROBLEM; Avant-Garde Work Calling for Seats' Removal Dropped
January 12, 1960, Tuesday

Part of Leonard Bernstein's projected series on "Twentieth Century Problems in Music" with the New York Philharmonic has run into a familiar twentieth-century difficulty: a housing problem.

The Philharmonic programs of March 31 to April 3 were entitled "The Search for New Techniques" and it was this search that led Karlheinz Stockhausen to score his "Groups" for three comlpetely [sic] independent orchestras, each of which must be placed in a different part of the auditorium. But the work of the young German avant-garde composer will not be performed in Carnegie Hall.

Following the composer's instructions would have meant ripping out seats on both sides of the hall to make room for the musicians. It is hoped that a performance will prove more feasible in Lincoln Center.

FESTIVAL CHANGED BY PHILHARMONIC; ' Mahagonny' Dropped From Theatre Musio Fete -- 2 Other Switches Listed
March 11, 1960, Friday

The Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera "Mahagonny" will not be performed by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein because of difficulties in obtaining the rights for the use of the libretto...

In two other switches, Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gruppen," an avant-garde German work, has been replaced by unusual French and American compositions...

The Stockhausen work, which calls for three orchestras, has been replaced by Henry Brant's "Antiphony I," a composition that divides the orchestra into five groups; Pierre Boulez's "Improvisation sur Mallarme I," for soprano and an unusual instrumental ensemble including harp, vibraphone and percussion instruments; and "Concerted Piece for Tape Recorder and Orchestra" by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky.

RECITAL IS GIVEN BY DAVID TUDOR; Whacks and Scrapes Piano in Avant-Garde Works of Bussoti and Others
ERIC SALZMAN.
March 29, 1960, Tuesday

David Tudor has been known to perform on a "prepared" piano, but last night at the Living Theater he had to play a repaired piano...

...the socko last movement [Bussotti's "Pieces of Flesh"] cost the piano one of its black keys. Mr. Tudor glued it back on after the work, and it seemed to hold...

The whole evening was really very frustrating. Mr. Tudor is such a fantastic pianist; he can do the most unbelievable things. But there was very little that was worth the effort...

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstueck VI was quite something else. It is a static piece, the hard sounds of which are repetitive and do not seem to add up to a single proportioned piece; at least on one hearing. But there is the sense of an utterance that is substantial and in which the means, the material and the realization stand in some sort of valid relationship with one another.

COLOGNE -- MEETING PLACE OF MODERN MUSIC
April 24, 1960, Sunday

Between June 10 and 19 there will be a great deal of contemporary music performed at Cologne, Germany. The thirty-fourth festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music will provide the nucleus for a series of concerts. All the works performed on the society's programs were selected by an international jury, with each national section being entitled to submit six works...

There will be two concerts for chamber orchestra. The one on June 11 will consist of "Cori di Didone", by Luigi Nono (extra selection), "Anagrams" by Mauricio Kagel (extra selection) and "Schwingungen" for four groups of loudspeakers and four instrumentalists by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Germany).

STRAVINSKY-GESUALDO; New Work Is a Transformation of Old Ones By 16th-Century Modernist
By VIRGIL THOMSON
October 2, 1960, Sunday
VENICE

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, conducting the Orchestra of the Teatro La Fenice in the Sala Dello Scrutinio of the Doge's Palace, brought to a close last week this city's twenty-third festival of contemporary music...

...There also were two works by Stravinsky, which the composer conducted. These were the ballet score "Orpheus" and a new seven-minute work, "Gesualdo Monumentum."

This last is a homage, on the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, to Gesualdo da Venosa, prince and murderer, as well as a composer of advanced harmonic invention...

Germans Represented

German composers represented included Karl Amadeus Hartmann (by his Seventh Symphony) Wolfgang Fortner (by a work for oboe and orchestra entitled "Aulodia"), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (chiefly by a piece for electronic tape, piano and percussion, entitled "Contacts.")

Stockhausen in the NY Times -- 1959

Schuller and Piston Quintets Bow Here
ERIC SALZMAN
March 11, 1959, Wednesday

Local premieres of two contemporary American works were features of the second of two Tuesday evening concerts given by the New York Woodwind Quintet last night in Carnegie Recital Hall.

A Quintet (1958) by Gunther Schuller is an important work of a talented young man who has turned of late from concert jazz to serial techniques. Mr. Shuller [sic] is a horn player, so it is understandable that he knows the winds intimately, and he writes for them with skill. But the work suffers slightly from stylistic inequities.

The first movement was the most "abstract," and hence might have seemed the most experimental. Actually, it leans heavily on its prototype, the "Zeitmasse" for wind quintet by the young German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The other two movements shake free of the influence and present more imaginative ideas.

