The problem here is that some people are trying to have a discussion and others are trying to start an argument, some with wilfully inane assertions.

However that might be: the silences in Piano Piece 10 could be seen as one of its most interesting features, which points forward to Stockhausen's further explorations, in the succeeding years, of unusual relationships between sound and time. (I think this would also be a feature of the complete Carré if there would ever be a chance to experience it in that form.) The silences in Piece 10 indeed don't stand "outside" the structure of the music (in the sense that they would if they were breaks between "movements") but are a part of its serial constellation. This is made clear, I think, by the way that the silences are never framed by any kind of opening/closing gesture but rather come across (to me at any rate) as signifying a continuation of the music with "zero density" or "zero dynamic". This has interesting implications for the end of the piece, where, after twenty-odd minutes shot through with these silent "interruptions" (after which "transmission" continues as before), it isn't clear that the concluding silence is actually an "ending" or not.

I wonder to what extent Stockhausen was aware of (or thinking of) those earlier works of Cage that make use of long silences? Apart from the obvious 4'33", the work that does this most spectacularly is the earlier Four Walls (1944) for piano and voice. Margaret Len Tan, who really made the piece her own in later times, wrote eloquently about the piece representing a disturbed mind, with the silences signalling the fracturing of consciousness. I'm not sure if this piece had ever been performed by the time Stockhausen wrote Piano Piece 10, though, let alone in Europe. But one can find elements of the same, though to a lesser degree, in other early Cage works.


The final three pages contain a series of eight chords or very short gestures, all quiet, creating a greater degree of regularity and calm than at any point previously. That is what I find gives the passage its 'concluding' quality.

Wouldn't you, at this point, want to know how KS reached his pitch-organization decisions? The way Henck describes them leads me to believe that KS did some quasi-improvisational sketching (within the registral and chord/cluster width constraints of the individual characters), and then systematized this approach ex post facto. The sheer convolutedness of the pitch- and diastematic conception convinces me that this is the case. The first 5 pages, which KS calls Vor-Phase, are followed without a break by the first statement of the first character. In other words, the first pause occurs after the main body of the piece is already under way. Seems to me that an interpreter ought to be aware of this in order to interpret it according to the composer's wishes. Is this where we part ways? Would you rather interpret it in the way you yourself find most compelling? What if that runs counter to the intentions of the composer? We can certainly agree to disagree about this as far as I'm concerned. With these observations you make a strong case for taking the piece at face value, in a line of thought that might, I suppose, be hindered by knowing how all this stuff was structured. But regardless of whether the gestural analysis you do comes before or after a study of composer sketches and plans, both types of study must contribute to a complete picture and a basis for realization. Here your intuition matches the artist's intention: but the repeated notes are just one of a handful of willful efforts to "work against" and "stand outside of" the pre-composition. All the characters have a basic set of chordal and cluster vocabularies, and despite all obfuscational strategies, this pre-structure doesn't allow for certain "typical" gestures that we like to see in piano music (trills, repeated notes, etc), so he simply inserts them and calls them, well, insertions. That's an inspired and highly engaging strategy. RE interspersions become less frequent: well, that's also pre-structure, but what's interesting is that the pre-structure doesn't capture the qualitative difference between something violent disrupting something wispy and something wispy disrupting something violent. The disruptions (Vertruebungen) are only a small percentage of the whole character-phase, but one can end up with the impression that these are just the same thing twice: first mostly wispy and a few loud outbursts.... then mostly loud with a few wispy (meek? desperate?) calls of protest. It seems like violent wins the day. Or one can try to make the case that the wispy character doesn't need as much time to assert itself as before, and the violent character "doth protest too much." As stated above, I think that on a micro-level, KS was looking for a way to make his pitch and diastematic decisions quite freely. I agree that the final phase and especially the final statement of Charakter IV bear resemblance to a kind of coda, but it's remarkable how much of this is the result of simple control parameters (e.g. Vertruebungsgrad = 0) and how much a result of manipulating dynamics and profiles to draw the piece to a more convincing close. All this can be traced and 'documented' by reading Henck. If only to eliminate guesswork. As you say... I think the deeper "meaning" of a great piece of music in the history of ideas can be found by comparing its pre-structure (as well as the super-structure, i.e., what transcends or defies structure) with its audible result  -- neither one nor the other is sufficient. When the two sets of data seem in tandem, or on the other hand part ways quite radically, it's pretty neat. Can we agree on that? Phoo! It does! It does!!Ferneyhough? In this context? Definitely a can of worms. But by not getting into it, I don't deny the importance of your point.

Rather than try to decide whether KS begins with intuition or with structure, I like to just assume that the pieces are the by-product of a life-long effort to meld these two forces together. Another chicken-egg question. And ideally just as moot. If one has to ask, then it is implicitly a critique of the piece. In fact, the system transcends intuition, and then intuition transcends the system. Mutual transcendence, like holy matrimony. Bettie and Boo.

For Ferneyhough, I think, the dialogue between structure and intuition is so intense and rapid, that the structure is in danger of being completely obfuscated... and that's just where he likes it. As I said, it's a can of worms...leads me into blatant generalizations.

(for the quotes of mine that Chafing Dish is responding to, see the earlier post)


Not particularly, unless I was a composer trying to absorb some of those techniques myself. No-one has really come up with a convincing analysis of the pitch decisions in the minute Klavierstück III, but I don't think that's such a great loss.


