Karlheinz Stockhausen / Sound ++ pls see post below for what's due next week++

Dear all,

I am posting a thread for Karlheinz Stockhausen. Some refer to him as the father of electronic music, definitely a brilliant eccentric.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Stockhausen

Below is a link to one of his works "Gesang der Junglinge" (song of the youths)
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/gesang-der-juenglinge/
Take a listen with some good headphones. Some of you expressed interest in sound, so here we go!
NB: this is a great site that can serve as reference for the materials discussed in our class, dig in, you will likely find something of interest & inspiration.

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/

Also, below is a paper i wrote about this piece a couple of years ago, comments welcome.
thxs
c

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
surround anima in sound
a look into "Gesang der Jünglinge"
by carolina trigo

What struck me the first time I heard "Gesang der Jünglinge" was its spatial circularity. Sounds rotate from one ear to the other, as if the listener itself were being rotated as an object. Each ear in rotation and displacement suggesting a passageway to different dimensions; wherein sounds form and dissolve as ever-changing sculptures, sequential yet non-linear.

The piece is based on a a biblical story from "The Book of Daniel," where Nebuchadnezzar throws 3 young men into a furnace who miraculously survive and begin singing praises to God. Looking into the structure of this story it mentions some aspects which I think parallel Stockhausen's approach: It states that language emphasizes structure, that structure (of theme or meaning) has precedence over chronology and that grouping emphasizes prophecies. Stockhausen intended to create the sound of phonemes electronically by matching voice resonances and pitch. The piece consists of 3 main components 1) recorded voice of boy soprano 2) electronically generated sine tones 3) electronically generated pulses.... Through Serialism, Stockhausen utilized sets to describe musical elements, allowing for their manipulation.

"Gesang der Jünglinge" explores space, colours, tones and distances. There is union and slippage. Much like a choreographer, Stockhausen materializes music by using the audience as phenomes, as bouncing boards for new reverberations to a whole. He invites us to touch the music and re-define it. We are therefore instruments, particles contributing and altering the mass and surface of the sound invading and leaving our bodies.

The piece is a superimposition of the electronic and the corporeal; the synthesized and the sculptural, a continuous discontinuity of sounds and emotions, the transformation of sound into a new language... a language akin to the performance and experience of a numinous dream, a collage of memory laments and sensations, pointing towards the known and unknown in us.

I believe "Gesang der Jünglinge" is the sound of oratory, a piece of prayer, holding some parallels to C.G.Jung's "Answer to Job" which in brief, is a study of divine darkness, of god and man as vice-versa; of the symbolic role that theological concepts or forms play in a person's psychic life. In this vein, it is not surprising that Stockhausen created or believed in his own religion (being reborn in Sirius.) I allude to "Answer to job" because I see in Stockhausen a man at the threshold of the heretic boundary between human life and divine creation. These quotes from the book might illustrate what i sense: "... but in all omniscience there existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man." [...] "God's Incarnation in Christ requires continuation and completion because Christ, owing to his virgin birth and his sinlessness, was not an empirical human being at all. As stated in the first chapter of St.John, he represented a light which, though it shone in the darkness, was not comprehended by the darkness. He remained outside and above mankind. Job, on the other hand, was an ordinary human being, and therefore the wrong done to him, and through him to mankind, can, according to divine justice, only be repaired by an incarnation of God in an empirical human being. This act of expiation is performed by the Paraclete; for just as man must suffer from God, so God must suffer from man. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation between the two." —C.G.Jung, "Answer to Job," 1952.

Like Daniel to the King of Babylon, or Job to Yahweh, Stockhausen's piece points towards that reconciliation, surrounding us in the sound of discord, out of which emerges the fairest harmony.