Stockhausen: Kontakte & Gesang der Jünglinge

By the early 1960s, the electronic tape music scene had exploded. To Ed canby, it seemed that its practitioners were producing at such a pace that every week brought with it new and revolutionary sonic innovations and ideas. Previous episodes of Recordings, E.T.C. have largely concentrated on the works of American composers, but this episode focuses on two pieces by German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The first piece, "Kontakte" (1959-1960) was commissioned by and produced in the Electronic Music Studio in Cologne, Germany. According to Canby, the title refers to "various types of of contacts or relationships between different aspects of recognizable and purely fabricated sounds" which include percussion, electronic sounds and other "exotic instruments". Along with the electronically produced sounds, silence is employed as its own sonic element within the space of the piece. However, Canby notes that the languid pacing of this half-hour long work makes it difficult to play over the airwaves and its accompanying "lack of leisure" and "abhorrence of silence".

The other piece is "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1956) or "Songs of the Young Ones" — an "excellent example of impressionistic electronic music" that combines "weird, unheard of sounds" with concrete, real-world sounds. The words, spoken and sung by a choir of German schoolboys, are taken from the third Book of Daniel, the apocryphal Bible text where three Christians boys are thrown into a fire on the orders of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and are subsequently saved by an angel who overheard their singing. Stockhausen reconfigured the recorded voices into a surrealistic collage of human and non-human sounds that creates the impression of an otherworldly space.

Canby adds at the end that "it's nice to have a human touch in a piece of electronic music in this age of dehumanizing everything right and left".

WNYC archives id: 58795