The pieces from XV onward are for the synthesizer or similar electronic instruments, which Stockhausen had come k,avierstck regard as the natural successor to the piano. The set is dedicated to Marcelle Mercenierthe Belgian pianist who performed the world premiere in Darmstadt on 21 August Decroupet Group composition is used throughout the piece, permeating its many layers: There are six of these series and therefore 36 groupsand stockhasen the six series are arranged in a square:.

These two hexachords alternate regularly throughout the piece, but the internal order of the notes is freely permuted from one occurrence to the next Harvey23; Kohl; Rigoni Leonard Stein ‘s suggestion that the outermost klaviestck of proportion numbers could be replaced by changing metronome values, calculated from the fastest speed possible for the smallest note-values, was later incorporated into the published score as a footnote, but has been dismissed by one writer as “superfluous” and “a mistake”, holding that “the piece is playable in its own terms” by any pianist who can play ChopinLisztor Beethoven Maconie According to one writer, the piece is a study in vertical note groups treated as electronic tone mixtures Maconie, though Stockhausen composed it ten months before his first practical experience in an electronic studio.

It consists of thirty groups, each of kalvierstck bar, ranging in length from 1 8 to 5 8 and grouped ix five multiples ranging from xtockhausen to 8: Their exact nature and disposition, however, are a matter of debate Rigoni—27; Sabbe36— According to another analysis, it is the pattern of the first five notes, and thus a proportioned time structure based on fives runs through the entire piece Schnebel— Analyses of the pitch material stochausen fallen broadly into two camps.

One, initiated by Robin Maconie63holds that the piece is constructed from chromatic tetrachords; the other, founded by Dieter Schnebeland continued by Jonathan Harvey24—27maintains that the basis is actually a five-note set, consisting of that same tetrachord plus a note a minor third above 0,1,2,3,6and ordered as a series: In a passing reference to this piece, the Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw presents these same five notes in ascending scale order, which he describes as “rudiments of the note series”, but does not explain whether his diagram is to be understood as an ordered row or an unordered collection Leeuw— Nevertheless, its “note points”, are collected into groups and layers by means of some features that remain constant e.

This piece is written in strictly linear two-part counterpoint, and features progressive shortening of fundamental durations by serial fractions.

Each note is either followed or preceded by a rest, and so the termination of a note can serve as a reference to a point in time as an alternative to the beginning of the note playing the same role Maconie— The identities of the two contrapuntal strands are achieved not through register or pitch material, but solely through dynamics: However, these distinct dynamic categories are eroded over the course of the piece by the increasing addition of intermediate dynamic values Frisius Pierre Boulez was an early admirer of the piece: Two others on the contrary describe it as a succession of chromatic aggregates, organized primarily by registral position.

This starts from fixing the notes in a perfectly regular pattern of minor ninths, “wrapping around” from the extreme high to the extreme low register or low to high, depending on the direction taken as the upper or lower limit of the keyboard is reached twiceso as to create an unbroken cycle. In the ascending direction: From this stocohausen disposition, progressive changing of note registers somehow plays a zi in xtockhausen the subsequent course of the piece Frisius; Frisius73; Rigoni His decision to again compose for conventional instruments was prompted chiefly by a renewed interest in unmeasurable, ” irrational ” factors in instrumental music.

These were expressed by such things as modes of attack involving complex physical actions, or the interplay of metrical time with durations determined subjectively, by physical actions notated as grace notesto be played “as fast as possible” Toop Stockhausen’s collective term for these kinds of subjective elements is “variable form” Stockhausen, The first four pieces of this second set, V—VIIIoriginally conceived to be of about the same size as pieces I—IVwere composed fairly rapidly, during Having gotten this far, however, Stockhausen seems to have found them unsatisfactory for two reasons: Over the course of this second set, it becomes increasingly easier to perceive the overall, as opposed to local, structure, as the basic types of material become more highly differentiated and are isolated from each other by increasingly significant use of silence Smalley The original plan for these six pieces, drafted early inis based on the following number square Toop a93; Toop The first row is an all-interval seriesand the remaining rows are transpositions of the first onto each of its members Toop a, 93— One basic idea for this set is that each piece should have a different number of main sections from 1 one to 6each identified by a different tempo.

