For those within travelling distance of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a chance to hear this version on Saturday 8 November.  

A couple of thoughts occur to me in this connection, IRF.

Maybe it's interesting to ask the question why these pieces are as long as they are. If we can think of music as being a particular way of articulating the experience of time, the 75 minutes of Stimmung is actually a quite different thing from what a 10-minute version would be. Taking your example of Deep Purple, their music is made up out of a string of simple structural elements (riff, verse, chorus, solo...) which  can basically be added to or subtracted from at will, whereas the elements of a piece like Gruppen are interrelated parts of an overall evolving structure whose presence is maybe not so easy to "feel" on a first or second hearing. This is why Cosmic Pulses is in fact very different from a Keith Emerson solo: the entries and exits and pitches and tempi of its 24 layers and every spatial movement they undergo (which of course they don't in the stereo format, which means a large part of what happens in the 8-channel concert version doesn't come over at all) are all planned and executed as a unity.

Also: given that you listened to Gruppen over the radio, that is through loudspeakers, how would your experience have been altered in retrospect if you'd been told at the end that it was an electronic piece made out of samples of orchestral instruments? Maybe not much! since one person's "unholy racket" can easily be to someone else one of the most exquisitely complex networks of beautiful orchestral sound ever composed. (I agree with you about James MacMillan though! he and most of his generation seem to be content with the "ordinary" while Stockhausen was quite the opposite). No, it isn't melodic in the sense that there are recognisable and coherent "lines" which emerge from it: indeed anything of the kind has been quite deliberately broken up into its constituent parts and distributed through the orchestra. As with the durations of the pieces, this feature is there for a reason: to encourage the listener's attention elsewhere, maybe to "wander" through the sound textures rather than being "told" (by the hierarchy of melody and harmony) what to listen to and for. This I find liberating and exhilarating, and actually I have done since I first heard this kind of music.

That's an interesting way of putting it!

RB (born 1959)...JM (born 1959)...

And to stay on topic, the first time I heard Gruppen I was excited by it but couldn't really piece together what was going on. So I listened to it again immediately, and got more excited but no closer to 'understanding' the piece. In fact it took several days of coming back to it before I really felt I appreciated why it was the way it was (by which time I couldn't take much more excitement...)

I think my point is, there's no reason why anyone should listen to a work repeatedly in order to 'get' it - but I think if there's any spark of interest on the first hearing, it's worth delving a little (or a lot) deeper to see if the piece will reveal itself gradually. If it doesn't, that's just fine - it's even possible that one will start to enjoy the piece several years later after hearing it accidentally, or never at all.

One answer would be: Beethoven's music and the way that it works (tonally, structurally, the idea that in Beethoven's music the orchestra is doing "the right thing" that an orchestra should do) is a familiar and accepted part of our musical culture, as is rock music, whereas Stockhausen's isn't (although it was a lot closer to being so in the 1970s than it is now, these things come and go). It doesn't require "greater academic understanding" - as I say, I took to it immediately at a time before I could read or play music (in fact a principal reason I taught myself to read music was wanting to know how Stockhausen's music worked "from the inside"). It may indeed require multiple listens, not because it's more "difficult", which I don't believe it is, but because its idiom is unfamiliar. Neither am I trying to claim for myself some weird ability to assimilate unfamiliar musical idioms - there's some music which it took me a very long time to "get" (eg. Shostakovich) and some which I think I might never get (eg. Britten).

As Ron says, the experience of getting to grips with something which at first seems out of reach is often a highly enlightening and satisfying one - although I'd add that the fascination has to be set off in the first place (or at least at some point), or you're not going to bother to follow it up.

Talking about my, er, generation: I think there was a moment for contemporary music in the UK, just as for the society of this country in a wider sense, I mean in the early to mid 1980s, when things could have gone either way in terms of following a more experimental or a more traditionalist direction, and there was a decisive turn in favour of the latter, not unrelated to the kind of populism promoted by the Thatcher régime (irrespective of whether her opinions were actually embraced by composers). The result, together with the arts policies of governments from Thatcher's to the present one, has been a radical reduction in the "biodiversity" represented in institutions like the Proms (where Stockhausen's music, for example, was often programmed in the 1970s).

I'm not trying to say anything about the way people "ought to" write or listen to music, and I have nothing against music which is "traditionalist" in outlook - plenty of the music I enjoy listening to could be described in those terms - but there's something a bit depressing about feeling I should defend Stockhausen's music now in the same terms as I might have done thirty years ago because his music is so seldom programmed compared to that of people like MacMillan.

Time I went off and calmed down I think.

My journey through Stockhausen's music:

http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/stockhausenjourney.htm

And I've just listened to the whole thing. Not much music I didn't know, but it's an interesting choice of excerpts, made with the (apparently not altogether convinced) assistance of the composer - who does almost all the talking between them, in a completely non-technical and actually rather endearing way. Some of my favourite moments aren't there, but I would recommend this programme to anyone who'd like to get to know something about the music but might be put off by the fact that it lasts at least half as long again as Wagner's Ring. The download unpacks into 3 CDs' worth of material and is divided into commentary and excerpt tracks, so those who don't understand German (though I don't think it would be hard for someone with just a little German to get the gist of it) can just skip them. It's mp3 at 320kbps so sounds quite good.

That is indeed true, and we are very fortunate in our generation to have so many perfect recordings available. But as the member says it really applies only to composers who are "serious" in the first place. It has no relevance to composers (so-called) such as the late unlamented Stockhausen who require the performers to remove their footwear. That is pseudery of the first order, and seventh-rate composition.

We intend to download all the links kindly provided by Members on this page, but it is most unlikely we shall ever feel inclined to listen to them! There will always be something better to do! For example we are at present engaged in putting together a list of serious German-speaking composers whose music is never played in England - there are dozens of them - and as the list grows we shall little by little introduce them here to Members.