DARMSTADT DEBATES; German City Host to a Festival That Discussed as Well as Played Music
By PETER GRADENWITZ
September 27, 1959, Sunday
DARMSTADT

Music has lost its once cherished spontaneity, freedom, variety and color of expression because classicism, romanticism and early serial music all tended toward applications of strict rules in composition and a completely "determined" way of execution--the composer writing his score, adding dynamic and expression marks and demanding specific results from the interpreter of his music. Music has not kept pace in its development in comparison with other arts, such as literature and painting. Music should never try to express feelings or depict literary programs...

These were some of the theses propounded at this year's fourteenth International Vacation Courses for New Music held by the Kranichsteiner Musikinstitut in conjunction with the Hessischer Rundfunk (Radio Frankfurt) and the Darmstadt Theatre...

Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Henri Pousseur...are the leading spokesmen of the youngest generation, and it was their lectures and demonstrations that proved the most interesting and rewarding of this year's events.

Stockhausen demonstrated the most extreme application possible so far of the "indetermination" in a composer's work and of the "freedom of choice" given to the interpreter. In a composition by the 28-year-old Italian, Sylvano Bussotti, "Piano Piece for David Tudor," the music presents itself as a line drawing. This drawing is to inspire the pianist to whom the composer leaves all freedom to interpret the lines, ornaments, points and signs of the "score." Stockhausen's own latest work, "Cycle for percussion instruments," applies this principle of "undetermined" music to a large group of percussion instruments served by one player who turns around in a circle to play a cycle of structures noted on single leaves, beginning and ending according to his own choice.

Most of the music heard could hardly be imagined in a performance other than by the miraculous David Tudor at the piano and Severino Gazzelloni the flutist. Indeed, a prominent visitor ventured to say that the only real composer this year was Tudor, who built complete edifices of music out of sparse lines of notation or drawing.

MORE MODERNS, PLEASE; Many Important Works Of Our Time Missing From LP Catalogues
By ERIC SALZMAN
November 15, 1959, Sunday

Whatever happened to the big boost that the long-playing record was supposed to give contemporary music?

Within the first few years of the LP disk a number of small companies were devoting much of their energies to the music of our century. Most of these outfits have long since passed on and, with them, their catalogues...

Stereo may mean real drought for the moderns, at least for the moment. With a few exceptions, most of the major companies are concentrating on getting out stereo versions of bestsellers, standards and stand-bys...

...there are a host of big European names who might fairly demand a hearing in the new catalogue on the basis of merit or importance.

The Italians, Luigi Dallapiccola, Goffredo Petrassi and Luigi Nono; the Germans, Hans Werner Henze, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Giselher Klebe and Boris Blacher; the Englishman, Matyas Sieber; the Russian-Swiss, Vladimir Vogel; the Frenchman, Pierre Boulez, are all names to conjure with in Continental circles but are represented in our catalogues not at all or poorly. Some have had works made available in Europe. Deutsche Grammophon has a whole contemporary series. Decca, please take note...

Invoking the deities and the A and R men is undoubtedly not enough. As always, one gazes longingly in the direction of the foundations. This is a large country and its musical life is heterogeneous. This diversity, often accounted a virtue, has hurt the American composer because there are no adequate channels to make his work widely known across the land, even when he can get performances. A good program of recording combined with good publicity and distribution facilities, might work wonders.

Music: An Annual Visit; Pittsburgh Symphony Plays Hindemith, Nono
By HOWARD TAUBMAN
November 17, 1959, Tuesday

The Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by William Steinberg came to New York for its annual Carnegie Hall appearance last night and bore the gift of two unfamiliar pieces. One was by the young Italian, Luigi Nono, who is far out in the advance guard. The other was by Paul Hindemith, now moving up into the rank of grand old man, and this work carried the proud title "Pittsburgh Symphony."

Mr. Nono often is bracketed with Pierre Boulez of France and Karlheinz Stockhausen of Germany among the leaders of the international vanguard, which is experimenting with all sorts of new--and strange--musical materials. In "Due espressioni," which had its New York premiere, the most radical device is to organize the percussion section like the elements of a choir. Otherwise, the full apparatus of the symphony is used, but always with restraint and reserve.

Stockhausen in the NY Times -- 1958

1958 was a rough year for Zeitmasse, which is the only piece of Stockhausen's to be reviewed in the Times. Neither critic received it favorably.

It's interesting to note that Stockhausen first spooked Americans on Halloween.

MODERN SCORES FROM 17 NATIONS; Strasbourg Plays Host To Recently Ended I. S. C. M. Festival
By PETER GRADENWITZ
June 29, 1958, Sunday
STRASBOURG

Most of the music performed was "serial music," not all of it purely dodecaphonic, though. It is probable that the principles of serial writing will go down in music history as the only new technical and stylistic devices that have produced a really new mid-twentieth-century music.

