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RE: Stockhausen's "Stimmung" great vox Re: Sort of OT: Bjork's new cd MEDULLA... and looping?

Title: Re: Stockhausen's "Stimmung" great vox Re: Sort of OT: Bj
Damn...you seen the man himself perform?! That would be incredible. Part of why I am glad I am performing and going to the Santa Cruz gig is, the opportunity to meet the Stockhausens of today!!! To see what others are doing in the non mainstream is very exciting. This is a great chance to see authentic artist who haven't lost sight of the art. This is part of the reason I like working in circuit bending as the instruments randomly create a loop as if it is composing. I merely am the conductor as I trigger the circuit. This makes for some very unique performance moments. One is forced to improvise in the moment...Or make sense of the random looping by introducing additional looping that guides the final  composition. It allows myself to be a active listener.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Zvonar [mailto:zvonar@zvonar.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 11:15 AM
To: mungenast@earthlink.net; Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: Stockhausen's "Stimmung" great vox Re: Sort of OT: Bjork's new cd MEDULLA... and looping?

At 11:48 AM -0400 9/7/04, mungenast@earthlink.net wrote:

If you like "otherworldly" vocals, a capella, check out Stockhausen's "Stimmung."

I was lucky enough to hear this performed by Stockhausen's group at MIT (circa 1969 or '70?), with Karlheinz at the console. The performance was in Kresge Auditorium, a dome-shaped building. Each of the six singers had an individual mic routed to a separate loudspeaker; the speakers were placed equidistant around the perimeter of the auditorium.

I spoke to one of the tenors at the reception afterwards; he showed me his performance score. The piece is constructed in a modular form, with each of 66 musical moments written on a separate index card. During the preparatory and rehearsal period these cards would be shuffled and dealt out to the performers, so the overall form of the piece would be indeterminate. For the tour version a fixed ordering of the cards was selected and the cards were stuck onto the pages of the six performance booklets (presumably Stockhausen had a master score version).

For those who haven't heard the piece (the title Stimmung means "tuning") the vocal technique includes a great deal of reinforced vocal harmonics and the text is made up of 11 magic names. Here's a nice Web page:

http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco2/Rec/Stockhausen/12.html
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Richard Zvonar, PhD      
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