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Stockhausen - Plus-Minus

Label: Hat Hut

Cat No: HATN178

Barcode: 0752156017820

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 26th April 2010

This product has now been deleted. Information is for reference only.

Works

Stockhausen
Refrain No.11

Stockhausen
Kreuzspiel No.1/7

Stockhausen
Plus Minus No.14

Artists

Ives Ensemble

Works

Stockhausen
Refrain No.11

Stockhausen
Kreuzspiel No.1/7

Stockhausen
Plus Minus No.14

Artists

Ives Ensemble

About

“These three works show the extraordinary distance which Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) travelled in the first years of his compositional career. Kreuzspiel (1951) was not only his first work to receive a public performance but was also the piece with which he announced his arrival as a major figure within the emerging generation of composers.

In 1963 Stockhausen was on holiday in Sicily with his lover, Mary Bauermeister. He needed to produce teaching materials for his first composition course at the newly established Kölner Schule für Neue Musik, so together on the sea shore they sketched the beginnings of Plus Minus in the sand. What emerged were graphic symbols for seven different types of sound material which range from precisely pitched sounds to sounds which are noise-rich and timbrally ‘indeterminate’. Each of the seven pages of the score has 53 of these symbols arranged in a grid. Each square of the grid represents a single musical event and Stockhausen added an elegantly designed set of subsidiary symbols to give each event its special character. Seven more pages of staff notations provide basic pitch material and in a further set of 35 verbal instructions Stockhausen establishes how all this information can become a piece of music.

This is what makes Plus Minus remarkable: the score provides detailed specifications for making a composition but it can only exist as music when someone makes a performable realisation of those specifications.

Why has Plus Minus never been recorded before? Primarily, I think, because the process of realization is so complicated and time-consuming, but perhaps also because the status of the finished work is uncertain.

Sadly Stockhausen is not longer here to tell us what he thinks, and he himself never made a realization, but John and I are certain that we have created a Stockhausen piece: a fascinating, provocative, contradictory musical world, which without him could never have existed.”
Christopher Fox, 21st July 2008