Piano piece X (Stockhausen)

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The piano piece X , dedicated to Aloys Kontarsky , is the tenth piano piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen , who wrote a total of 14 piano pieces. It was written in 1954 and revised by the composer in 1961. The world premiere took place in 1962 at the 3rd Settimana Internazionale Nuova Musica in Palermo by Frederic Rzewski .

General character

This piece opens up a completely different world for those familiar with European classical music composed before 1900 : categories such as melody, harmony and counterpoint take a back seat to general structural processes, sharp contrasts, asymmetrical rhythms, deceleration and acceleration events, long colored resting points, sound transformations, Composite and decomposed sounds. What the work has in common with older music is that the attentive listener already understands the general formal course with the first acoustic reproduction. This can not be taken for granted in new music .

Musical course of the first few seconds

The piece begins with an accentuated major third fa in the middle register, which is followed by a transparent texture of scurrying chromatic runs, jagged, quiet note sequences and interwoven, dynamically separated and longer-sounding individual notes f sharp-dge-dis-f. A fermata on the last f leads to a short pause, whereupon the sentence clumps together with three-tone microclusters with the main note emphasized. This material then mixes, there is slight tonal condensation and the tonal space expands downwards. The molded part ends with the interval jump fis′-f ″.

After this part, which lasts 20-33 seconds depending on the artist, the acoustic world changes radically. The airy movement, which has so far alternated between mezzo-forte and triple piano, is interrupted by sudden, brutally hammered, accelerating double forearm clusters, which develop in their dynamics from brute triple forte to piano. The starting cluster of this group expands the tonal space considerably upwards; the cluster cascade finally contracts again to the range of notes that existed at the beginning of the piece, so that the arms slightly overlap.

This is followed by five-tone and two-tone chords in wide registers with interspersed rapid cluster arpeggios , whereupon the piece finally reaches its first maximum spectral expansion up and down on a fortissimo cluster. Clusters and 6-note chords let the pitch space collapse again and the movement pauses briefly on an extremely delayed bass cluster repetition. In a subsequent Accelerando movement , the chords and clusters spread out again and the composition finally remains on an extremely rapidly repeated, increasing and decreasing four-stroke f, which during its dynamic forte-fortimissimo maximum is only briefly due to the impulse of the around a tritone lower three-prime h is interrupted.

Opposites as a structural feature

Depending on the interpreter, only 30 (Rzewski) or 55 (Wambach) seconds have passed. An essential element of the piece has already unfolded: the contrast between different materials. Contrast is just the simplest form of formal happening; In the course of the piece there is a mediation between opposites such as loud / quiet, slow / fast, short / long, melodic / chromatic, narrow / wide, sound / noise, individual shapes / mass complexes. At the beginning, the opposites dominate the action, but gradually recognizable figures emerge.

The key values ​​of the presented opposites reach the limit of what is playable: extreme speed of action ("as fast as possible") stands against letting it fade away completely after the attack, extreme dynamic contrasts between triple forte and triple piano follow quickly one after the other, extreme noise is contrasted by double arm clusters with single notes.

However, Stockhausen mediates between all these extremes by means of richly differentiated gradations: For example, Stockhausen fills the tonal gap between the individual tone and the white noise formed by the broadest cluster with a range of carefully coordinated clusters and chords with different density and width.

Colored silence

If the density of action of the piece reaches into dimensions that were hardly daring up to then, its opposite is also found, the gradual fading of the strings into almost inaudible realms. The pauses in the composition are not just simple silence, but rather colored silence in which pause events are embedded, which sound out the material as if with a magnifying glass. Each sound is given a lot of time there; where 80 attacks took place in a certain time unit, the slow fading of a singular sound event is now listened to.

The ear is struck by the numerous conversions of the sounds that result from a very developed use of the right pedal or special types of touch. The simplest case is simply letting the strings fade away, so that it is easy to see how the high notes go out first and then the lower notes later. A particularly striking passage can be found on page 11 of the score , in which ascending, dynamically developing cluster ladders up to fff are allowed to swing freely when the right pedal is depressed. However, Stockhausen also uses a whole series of differentiating techniques, such as half-pressed pedal, immediately repeated silent depression of the keys after the stop, gradual release of the right pedal, silent depression of keys and stimulation of echo strings. This shows the composer's affinity for electronic music , in which envelopes are modified and filtering is carried out.