Toop a94— Another five squares are derived from this first one, by starting with its second, third, etc. These six squares “furnish a sufficiently large number of proportions for all the pieces in the cycle, but apart from determining the tempo groups and main subdivisions, they do very little to precondition the actual content of each piece, or indeed the number of features to which the squares are applied” Toop a95— Stockhausen drastically revised and expanded this early version, bringing the grace-note groups into less extreme registers, then using the result as a background for an stochausen new set of superimposed figurations based on series quite unrelated to the original material Toop The piece is in six sections, each in a different klxvierstck, with the fastest tempos in the middle and the slowest at the end.

Each section is made up of several groups, of great variety and distinctiveness, ranging from a single, short stockhauwen near the end of the sixth section to a group of forty-seven notes in the third section Harvey35— These three possibilities are doubled to six by the use or non-use of the pedal Toop A specific color tints such a “head”—or core—of a sound structure, by means of the intervals of the notes which ring together.

Stockhausen This piece has been described as “the s counterpart of a Chopin nocturne, elegant and crystalline” Toop The symmetrical pitch structure was probably modelled on the interlocking chords at the beginning of Webern ‘s Symphony, but the narrow, claustrophobic high register of klaierstck piano piece and its “spasmodic, twitching rhythms” combine to give it a character suitable only for a short piece Toop— On 5 Decembershortly after completing the second version, Stockhausen wrote to his friend Henri Pousseurexpressing great satisfaction with his new piece, which had taken three months and now came to fourteen pages quoted in Toop b26; Toop23and to Karel Goeyvaerts he wrote “It’s pure, but alive” Toop By Januaryhowever, he had decided the harmony was not “clean” enough, and completely rewrote the piece again Toop b26; Toop A notational innovation introduced in the final version of this piece is the graphical indication of tempo changes on a line staff.

A rising line indicates accelerandoa descending line represents ritardandoand the line vanishes altogether when there is a rest. This notation is more precise than the traditional indications Maconie; Rigoni The process of composition already had entailed a number of revisions, and Stockhausen finally abandoned this version, evidently in part because of the drastic reduction in rhythmic subtlety, but also because of persistent difficulties in avoiding strong tonal implications caused by the chosen serial conception of the pitch structure.

Stockhausen: Klavierstücke I to XI CD review – Liebner makes light work of piano cycle’s challenges

Like the original, discarded piece, the new version is divided into stocknausen tempo-defined sections MM 40, Although note is counterbalanced by a group of grace notes preceding its next entry, and by other tones, the opening few bars “tend to group around this unassailable centre” Grant This is achieved by silently depressed keys and by stockhauxen of the middle pedal, in order to release the dampers so that certain notes may be set into sympathetic vibration by striking other notes.

In this way many different timbres can be created for the same pitch.

The repetitions of these central notes makes them particularly obvious Stockhausen It consists of two tempo groups tempo no. These ideas are alternated and juxtaposed, and finally resolved in the appearance of a new texture of irregularly spaced fast periodic groups in the upper register Smalley31— Stockhausen deliberately exploits the impossibility of playing all four tones of the repeated chords at exactly the same time and intensity klavierstk example of “variable form”so that the tones constantly and involuntarily shift in prominence.

The idea of this repeated-chord variability was inspired by an improvisation Mary Bauermeister made on the piano in Doris’s and Karlheinz’s apartment in Cologne-Braunsfeld sfockhausen, probably with non-European music in mind, she repeated a single chord on the piano, varying finger-pressure slightly on the individual chord tones from one repetition to the next to produce a kind of micro-melody Bauermeister The rhythmic proportions throughout this piece are governed by the Fibonacci series Kramer kpavierstck, —25 wtockhausen, used both directly 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.

Frisius The performance of them requires the performer to wear gloves with the fingers cut away Godwin Over the course of the piece, there is a stockjausen of mediation between disorder and order.

From a uniform initial state of great disorder, there emerges an increasing number of ever more concentrated figures. By the end, the figures become unified into a higher supraordinate Gestalt Stockhausen Stockhausen abandoned the original plan for this piece, which prescribed three large sections, and replaced it with a new plan based on scales of seven elements.

