The Piece:
·
Choose a text.
·
Record it.
·
Spoken voice or sung; male or female.
·
Produce a piece using only the recorded text as your sonic material.
The Rules:
·
No samples.
·
The text must be intelligible.
·
The nature of the piece must reflect the meaning
in the text.
Research
Karlheinz Stockhausen (22nd August 1928 - 5th December 2007)
was a German Avant-Garde composer. He's
best known for his work in electronic, aleatoric and serial music, and musical
spatialization. He has been considered
as
perhaps the most influential voice of the post WWII European
avant-garde.
(Stockhausen Resource Pack 2006)
He worked briefly at the Studio d'Essai with Pierre
Schaeffer whilst he attended classes at the conservatory in Paris, but then
moved to the WDR in Cologne studying Elektronische Musik instead of Musique
Concrete. He wrote 370 works in
total. He is best known for his works
such as Helikopter-Streichquartett, Kontakte and Aphex Twin.
Gesang Der Jünglinge literally translates as "song of
the youths" and is an electronic work realised in 1955-56 whilst at the
WDR in Cologne. It has been described as
the
first masterpiece of electronic music (Simms 1986)
This piece is most important for its ability to flawlessly mix
the human voice with electronic sounds by matching the resonances of the voice
with pitch and producing sounds of phonemes electronically. This marked the first time the two opposing
schools of electronic music (the German Elektronische Musik and the French
Musique Concrete) as it uses both recorded sounds and generated sounds.
The thirteen minute long piece is for magnetic tape and five
loudspeakers. The text is drawn from the
Bible's Book of Daniel and was performed by a boy soprano. Its premiere was on 30th May 1956.
The Composition
The composition strives to show an element of the electronic
usage of sound while also allowing the text to be heard comprehensibly. The piece is based on the idea of time as a
constraint and so the idea is to show a sense of repetition and monotony and
that is why the clock ticking at the beginning seems so much louder than the
speech. The manipulated electronic
sounds below are that of the background noise whilst on a train; the recording
captured speech, the movements of the train and the environment. All of the texts are related to time, many of
which are poems. The piece epitomises
two key ideas. The first idea is that of the pinpointing of small sections of
history. The second is the idea of
social challenges and acceptances.
Idea 1 – Social Challenges
The first voice represents one’s own voice. The singular thought of one’s own
expression. It breaks through the
background sounds which represent the environment and atmosphere around the
speaker. This voice speaks and then a
second voice joins. The second voice
joining represents the beginning of the realisation that one is not alone in
the thoughts and expression that they are giving. As more speakers join, with international
accents, it shows that there are people all over the world feeling the same way
as the first speaker; a movement has begun.
Whatever thoughts the first speaker has, it’s repeated in the other
speakers. The repetition towards the end
of the piece represents the ongoing repetition of these thoughts through many
people at many different stages through time.
The speakers grow quiet as they adjust back to their surroundings and
this is when the background sounds from the train can be heard again. The final sound, one of the speakers saying “time”,
shows that the repetitive loop of emotion is going to continue.
Idea 2 – Pinpointing history
When creating the piece, this was the main idea in
mind. For this idea, the piece begins
with someone (or something) looking at the earth and “tuning in” on a specific
point in the history of the world. These
are the radio like sounds heard at the beginning. The clock signifies the specific period they
are searching for. When they find their
desired era, the first speaker begins talking; it’s as though they are zooming
in on that specific time period. The first voice indicates the repetitive daily
routine of the people on earth. The
second voice joins from a later time and also signifies the monotony of daily
life. The third voice is from a previous
date, and shows the tedium of life then. The next voice joins and has a different
accent again, showing that someone from another part of the world shares in the
same tedious routine. As each voice
joins from each time period and each part of the world, it signifies the same
monotonous daily grind. The repetitive “time”
from 1 minute 37 seconds shows this monotony once again. The piece ends with the onlookers “tuning out”
of the earth. The whole composition is
to represent the monotony of daily life but also the tedious repetition of
actions, not just one’s own actions around their own life, but the effects
humans have on the world itself. The
idea that the world, through the cause of humans, repeats a cycle of a peace
period, then a war, regardless of how small or large the war is, followed by a
regeneration / clean up period then peace again. Humans are monotonous and tedious by default
and the same problems are ongoing with the world.
The piece was created by recording the texts for the
piece. After deciding on using time as
the basis for the piece, the texts used include The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Elliot, The Hand of Heaven by Francis Thompson and I had No Time to Hate by Emily
Dickinson. The texts were recorded
through speakers using a field recorder and then input into Cubase for
editing. The singular instance of the
word “time” were copied in order to create the end section. The sounds from the train was manipulated in Cecilia
and then reversed in Cubase. The piece
was arranged and then mixed and exported.
Critical Analysis
The composition has good structure and is a good metaphor
for life. It stays within the brief and
uses some elements Stockhausen used for Gesang Der Jünglinge in terms of the
use of both comprehensible speech and ambiguous background sound. The mix levels, while generally good, could have
been cleaned up more in order to give more space to the individual voices.
References
Stockhausen Resource Pack (2006) 'The Life and Work of Karlheinz stockhausen' from Soundscapes: Exploring Electronic Music and Karlheinz Stockhausen by London Sinfonietta. Found here: http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/sites/default/files/SOUNDSCAPES%20-%20Exploring%20electronic%20music%20and%20Karlheinz%20Stockhausen_1.pdf [22.4.14]
Simms, Bryan R. (1986). Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-872580-8
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