![Todaiji shoro](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Todaiji_shoro.jpg)
''Telemusik'' is an
electronic composition
Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means ( electroac ...
by
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th and early 21st-century ...
, and is number 20 in his catalog of works.
History
Through his composition student,
Makoto Shinohara, Stockhausen was invited by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation
NHK
, also known as NHK, is a Japanese public broadcaster. NHK, which has always been known by this romanized initialism in Japanese, is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee.
NHK operates two terrestr ...
to visit Tokyo, and to carry out two commissions in their electronic music studio, in connection with the 50th anniversary of the founding of NHK in 1965. Because of other commitments, Stockhausen was unable to meet this schedule but finally, under pressure from Tokyo, he flew to Japan on 19 January 1966. According to a note in the score,
''Telemusik'' was realized between January 23 and March 2, 1966 in the Studio for Electronic Music of the Japanese broadcasting system Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), in collaboration with the director of the studio, Wataru Uenami and the studio technicians Hiroshi Shiotani, Shigeru Satô and Akira Honma.
The score is dedicated to the Japanese people. The first public performance took place at the NHK studios in Tokyo on 25 April 1966, in a program which also featured the first and second performances (in versions for trombone and for flute) of Stockhausen's other NHK commission, ''
Solo
Solo or SOLO may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Comics
* ''Solo'' (DC Comics), a DC comics series
* Solo, a 1996 mini-series from Dark Horse Comics
Characters
* Han Solo, a ''Star Wars'' character
* Jacen Solo, a Jedi in the non-canonical ''S ...
''.
Materials and concepts
The substance of the work consists of recordings of a variety of traditional ethnic musics from around the world, together with electronically generated sounds. More than twenty of these recorded fragments are intermodulated on tape with electronic sounds and with each other to produce "odd hybrid-types"—modulating, for example, "the chant of monks in a Japanese temple with
Shipibo
The Shipibo-Conibo are an indigenous people along the Ucayali River in the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Formerly two groups, the Shipibo and the Conibo, they eventually became one distinct tribe through intermarriage and communal ritual and are c ...
music from the Amazon, and then further impos
nga rhythm of Hungarian music on the melody of the monks. In this way, symbiotic things can be generated, which have never before been heard". Only seven of the work's thirty-two moments—nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 16—are restricted entirely to electronic sounds. The pitch range is deliberately kept rather high, between 6 and 12 kHz, so that the intermodulation can occasionally project sounds downwards, sections "that seem to be so far away because the ear cannot analyse it, so that it entered the normal audible range and suddenly became understandable". In this way, register becomes a means of bringing the “distant” close up (Greek ''tele'', "afar, far off", as in "telephone" or "television") the concept from which the title of the work is derived.
The work was created using a six-track tape recorder custom-built for the NHK studios. One track was reserved for editing during production, with the completed music being intended for playback in five channels, arranged in a circle around the audience. However, there are none of the continually-moving-sound techniques found in other of Stockhausen's electronic works, such as ''
Kontakte
''Kontakte'' ("Contacts") is an electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, realized in 1958–60 at the ''Westdeutscher Rundfunk'' (WDR) electronic-music studio in Cologne with the assistance of Gottfried Michael Koenig. The score is Nr. 12 ...
'', ''
Sirius
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. Its name is derived from the Greek word , or , meaning 'glowing' or 'scorching'. The star is designated α Canis Majoris, Latinized to Alpha Canis Majoris, and abbreviated Alpha CM ...
'', or ''Oktophonie'' from ''
Dienstag aus Licht''. The spatial conception of ''Telemusik'' is therefore closer to that of ''
Gesang der Jünglinge
''Gesang der Jünglinge'' (literally "Song of the Youths") is an electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne and is Work Number 8 in the composer's catalog. The vo ...
'', which was also originally in five channels. For performances elsewhere than at the NHK studios, Stockhausen mixed down several two-channel stereo copies, using a panorama console to approximately position the five channels from left to right as I IV III II V.
Form
![Klangschale](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Klangschale.jpg)
The principal forming element of ''Telemusik'' is duration. The work consists of thirty-two structures, called "
moments" by the composer. Each begins with the stroke of a Japanese temple instrument. These six instruments are each associated with a moment duration according to their natural decay time: the ''taku'' (a high-pitched sandalwood clapper with almost instantaneous decay) with the shortest duration, the ''bokushō'' (a larger clapper with longer decay time) with the next longer duration, then a hollow-sounding ''
mokugyo'' ("wooden fish"), higher and lower-pitched cup gongs called ''
rin'' and ''keisu'', ending with a group of four large temple bells for the longest of the six durations used. The durations in seconds of these moments are taken from the six
Fibonacci number
In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted , form a sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from ...
s between 13 and 144. The numbers of occurrences of these steps are also drawn from Fibonacci numbers, from 1 to 13. The longer the step, the fewer times it occurs, and vice versa:
However, the actual duration values used in the score are systematically varied above these base values so that from longest to shortest there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, and 2 variants (144, 89/91, 55/56/57, 34/35/36/37, 21/22/23, and 13/14). In order to achieve the specified numbers of moments, the variants of the shorter values are duplicated, again according to the Fibonacci series (13 × 5, 14 × 8; 21 × 3, 22 × 3, 23 × 2; 34 × 2, and the rest with single instances).