Klavierstücke (Stockhausen) – Wikipedia

A basic series beginning with the strongest contrasts and progressing toward the central value was chosen: The overall form is produced from this series in a complex way, resulting in a seven-phase form, to which Stockhausen added an eighth, preliminary section which compresses the seven main phases into a single one Henck b There are at least thirteen separate dimensions organised into seven-degree scales Henck b17— Pitches are the only thing not organised in sevens.

However, the score was not finished in time for Tudor to learn it, and subsequently his international touring did not leave him in a position to do so. Consequently, the piece was finally premiered by Frederic Rzewski on 10 Octoberduring the third Settimano Internazionale Nuova Musica in Palermo. On 22 December Rzewski made the first recording for commercial release, in the Ariola sound studios in Berlin Henck b5—6. The mobile structure and graphic layout of the piece resembles that of Morton Feldman ‘s Intermission 6 for 1 or 2 pianos ofin which 15 fragments are distributed on a single page of music with the instruction: In the same year, Earle Brown had composed Twenty-five Pages for 1—25 pianists, in which the pages are to be arranged in a sequence chosen by the performer sand each page may be performed either side up and events within each two-line system may be read as either treble or bass clef Anon.

When David Tudor, who at the time was preparing a version of Feldman’s piece, was in Cologne inStockhausen asked him. Tudor and Schonfield Apart from the layout on the page, Feldman’s piece has nothing in common with Stockhausen’s composition.

Rather than rhythmic cells, its components are single tones and chords, with no rhythmic or dynamic indications Frisius The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends.

Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. Though composed with a complex serial plan, the etockhausen have nothing to do with twelve-tone technique but instead are derived from the proportions of the previously composed rhythms Truelove—25; Truelove The durations are stockhausej on a set of matrices all of which have six rows, but with numbers of columns varying from two to seven.

Klavierstücke (Stockhausen)

These matrices “amount to sets of two-dimensional ‘scales'” Truelove The first row of each of these rhythm matrices consists of a sequence of simple arithmetic duration values: These “two-dimensional scales” are then permuted systematically Truelove, —and the six resulting, increasingly larger matrices were combined together to form the columns of a new, complex Final Rhythm Matrix of six columns and six rows Truelove, — Stockhausen’s design appears to have been to select an equal number of fragments from each row degree of complexity of subdivision and each column overall duration of the fragmentexcept for the first column shortest duration and last row most complex subdivision.

This klavifrstck suggested by the fact that he originally selected column 6, row 3 for the last fragment marked with an x in the illustrationthen changed his mind in favor of the lower-right cell Truelove klaviershck, When writing out the fragments, Stockhausen doubled the note values from the ones in the matrix Truelove, so that, in the score, fragments 1—4, 5—7, 8—10, 11—13, 14—16, and 17—19 have overall durations of 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, and 28 quarter notes, respectively.

Within each of these groups there is a “main text” of melody or chords. Interspersed into these are groups of grace-note chords and clusters, as well as tremolos, trills, and harmonics, and these two levels are constructed independently Toop One of the earliest analysts of this piece, Konrad Boehmer71—84observed the distinct sets of group durations but, apparently not having seen the sketches, established a different taxonomy and made a mistake counting the duration of one group. Since Boehmer’s labels have been used by a number of later writers Hellfer ; Stockhauxen ; Trajanothe stockhwusen with the numeration from the sketches may be useful:.

The nineteen fragments are then distributed over the single, large page of the score in such a way as to minimize any stockhauseb influence on spontaneity of choice and promote statistical equality Boehmer Tudor wrote to apologise, and Steinecke accepted that he would have to settle for the European premiere, but then Tudor planned stockhausem play the piece in Paris two weeks before Darmstadt.

However, Tudor fell seriously ill early in July and had to cancel his European tour, and so the European premiere took place on 28 Julythe last day of the courses, in the Orangerie at Darmstadt, in two different versions played by stockausen pianist Paul Jacobs and billed in the programme book as the world premiere Misch and Bandur,— However, this set never got beyond the planning stages Toop The pieces from XII to XIX are all klqvierstck with the opera cycle Licht —and appear not to continue the original organizational plan.

All of the material of the Licht cycle is made from three melodic strands, each called a ” formula ” by Stockhausen, and each identified with one of the three archetypal protagonists of Licht: Michael, Eve, and Lucifer.