However, many young composers seem to be so delighted with the technical tricks possible (but not necessary) in serial music that their compositions have nothing but technical interest. One visitor mockingly said I.S.C.M. stood for International Series Computing Machine...

Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Zeit-Masse" for wind quintet was not new to most festival visitors. It is an interesting but not wholly convincing attempt at reviving liberty and improvisation in performance.

SCHOLARS MEET; International Society Confers in Cologne
By EDWARD DOWNES
July 20, 1958, Sunday

A report on the 1958 triennial meeting of the International Musicological Society, Downes only mentions Stockhausen in passing, while setting the scene.

The Cologne conference was as wide in scope as the host city itself. The impressive remains of the Roman colony, which gave the city its name, lie almost within sight of a large Ford factory on the Rhine. From the Cologne radio station, where Karlheinz Stockhausen leads a group of radical composers of electronic music, it is only two city blocks to the great cathedral and its eleventh-century shrine with the bones of the three kings who followed the star to Bethlehem.

YOUNG RADICALS; First LP Issues of Works by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen
By EDWARD DOWNES
September 14, 1958, Sunday

Expert Group
This is the first LP disk issued in this country of a work by M. Boulez and it seems an excellent choice [Le Marteau sans maitre]. It is performed by an expert group of chamber musicians under the direction of Robert Craft with Margery MacKay, alto, as soloist. The reverse of this single Columbia disk contains Nr. 5 Zeitmasse the first work of the German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, to be released in this country...

Herr Stockhausen's "Nr. 5 Zeitmasse" left this listener as cold as did the same composer's electronic music performed this summer by the Cologne radio. "Nr. 5 Zeitmasse," which is for woodwind trio, uses many of the same complex serial techniques as M. Boulez' score, but it lacks the latter's surface appeal. And underneath the surface this listener failed to hear anything but a confused jumble of notes. They sounded as if they were played with wonderful precision but they grew duller with repetition. In addition to his conducting, Mr. Craft contributed copious and interesting sleeve notes, part technical, part personal.

German Composer to Visit U.S.
October 31, 1958, Friday

Karlheinz Stockhausen, German composer, will arrive here Sunday for his first visit to the United States. He will lecture Monday at 8:30 P.M. in Columbia University's McMillin theater on "New Developments in Instrumental and Electronic Music." Herr Stockhausen is a leader in electronic composition in the studio of the West German Radio at Cologne. Columbia University has what it believes to be the only comparable electronic studio in this country.

Stockhausen in the NY Times -- 1957

There was only one formal mention of Stockhausen, in a review of David Tudor's recital at the Carl Fischer Concert Hall. The program also included two works each by Bo Nilsson, Henri Pousseur and Bengt Hambraeus.

The second mention of Stockhausen came in the form of some creative insults from a reader.

Music: Tudor Plays Modern Works; Pianist Heard at Carl Fischer Concert Hall European Composers Make Up Program Daniel Abrams Bows
By ROSS PARMENTER
April 23, 1957, Tuesday

Ever since he began playing here seven years ago, David tudor has devoted himself to experimental composers. Recently, too, the young Philadelphia pianist has become a sort of liaison performer between the United States and Europe...

The cross-fertilization process was shown most strikingly in Karlheinz Stockhausen's No. 4 Klavierstueck XI. It was a work in which the young German musician incorporated into his own composing the ideas of chance that John Cage and other Americans have been developing.

The work consisted of nineteen or twenty fragments of music written on a sheet of cardboard that resembled a medium-sized poster. The instructions were for the performer to start with the fragment that caught his eye first. Then he was to play the other fragments at random, the stipulation being that when he found he had played one fragment three times he was to stop. The piece was over.

The work was programmed twice. Mr. Tudor first played it just before the intermission and then he played it as the concluding work...

Both performances sounded equally episodic and disjointed. In fact, it was hard even to distinguish this work from the earlier eighteen-minute Stockhausen No. 2 Klaviertuck VI [sic]. There were the same angry piling of notes, followed by isolated clanks and bell-like tones, the same unexpected pauses and the same absence of such elements that ordinarily make for coherence as melody and formal rhythm...

Instead of its conventional place on the stage, the piano was placed in the center of the hall. the listeners made a rectangle as they sat on the four sides of the performer. They hung on each note with absorbed attention. One gained the impression, too, that the composers were men of extraordinary earnestness. But whether this music is really the music of the future remains to be seen. This listener was interested, but he could not honestly say he enjoyed it.

FROM THE MAIL POUCH
May 19, 1957, Sunday

EXPERIMENT
To the Music Editor:
I enjoyed Ross Parmenter's review of David Tudor's performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's No. 4 Klavierstueck XI. However, I feel that I have surpassed Herr Stockhausen's experimental technique. In my system several pre-punched International Business Machines cards are arbitrarily arranged by a 3-year-old neighbor. The resulting pack is fed into a large calculating device, which, in turn, activates a piano keyboard. This is indeed "pure" music, for it is almost entirely free of cumbersome devices such as form, discipline and meaning.