![Rin gong at Kiyomizu-dera, Kyoto](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Rin_gong_at_Kiyomizu-dera%2C_Kyoto.JPG)
Each of the 32 moments is then subdivided into from two to thirteen subsections, again using Fibonacci numbers, in most cases with some values repeated. For example, one of the composer's sketches (reproduced in ) shows that moment 22, with a total duration of 91 seconds, has subdivisions of 34 + 21 + 13 + 8 + 5 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1, though not used in that order in the composition itself.
The moments' durations are distributed over the length of the composition as follows:
The "extra" moment marked "7 Fortsetzung" (7 continued) is an insertion which repeats the long composite of descending glissandos from the two preceding moments,
ring modulated with a 12,000 Hz sine wave, briefly "notched" with a dip to 2,000 Hz at the point corresponding to the division between moments 6 and 7. This insert is marked at the beginning by a stroke on a Japanese temple instrument found nowhere else in ''Telemusik'': a gong called a ''kane'' (鐘). Of the six resulting structural layers, or "formant rhythms" four—the second, third, fourth, and fifth—are internally symmetrical. However, their centres of symmetry, marked in the table by the symbol "↕", do not coincide, so that the composite structure is not itself symmetrical. The ''keisu'' layer is centred on the overall form, while the ''rin'', ''mokugyo'', and ''bokusho'' layers are
phase-shifted by incrementally increasing distances to the left, right, and left again.
![Bell'kyoto](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Bell%27kyoto.jpg)
Moments are often more or less casually grouped together into successions of two or more moments, similar to the ''Hauptgruppen'' Stockhausen conceived as early as ''
Klavierstück I'' in 1952. Opinions on these groupings differ somewhat.
Robin Maconie
Robin John Maconie (born 22 October 1942) is a New Zealand composer, pianist, and writer.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Maconie studied with Frederick Page and Roger Savage at the Victoria University of Wellington, receiving a Master of Arts in t ...
describes moments 15, 16 and 17 as a "structural episode" consisting of a sustained "resonance of consciousness", superimposing and transforming material taken from moments 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 14. Others variously regard as groupings:
* moments 1–3
* moments 5–7 cont'd, 10–11, 17–23, and 27–31
* moments 12–14 and 24–26
* moments 16–21, 22–23, and 27–30
Discography
*DG LP 643546 (with ''
Mixtur'', small ensemble 1967, backwards version)
*Stockhausen Complete Edition CD 9 (with ''
Mikrophonie I'' and ''
Mikrophonie II'')
*Stockhausen Text-CD 16 (remastered November 2007)
References
Sources
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Further reading
* Cott, Jonathan. 1973. ''Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer''. New York: Simon and Schuster. .
* Frisius, Rudolf. 2008. ''Karlheinz Stockhausen II: Die Werke 1950–1977; Gespräch mit Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Es geht aufwärts"''. Mainz, London, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Toronto: Schott Musik International. .
* Fuhrmann, Roderich. 1974. "Karlheinz Stockhausen: ''Telemusik''". ''Musik und Bildung'' 6 (January): 24–29. Published at the same time in ''Perspektiven Neuer Musik—Material und didaktische Information'', edited by Dieter Zimmerschied, 251–265. Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne. .
*
Gruber, Gernot. 1999. "Stockhausens Konzeption der 'Weltmusik' und die Zitathaftigkeit seiner Musik". In ''Internationales Stockhausen-Symposion 1998, Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität zu Köln, 11. bis. 14. November 1998: Tagungsbericht'', ed. Imke Misch and
Christoph von Blumröder
Christoph von Blumröder (born 18 July 1951) is a German musicologist.
Career
Born in Northeim, Blumröder studied musicology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in Breisgau with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, philosophy and history of the . ...
, in association with
Johannes Fritsch
Johannes Georg Fritsch (27 July 1941 – 29 April 2010) was a German composer.
At the age of seven, Fritsch found a violin in the attic of his uncle's house in Bensheim-Auerbach, Germany, and began lessons with a village music teacher named Kna ...
, Dieter Gutknecht, Dietrich Kämper, and Rüdiger Schumacher, 103–111. Signale aus Köln 4. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag. .
*Nanni, Matteo. 2009. "World Music e globalizzazione della cultura: ''Telemusik'' di Karlheinz Stockhausen".''Il Saggiatore musicale'' 16, no. 1:75–102.
* 1989. "Universalismus und Exotik in Karlheinz Stockhausens Telemusik". ''Musica'' 43:315–320.
* Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 2009. ''Kompositorische Grundlagen Neuer Musik: Sechs Seminare für die Darmstädter Ferienkurse 1970'', edited by Imke Misch. Kürten: Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik. .
* Utz, Christian. 2007. "Zur kompositorischen Relevanz kultureller Differenz: Historische und ästhetische Perspektiven", in ''Musik und Globalisierung: Zwischen kultureller Homogenisierung und kultureller Differenz—Bericht des Symposions an der Kunstuniversität Graz, 17.–18. Oktober 2006'', edited by Christian Utz and , 29–49. Musiktheorien der Gegenwart 1. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag.
External links
Klankwereld.org – GAGAKU-CIRCUIT– a reconstruction of the Gagaku circuit for
Max 5, an audio circuit widely used in Stockhausen's ''Telemusik''.
Klankwereld.org – GLISSANDI vom STRUKTUR 6, 7– the glissandi from structures 6 & 7 of ''Telemusik'' programmed in Max 5.
analysis, Ed Chang
* ,
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the ancient arms attributed to the Kingdom of Es ...
, May 1972
{{Authority control
20th-century classical music
Compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen
1966 compositions
Serial compositions
Electronic compositions
Spatial music
Music dedicated to causes or groups