The passage on the top of page 6 does indeed follow without a break, but is of a markedly different character to the previous four-and-a-bit pages (from the cluster interspersion at the bottom of page 1 onwards). Most of what precedes is made up of chords and clusters; the top of page 6 returns to the arabesque-like figurations that open the piece (marked äußerst leise). That can be easily ascertained simply by looking at the score. If there is significant other information that an interpreter needs to know in order to 'interpret it according to the composer's wishes', why didn't Stockhausen put that in the score (after all, he hardly shies away from broadcasting plenty of information about the workings of his pieces)? But also, even though in a compositional sense one could say 'the main body of the piece is already under way' at the top of page 6, the very fact of there not being a pause preceding it can make this section seem like an outgrowth from the previous one (though separated because of its character, as I say). Is it necessarily always in line with the composer's intentions to highlight the compositional role of this passage? Mightn't the ambiguity be a part of the piece, and as such not necessarily to be erased?

Stockhausen knew what he was doing in terms of notation and supplying information about his works. I'm not convinced that the work cannot be interpreted satisfactorily without reading Henck's analysis of it. Stockhausen's own note talks a little about the different degrees of organization that were employed in the compositional process, and how 'structures are crystallized in solitary individual shapes....or they are levelled out in massed complexes', as well as how 'the initial homogeneous state of advanced non-organization (undifferentiation) unfolds into increasingly numerous and concentrated shapes'. It is of course legitimate to ask whether the actual work necessarily corresponds to how he himself describes it. Also about the mode of quasi-scientific discourse that accompanied a lot of compositions of the time, and why such a discourse was employed?


I don't really think such information 'hinders' things, just that it's not particularly necessary. Because I do believe this is music that at least has the potential to be highly meaningful to non-specialists, as is true of most of the best music.


That is a very 'planned' view of the process of interpretation, which I'm not sure would necessarily correspond to many performers' experiences (including some of the early performers). I do a certain amount of that, but often conclude that more intuitive responses to the score, or at least responses derived primarily from the score, can be equally valuable. I've been rehearsing both books of Boulez's Structures recently with another pianist in Germany, for a recording of it we are making in the autumn. Now, in terms of pieces 1b and 1c, I don't really know in any detail how they were constructed - I'll probably endeavour to find out a little more, but ultimately I'm more concerned with what I perceive in the finished work (1b is a particularly intense dramatic work). There's a review by Charles Rosen of Taruskin's Oxford History in which he says that he actually didn't know what the row was in the Webern Variations (which he had played a great many times and recorded) before reading this book, and is not sure if he is any the better off for so doing.


Yes, but one which can be discerned for the most part just by listening, playing, studying the score.


But why does it particularly matter whether they are pre-structure or not? Doesn't what comes out in sound matter most?


Well, that's to move into the realms of competing literary discourses around the work. Obviously there are interpretative question as to how one executes Stockhausen's dynamics, tempo (and tempo flexibility), etc., which each performer will arrive at their own conclusions at, but basically I think a lot of what you're describing can be discerned reasonably clearly from the work itself.


Yes, but once again I'm not sure if that tells us much more about the work, as opposed to how it was composed.


I'm afraid not - I think that is a form of mystification, and far too reliant upon compositional intention. 'Meaning' (never a particularly good word in the context of music which is so semantically ambiguous) to me is not about 'what did the composer mean' but rather 'how are the types of experiences made manifest through a work meaningful more widely in terms of consciousness, people's lives, society (and the wider culture bequeathed by society), etc.'.


Hmmmmmm .....


Sorry, but I find that to come perilously close to mystification as well. What I don't generally find in the type of approach you seem to be outlining is any real consideration of why and how the work might be at all meaningful other than to Stockhausen aficionados, with extensive knowledge of his working methods, an interest in his rather eccentric ideas, and so on.

Yes - the same with Klavierstück IX relative to Young's X for Henry Flint. Possibly the opening idea was inspired by hearing the Young piece, but Stockhausen develops this material (and other material) in various ways, a wholly different approach to that of Young. I'm not saying that one approach is necessarily better or worse than the other - they both spring from fundamentally different aesthetic aims - but influence does not mean total subservience. There are many ways in which Anglo-American experimental music influenced developments in Europe (and vice versa, though we don't hear as much about that from the various apostles of Anglo-American musical triumphalism from Nyman onwards), but, as implied in the Johnson quote Richard gave earlier, they often take on an extremely different manifestation in their latter form. In Amy C. Beal's recent book New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), she mentions that composers such as Stockhausen, Schnebel, Kagel, Huber, Otte, Zimmermann and others were influenced by Cage, Feldman, Fluxus and so on, but says almost nothing about precisely how, nor the whole process of mediation. One sometimes might almost be left with the impression, were one only to read this book, that these composers were little more than epigones of American experimentalism (the sort of message that goes down well in these neo-conservative times to certain American audiences), whereas even a cursory listen to a few works by any of those figures would clearly reveal quite how different their music is.


It all depends what exactly he means by 'its workings'. If 'workings' is taken to mean compositional processes, then he does lay himself open to the sorts of 'formalist' criticisms that Nyman and others made; if he's talking about the 'workings' of the pieces as they exist in sound (which I would like to think he is, as such things are very apparent in much of his music), it is a different matter.

About the dialectic between the 'experimental' and the 'avant-garde' (which can become highly reified categories which present an overly Manichean view of things, especially when mapped onto 'America' and 'Europe' respectively)? Why 'laughable'?