Serial structure

The starting point for the shape of the piece is the series of numbers 7 1 3 2 5 6 4. It can be seen that this is a decay process in which the middle is reached starting from the maximum deflection and alternatingly decreasing fluctuations. The piece belongs to so-called serial music , in which musical parameters are organized in rows. Categories such as durations, dynamic values, density ratios, tone quality (note name) and position serve as parameters. The series of numbers can be seen as a kind of super formula for the piece, through which most of it is organized. Stockhausen applies numerous transformations to the series, such as rotation , inversion, and permutation .

The work consists of 7 phases, which are preceded by a massive initial complex, which, as it were, anticipates the development of the form in fast motion. This first part is over, where the listener hears the unanimous material heard at the very beginning for the first time, after which the first pause unfolds.

The composition revolves around conveying relative degrees of order and disorder. A lower degree of order is associated with the equilibrium of the occurring parameter values ​​and a higher probability of strong differences, a higher degree of order with greater clarity, lower density and greater isolation of the events.

Analysis by Herbert Henck

According to Herbert Henck , Stockhausen is not about mere opposites, but about bringing together the extremes. In Herbert Henck's analysis, it can be understood that the same strict organizational principles are used to express the extreme disorder as they are in the passages with more uniform material. In other words: Even in the greatest chaos, the same strict serial principles prevail as elsewhere. This procedure is guided by the demand for the absence of contradictions in the order in detail and as a whole, the thought of the one in the whole and the whole in the one.

It mediates between the beginning and the end, the chaos and the balance. In the process, more and more figures with characteristic material emerge. Stockhausen counteracts the ever-increasing isolation of these figures by uniting these figures into one superordinate figure towards the end. The piece ends with soft single notes and four-part chords in pp and ppp. In the last stop, one of the low individual notes slips under the final chord in an extremely high register. This final sound fades away softly.

Interpretations

The composition was recorded by Frederic Rzewski , Aloys Kontarsky , Florent Boffard (excerpts available on his website), Herbert Henck , Bernhard Wambach and Ellen Corver . As with Rzewski / Kontarsky, the recordings either emphasize the dynamism and speed (instruction from Stockhausen in the score: "as fast as possible") or place more emphasis on transparency (Wambach):

Interpreter admission Duration Disk number
Frederic Rzewski Dec 1964 23 min vinyl Wergo 600 10
Frederic Rzewski Dec 1964 23 min vinyl Listen to SHZW 903 BL
Frederic Rzewski Dec 1964 23 min vinyl Heliodor 2 549016
Frederic Rzewski Dec 1964 23 min vinyl Mace S 9091
Aloys Kontarsky Nov 1965 22 min vinyl CBS S 72 59 1/2
Aloys Kontarsky Nov 1965 22 min vinyl CBS 32 210 008
Aloys Kontarsky Nov 1965 22 min vinyl CBS S77209
Aloys Kontarsky Nov 1965 22 min CD Sony Classical S2K 53346
Herbert Henck 1986 25 min vinyl Wergo 60135/36
Herbert Henck 1986 25 min CD Wergo 60135 / 36-50
Herbert Henck 1986 25 min CD Wergo 60135 / 36-50
Bernhard Wambach 1987 29 min vinyl Schwann Musica Mundi VMS 1067
Bernhard Wambach 1987 29 min CD Koch Schwann Musica Mundi 310 009 H1
Ellen Corver Jun 1997 27 min CD Stockhausen Verlag CD 56B

With the medium of long-playing records (vinyl), hard accents that are inserted in a longer pause can be heard as a pre- and post-echo a groove before and after. This also applies to a much lesser extent to the CD version of the analogue recording with Aloys Kontarsky. The cause here is crosstalk. In the Kontarsky recording, one can occasionally hear children's voices calling from afar during the breaks.

literature

  • Herbert Henck : Karlheinz Stockhausen's Piano Piece X: History, Theory, Analysis, Practice, Documentation . Herrenberg: Gotthard F. Döring music publisher (edition no. MD 0704), 1976.
  • Karlheinz Stockhausen : Piano piece X , dedicated to Aloys Kontarsky. Commissioned by Radio Bremen, Universal Edition, UE 13675f LW, 1967.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herbert Henck : Karlheinz Stockhausen's Piano Piece X , p. 6
  2. ^ Herbert Henck: Karlheinz Stockhausen's Piano Piece X , pp. 8-14
  3. ↑ Score piano piece X , Universal Edition, pp. 1–2
  4. ↑ Recording by Frederic Rzewski on Wergo 600 10
  5. ↑ Recording by Bernhard Wambach on Koch Schwann Musica Mundi 310 009 H1
  6. ↑ Score piano piece X , Universal Edition, notes