M. HARRIS CHASE
Brooklyn.

Stockhausen in the NY Times -- 1956

In the summer before he turned 28, Stockhausen came up in three articles in the New York Times.

STOCKHOLM FETE LACKS NOVELTIES; Even Most Extreme Works on Modern Music Program Are Short on Shock Value
By HAROLD C. SCHONBERG Special to The New York Times.
June 6, 1956, Wednesday
STOCKHOLM, Sweden

A review of the 30th annual ISCM festival. Schonberg cites 'an absence of real shockers', saying 'the closest thing along those lines' was Stockhausen's Kontrapunkte, and Toshiro Mayuzumi's Ectoplasme. Of Stockhausen, he writes, "...a 28-year-old German, is that country's leading exponent of electronic music, but his "Kontrapunkte," a chamber work scored for ten instruments, is a more or less conventional twelve-tone piece strongly in the style of Webern. It is extremely ingenious, extremely dissonant, and it has a novel piquancy for the first three minutes, after which it begins to dissipate itself.

SPLITTING THE OCTAVE; I.S.C.M. Composer Believes He Can Break It Down Into 42 Segments
By HAROLD C. SCHONBERG
June 17, 1956, Sunday
STOCKHOLM

Again from the ISCM, Schonberg writes, "Modern music has to a large extent consolidated itself. There was...little of the breathless experimentation that went on in the Twenties or early Thirties. Present-day ears are inured to dissonance...It may be that the harmonic liimit has been reached and that the only really new developments will come from those experimenting with electronic music.

Experimenters
At the ISCM concerts there were two such experimenters, and the more voluble was Karlheinz Stockhausen. This young German composer, born in 1928, is tall, boyish and utterly dedicated. He has a typical streak of German mysticism--a streak that led him to describe his "Kontrapunkte," a score for ten orthodox instruments, as a work in which "the contrasts may be so arranged that a state is created in which only one unity and one infinity are audible."

But his main interest is an electronic music, of which he is Germany's leading exponent. Stockhausen's views toward the new art are near-religious and his eyes take on a fanatical glow when he refers to "our music."

The Basic Aims
Basically, he says, his musical aims are those of any composer--to be master of his material, to employ the laws of musical form, and to create an emotional entity...One of his electronic works has been published by Universal Editions, and Stockhausen has prefaced it witha long and detailed introduction. Any electronic technician, he says, should be able to follow those directions and set up equipment that can realize the score...

...[Gesang der Jünglinge] uses forty-two steps in the octave...Stockhausen, incidentally, believes that the human ear, given a point of reference, can distinguish many more than forty-two steps to the octave.

Other Ideas
Stockhausen will not entirely desert his instrumental composition for electronic music. Up to now he has been greatly influenced by Anton von Webern, "the greatest composer of the century." He has many new ideas for instrumental compositon, and is preparing a work that employs (if this bewildered listener accurately followed his statement) a theory between the electrical system of his own body and the instruments themselves.

EXPERTS ON SOUND PULL NEW STRINGS; Congress on Acoustics Hears Electronic Music, Discusses Deceptive Tape Recording Wired for Sound New Music in the Air
By ROBERT K. PLUMB Special to The New York Times.
June 23, 1956, Saturday
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

Music and engineering were matched here yesterday at the second International Congress on Acoustics. The general conclusion was that music lost...

Wired for Sound
[Werner Meyer Eppler] introduced several compositions by the experimental German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Herr Stockhausen uses sounds produced by electronic devices to make his music. He is, according to Professor Meyer Eppler, the composer of the only piece of electronic music that has been published in score form.

The score of this composition (Stockhausen's 1954 Study No. 2) was a disappointment to those accustomed to conventional musical notations. It specifies tape lengths in fractions of inches in place of note duration. In electronic-music scoring, crescendos and diminuendos are indicated in decibels.

As part of a discussion of electronics compositions, Professor Meyer Eppler played (on tape) Herr Stockhausen's latest work, "Song of the Young Man in the Furnace," which had its world debut five weeks ago in Cologne. That performance utilized five loudspeakers. Today, Professor Meyer Eppler got along with one...

Engineers at the session felt that the composition was hard to understand, since it had a lot of musical effects that sound merely like something falling down stairs.

Professor Meyer Eppler agreed that electronic was difficult for the average listener, but he maintained that people who were familiar with modern music could understand it pretty well. This view was challenged by others in the discussion that followed.

New Music in the Air
But Professor Meyer Eppler and others maintained that new sound-producing and transforming techniques were going to change music. Eventually, a composer will be able to fix his ideas forever in sound through electronic devices, just as a sculptor fixes his ideas in modeling clay. No interpretation or change will be possible later.