Contemporary music. Stimmung, the magical choral work by Stockhausen.
In this edition of Contemporary Music we go back to the winter of 1968, when the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote his groundbreaking choral work Stimmung for the six singers of the Collegium Vocale Köln.
In 1968, Stockhausen was living on Long Island. It was February and bitterly cold. The sea he looked out on was frozen solid and strong winds were blowing.
Having accepted a composition commission from the Collegium Vocale Köln, he was constantly singing at home. Because the children could not sleep due to all the singing, he switched to humming in the evenings, and in doing so he discovered that by using different tongue positions he could produce a wide range of overtones. He meticulously mapped out these various types of sound production, starting from the keynote B-flat.
This is how Stimmung came to life. Stockhausen used his own poems and incorporated so-called ‘magical names’ that are sung or spoken, drawn from different cultures, such as Abassi-Abumo (Nigeria), Shiva (India), Gaia (Greece), Viracocha (Peru), Quetzalcoatl (Aztec), Grogoragally (Australia), and Atum-Ra (Egypt).
The result is a quiet twentieth-century madrigal, unique and enchanting.
Playlist
- Karlheinz Stockhausen – Stimmung, Copenhagen version, 2006
Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier
