Hello Martin,

to my knowledge there have been at least three versions of Stimmung: the original 1968 "Paris Version" devised by the composer himself with the Coolgeium Vocale Köln, for whom the piece was written, the Singcircle Version, devised by Gregory Rose with the assistance of the composer in the late 1970s, and Paul Hillier's "Copenhagen Version" for Theatre of Voices.

The score specifies which singers and which pitches are going to be active in each of 51 sections, but the rhythmical/phonetic "models", the spoken "magic names" and the four poems can be placed freely within this framework. What this means in practice is that the running order of the piece needs to be worked out prior to rehearsals. The "Paris Version" has been published as a fixed study-score in itself, and the Stockhausen Verlag double CD contains two recordings of it. The Singcircle Version differs in that the poems are spoken in English rather than German (not a good idea in my opinion, since the sound of the words in this piece is as important as their meaning).

None of these versions, though, differs from the others in anything essential. Since the piece is not concerned with long-term developing structure, changing the order of things around makes less difference than for example changing the order of the sixty-odd sections of Gruppen, though, even there, several sections were added and inserted at various points through the piece after the rest had been fully composed.

Mr Grew's contribution to the discussion is (perhaps deliberately) confusing. That diagram refers to Gruppen, not to our current main subject of discussion, Stimmung.

In passing, I'd hazard a guess that some Renaissance polyphonists must have drawn up some such plan for their larger-scale enterprises. The disposition of the third group of strings in RVW's Tallis Fantasia at the work's premiere was considered very deliberately with regard to the venue (Gloucester Cathedral), too. Even in the main body of classical repertoire, there are plenty of examples of offstage participation (or in the case of opera, onstage instrumental participation). Stockhausen was surely elaborating on a tradition of sound from diverse locations being an essential aspect of a piece's construction, rather than just being 'a little unnecessary'.

Yes indeed, Ron, though he seems to have come at it by a circuitous path. The original idea of having three conductors was devised in order to be able to superimpose three different layers of tempo, though of course it didn't take him long to grasp the wider implications. The most obvious "spatial effects" in the music, though, were late additions to the compositional scheme.

And indeed, he was never particularly interested in pointing to previous examples of the ideas he "originated".

Pictures from Stockhausen's rehearsals back in the day seem to suggest that this solution (which guarantees visual contact btw the conductors) has been around for a while. (cf. the duMont textbooks and the piccies from the old days). Nowadays of course we have mirrors to facilitate these things do not we?

The three-conductors solution was arrived at before detailed work on the score, although the "inserts" of music conceived in spatial terms were added even after the rest of the score was in fair copy. That's my understanding at least.

Cosmic Pulses consists of 24 melodic layers, each with its own spatial trajectory and each "looping" a different number of pitches (from 1 to 24!), which begin and then end sequentially. The "loops" become irregular in various ways: through "pitch-bending" glissandi, through (increasingly extreme) accelerandi and ritardandi, and through changes in dynamic which, in the central part of the piece in which all layers are active, bring one or more of them momentarily to the "surface" and then back into the general melée. Stockhausen himself wondered whether it was really possible to hear all the layers separately (as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I think) and it certainly isn't in the stereo version or in a space as echoey as the RAH. Eight of the other pieces in the KLANG series consist of a single vocal or instrumental line added each to a different selection of three out of the 24 layers, in which case they no doubt become much more individually discernible.

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