Flog bread:I've given you some Stockhausen - you know where to find it.
The aforementioned concert yesterday also included a world premiere and a UK premiere. Stockhausen's last piece (he died last December) was a BBC commission for this concert:
Cosmic Pulses (the 13th hour of
Klang*). From the program notes:
This work is pure electronic music, there are no acoustic instruments.There are 24 melodic (pitch and rhythm) loops, comprising from 1 to 24 pitches, in 24 different registers. These loops rotate at 24 different speeds around eight loudspeakers. The loops are successively layered together from low to high and from the slowest to the fastest tempo. Stockhausen composed 241 different trajectories in space, and he wrote "I do not yet know if it is possible to hear everything..."
The answer is, no it isn't. And although the basic sound is pleasant, it varies hardly at all during the 35 minutes of its performance - in short it is tedious, and completely lacks the sonic interest of his first experiment in spacial movement of sound,
Gesang der Jünglinge. Although Stockhausen spent 50 years working on spacial aspects of sound, he never considered the technology (ambisonics) which might have made an experiment like this latest piece work, or at least work a bit better then it did (I won't go into the deficiencies of last night's sound projection in detail).
The UK premiere was
Harmonien for trumpet (this piece together with versions for flute, and bass clarinet, forms the 5th hour of
Klang). The trumpet playing was fabulous - but the extreme serialism of the piece again rendered it ultimately repetitious and essentially boring.
Maybe I'll come round to these pieces - but then again...
Paul
* Stockhausen wrote lots of pieces in sets, like his seven operas named for the days of the week (eat your heart out, Wagner), and this uncompleted set of 24 for the hours of the day.