Electronic Chamber Music in a New Form: Stockhausen's Kontakte

Coming out of the German elektronische Musik movement of the 1950s, Stockhausen’s Kontakte brought chamber music to a new platform by creating a musical dialogue between electronic and instrumental sounds. Stockhausen’s innovation paved the way for the continued exploration of electronic music.

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Music critic, novelist, and librettist Paul Griffiths offers insights into Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte.

Archive of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, Kürten, Germany (www.karlheinzstockhausen.org)

In Conversation with David Adamcyk

Electronic artist David Adamcyk explains how to read the score of Stockhausen's Kontakte and discusses why this work is so important to electonic and chamber music.

David Adamcyk on Stockhausen's Kontakte from

Stockhausen works on Kontakte.

Archive of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, Kürten, Germany (www.karlheinzstockhausen.org)

Stockhausen’s Fanclub

The impact of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work on all forms of electronic music from the second half of the 20th century to today cannot be understated. He not only pushed the boundaries of numerous modernist composition techniques from serialism to musique concrète, but he also inspired a number of musicians in the popular vein to dabble in producing modernist art music. This playlist captures a number of early such attempts from the late 1950s and 1960s. It includes the dense yet funky creations of Dutch electroacoustic composer Tom Dissevelt, works written by Attilio Minio to accompany a futuristic exhibition at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and perhaps the most widely distributed piece of truly avant-garde music in history, an experimental collaboration between the Beatles and Yoko Ono by the name of “Revolution 9.”

Stockhausen: Kontakte for Piano, Percussion, and Electronic Sounds, No. 12.5

Pianist Michael Brown and percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum perform Stockhausen's Kontakte for Piano, Percussion, and Electronic Sounds, No. 12.5. Recorded live in the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio on January 16, 2020.

The pianist's set up for Stockhausen's Kontakte

Stockhausen's Kontakte

For Kontakte, Stockhausen made particularly engaging graphic representations that provide an approximate map of what the tape sounds like at any given moment. At the very top are time stamps. Below is a wide band of the musical staff devoted to an electronics graphic. The interwoven dynamics and pitch contours display a rollercoaster of sound, one which can be dissected in detail but also gives broad lines to follow. The pianist and percussionist, whose parts are below the electronic band of the score, can use the display up top to mark and time their entrances, tracking the progress of the tape and responding with their own percussive comments.

Music for the Eye

Electroacoustic works are simultaneously exciting and challenging to the ear for both listeners and performers. They can also be challenging for the eye. To perform this kind of music, the instrumentalists need to know what kinds of projected sounds to expect and when to interact with them. To this end, composers of electronic music have to find ways to visually display the electronic sounds they create.

Meadowcroft's Cradles

Thomas Meadowcroft’s Cradles gives the performers more freedom. His score is mostly instructions, but he gives a loose timeline of the work that indicates the physical position of the two percussionists in relation to the playback tapes they manipulate. The bottom layer of this score functions much like the top layer in Kontakte, showing the harmonies and character heard in a third “e-piano playback” voice. However, the relationship between the players and this third part is the reverse of that seen in the Stockhausen. There are various options for realizing this third part, but in all of them the change in the electronics part is cued in response to the decisions of the percussionists. The electronics part is in a symbiotic relationship with the other musicians and not an unrelenting and consuming driver of structure as it is in Kontakte. These two score graphics point to the diversity of ways in which electronic elements can interact with instrumentalists to create chamber music.

Meadowcroft Cradles Page 7 Used by kind permission of the composer

Concerts featuring new music are made possible, in part, by the Howard Gilman Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.