Harmonies and the Path from Beauty to Awakening: Hours 5 to 12 of Stockhausen's Klang

Abstract

HARMONIES AND THE PATH FROM BEAUTY TO AWAKENING: HOURS 5 TO 12 OF STOCKHAUSEN’S KLANG JEROME KOHL Can a composer give a justification for every note written in his composition? He cannot; he can only say, “It is the stream which has risen out of my heart. I am not concerned with every single note. What I am concerned with is the effect which is produced by my composition.” —Hazrat Inayat Khan (The Sufi Message 11:257) Hours 5 to 12 of Stockhausen’s Klang 477 TOCKHAUSEN’S LAST PROJECT, Klang, found the composer, after twenty-five years devoted to the opera-cycle Licht, resuming and reexamining ideas he had used throughout his career. The composition of Hours 5 and 6 represents a crucial turning point in Stockhausen’s plans for the shape of the entire cycle, and the working out of this segment of the cycle offers particularly clear illustrations of the characteristic struggle between automatism and intuitive choice in Stockhausen’s working method. A bonus in this regard is the unexpected discovery of evidence concerning Stockhausen’s treatment of “errors.” After bringing his seven-opera cycle Licht to completion in 2004, Stockhausen embarked on a chamber-music cycle titled Klang (Sound). While Licht took as an overall subject the seven days of the week, the new cycle focused on the 24 hours of the day. He had already announced his intentions to compose Klang (though not yet with this title) as early as August 1982, while still less than a quarter of the way through work on Licht (Texte 6, 400), and eight years later, explained: For twelve years I have been composing the week. And it will take another fourteen years. Then I want to work on The Day and find out what the day is. I see myself already as an older man waking up for a longer period at three o’clock in the morning to find out how it feels. After that at four o’clock, and so on. Particularly in the night I want to listen because normally I sleep like a bear in the night and I don’t really know what the second half of the night is . . . well, I do know some mysteries because I live in a forest. Nevertheless, most of the time after midnight I sleep. (Stockhausen 1998, 208) Klang was from the outset a valedictory project by a composer already in his mid-70s, as is indicated in the titles and content of the first four Hours Stockhausen composed: Himmelfahrt (Ascension), Freude (Joy, setting the Latin hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”), Natürliche Dauern (Natural Durations), and Himmels-Tür (Heaven’s Door). By the summer of 2006, Stockhausen had completed only these four of the projected 24 parts of the cycle, and had begun what were intended to be Hours 5 and 6. Stockhausen’s original conception of the Fifth Hour of Klang, as he explained it at the Stockhausen Courses in July 2006, was that it was to be titled Akkorde (Chords), and would consist of a solo in three versions for bass clarinet, flute, and trumpet, followed by a trio for these same instruments built on the material of the solo. The bass-clarinet solo was completed in time for Suzanne Stephens’s sixtieth birthday on 28 July 2006. When Stockhausen began composing the trio on the morning of 6 September 2006, it was S 478 Perspectives of New Music still to have been part of the Fifth Hour (Krytska 2006), and Cosmic Pulses—the first sketches for which are dated 16 August 2006—was still the Sixth Hour. In an impromptu discussion after his composition seminar on Himmelfahrt one day at the Stockhausen Courses in July 2006, Stockhausen explained that, in contrast to his usual method of working, he had no preconceived overall plan for the Klang cycle—he was composing each piece as he came to it. Nevertheless, he did take certain cues from the twenty-four-tone row initially devised for Himmelfahrt in order to develop the subsequent pieces in the cycle, but without adhering to any consistent method. The first half of this series (Example 1) is the symmetrical all...