Thanks to you and hh for Sternklang - now that really was an event. I enjoyed it immensely and there were lots of people there who obviously weren't contemporary music enthusiasts but who could appreciate the whole experience. It occurred on midsummer's day starting at 9pm - and the weather was very good which helped of course as people could just lie around on the grass if they felt like it.
If I ever get around to it, I've always fancied putting it on. Maybe I could stage some kind of performance during the Fringe up here in Holyrood park... [gazes dreamily into the distance]
Has anyone heard the 5th hour of
Klang:
Harmonien for bass clarinet/flute?
I heard Irvine Arditti talking about how they asked him to write a string quartet for them and he said he didn't write string quartets . . .
That really says it all does it not. The string quartet is so pure and absolute! All the great composers (not to mention the many who were not great) have written them, with the exception of course of Scryabine, who died young.
I think that it does say a lot.
For Stockhausen, Classical forms, genres and instrumentations have so much
baggage attached to them that he found them extremely problematic. Consider how he splits up the orchestra in
Gruppen and how he subverts the standard wind quintet in
Zeitmasse. I believe that this isn't just a matter of being original in each new work (though that's a symptom) but it's a matter of beginning again after WW2. The music of the Classical period, and the continuation of the same into the 19th century was considered compromised to some extent (though he seems to have been quite happy later on to reintegrate Mozart, Mozart and Haydn in his cadenzas).
Interestingly, like all good composers (I really don't like 'great' because I don't understand what it means and furthermore
I don't want to understand what it means: every single attempt to establish any kind of pantheon brings me up in a rash), Stockhausen was asked to write this string quartet, turned it down, and then
started (almost against his will) hearing and dreaming it. I see the helicopter deployment as being a way of radically problematising the relationship of the four players in a way that makes the medium viable to Stockhausen (of course it could be played in the concert hall with recorded rotor blades mixed in (and the sounding result would probably have pleased KS more - see those comments he made after the premiere about the change in course!) but there's something delightful about the way it works.
True, Bryn. (But it isn't really by Stockhausen!) I'd like to hear a complete performance of that some time - the only recording of it is (a) a bit of a mess, given that it was so far outside any of the performers' experience at the time when it was made (before the premiere IIRC), and (b) cut to about 2/3 of its full duration.
I don't have a score of Carré but I do remember, I hope correctly, that each of the four orchestras contains 16 string instruments as well as winds and percussion.
Why is that piece not available in any other recording? Is it difficult to put on or was KS ambivalent towards it? Seeing how he was revisiting earlier works, I would have thought he might have organised a second go at it if the first recording is as shoddy as you say. Ho hum. Let's hope for the future that someone takes it up.
