DCCLIX. STOCKHAUSEN, Karlheinz: Zeitmaße

DCCLIX. STOCKHAUSEN, Karlheinz (1928-2007)

Zeitmaße (1955-56)
Le Domaine Musical
Pierre Boulez, cond.
(13:38)

I was twelve when I took the record and score out from Carnegie Library, and sat for hours score-reading this wondrous work.

Fifty-eight years later, I feel a deep connection with Stockhausen's "Nr. 5" in his catalogue, as I've strived to unearth its secrets.

I'll try to share some of them below the first 22 bars of the score:

Zeitmaße means "time measures."

Stockhausen holed himself up in a rented room in Switzerland after he was commissioned to write a work for orchestra (this would become Gruppen). He had scarcely begun, when he was asked to write a short composition celebrating the tenth anniversary of Heinrich Strobel's serve at the Südwestrundfunk, Baden-Baden.

"I had to write something quickly, by that evening. I did not allow myself to take any time over it. And then, suddenly, I hear this whole little four-minute piece. I really chuckled to myself about it. It was for voice and wind quintet [sic; he surely meant quartet]. Later I replaced the vocal part with a cor anglais, and the 'piece' is the first four minutes of Zeitmaße."

The song -- using a text by Strobel, translated into French -- was scored for alto voice, flute, clarinet and bassoon (the "quintet" seems to have reduced to a "trio").

On cherche pour trouver quelque chose. Mais au fond, on ne sait pas ce qu'on cherche au juste. Et cela est vrai non seulement pour l"allemagne musicale.

(We are seeking to find something. But at bottom, we do not know quite what we are looking for. And that is true not only of German musical life.)

The song became the basis for the beginning of Zeitmaße. Stockhausen contemporarily wrote about the idea of "time measures" in an article entitled "How Time Passes":

"Music consists of order-relationships in time; this presupposes that one has a conception of such time. We hear alterations in an acoustic field: silence-sound-silence, or sound-sound; and between the alterations we can distinguish time-intervals of varying magnitude. These time-intervals may be called phases.

In order to compare one group of phases with another, we make a distinction between 'periodic' and 'aperiodic' phase-groups, and, between these extremes, we distinguish a greater or smaller number of transitional stages (as deviations from either periodicity or aperiodicity, depending on which predominates)."

The article goes on to explain his idea of serial organization, centering on the concept of a twelve-step duration series having the same properties as a basic 12-tone pitch series.

The first twelve notes of Zeitmaße form the pitch series: C#/D/A/C/G#/E/D#/F#/F/B/A#/G, which generates further series, where the last note of each row becomes a starting point for subsequent ones.

In addition to a pitch series, Stockhausen also constructed a dynamic series, which can be easily noticed by the constant change of dynamics in each part.

And finally, he determined five categories of "time measures," which are found both separately and in combinations:

1. Metronomically measured tempi, in 12 different degrees, measured as a chromatic scale;
2. "As fast as possible," dependent on the abilities of the players and the nature of the musical passage;
3. "As slowly as possible," with the passage to be performed in one breath. (Today, most accomplished wind players have learned circular breathing, which makes this process practical.);
4. Fast, slowing down to about a quarter of the initial speed; and
5. Slow, speeding up to "as fast as possible."

Thus, this early work prefigures Stockhausen's obsession with particular types of organization for each component of music: pitch, rhythm, form -- that grows more and more complex over the years.