Skip to main content

Kontakte

About twenty years ago I aquired a wonderful and educational 3-CD box set called OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music. Among its tracks was an excerpt from Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece 'Kontakte'. As with much of Stockhausen's output, it's not the most immediately-accessible music, but I did acquire a fondness for it, and became curious to hear all 35 minutes of the piece. I suspect I would have ordered my CD copy a couple of years later from a long-defunct UK on-line classical specialist called "Crotchet". It's a 1992 re-issue of a recording made in 1960, the same one from which the excerpt on the compilation had been taken.

'Kontakte' exists in two versions: the original all-electronic one; and the better-known "hybrid" version with parts for live piano and percussion backed up by electronic sounds on tape. The possibilities of modern "live electronics" would doubtless have thrilled Stockhausen, but were a long way from reality in 1960. Despite the OHM compilation's electronic focus, it was a section of the hybrid version that was featured on it. One aspect of the piece not captured on this, or on most other recordings, is the that the electronic parts were always designed for 4-channel "quadraphonic" playback.

Despite that limitation, and the age of the performance, it still sounds fresh and weird to this day. For me it conjures up mental images of alien beings attempting to communicate with each other in mutually-unintelliglble ways. I did try sampling some of Stockhausen's other work after this, but none quite hit the same spot.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more