Studie I / Studie II / Gesang Der Junglinge Zyklus Fur Zwei Schlagzeurgern

The composition was created in the Studio for Electronic Music of the NWDR in Cologne between July and November 1953. The world premiere took place in Cologne on 19 October 1954 in the concert series Musik der Zeit, together with Stockhausen’s Studie II and works by Henri Pousseur, Karel Goeyvaerts, Herbert Eimert, and Paul Gredinger.

The work was made not with the use of (electronic) instruments, like the Trautonium or Melochord, but rather out of pure sine tones. The ideal was to produce each sound synthetically and thus separately determined in its details: “The conscious organization of music extends to the micro-acoustic sphere of the sound material itself”; It is serially organized on all musical levels. Unlike Studie II, the score has never been published, apart from the first page as an illustration to Stockhausen’s analysis of the piece.

Materials and form: The fundamental concept for Studie I was that its serial system should begin in the middle of the human auditory range and extend in both directions to the limits of pitch perception. Durations and amplitudes are inversely proportional to the distance from this central reference, so the sounds become both shorter and softer as they approach the upper and lower limits of pitch audibility.

Sets of six values determine the entire work. Pitches are drawn from a series of intervals: a falling minor tenth, rising major third, falling minor sixth, rising minor tenth, and falling major third. Expressed as justly intoned numeric ratios, these are 12/5, 4/5, 8/5, 5/12, and 5/4. Starting from 1920 Hz, near the upper threshold of pitch audibility, thirty-six series of six pitches each are projected, starting with 1920, 800, 1000, 625, 1500, and 1200. The lowest value of 66 Hz is reached at the fourth value of the twenty-second series: 203, 84, 105, 66, 158, 127.[12] All of these ratios are derived from the 5:4 major third, and the resulting timbral combinations resemble the pleasant chiming of a crystal goblet or the combination of vibraphone and glockenspiel – sounds which Stockhausen had previously employed in 1952 in his orchestral compositions Spiel und Formel, respectively.

Studie I is composed with “groups”. Like the table of pitches, these groups are also constructed from sets of six numbers so that, for example, the first six “vertical” groups of the composition contain 4, 5, 3, 6, 2, and 1 notes each. Stockhausen calls these note groups “note mixtures”, and extrapolates the same grouping principle to the formal structure of the entire work: successive note mixtures form horizontal sequences, groups of these sequences form “structures”, and these structures are organized into one large “group series” that produces a unifying proportion series for the entire work. In order to increase the contrast between the note groups, a set of six envelope curves was added: steady amplitude, increasing amplitude to a sudden cut-off at the specified maximum, and a gradual decrease from the specified maximum; each of these occurs with and without reverberation to produce six forms in all.
________________

STUDIE II is an electronic music composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen from the year 1954. The composition was provisionally titled Bewegungen (Motions), but the name was later changed to Studie II.

Stockhausen had previously tried out sound synthesis with pure tones in Studie I. However, an aesthetic problem arose: “Instead of a fusion of the pure tones into new, more complex sounds, the individual pure tone components appeared separately audible and are easily identifiable. Thus, the impression develops of chords formed from pure tones instead of a new sound quality. On the other hand, the individual pure tones receive their own sound quality owing to their easy identifiability, about comparable to the specific sound of a simple music instrument somewhere between a flute and special pipe-organ registers”.

Stockhausen’s two Studien are amongst the earliest examples of composition with what he called “groups”, in contrast to the earlier concept of punctualism or “point composition”, in works like Kreuzspiel.

The idea at the core of Studie II was the decision to extrapolate everything from the number “5”. Five main sections are each divided into five subsections, and each subsection contains five groups consisting of one to five sounds, called “tone mixtures”. Each of these tone mixtures is constructed as five equally spaced, reverberated sine tones. The width of the tone mixtures remains constant within each group, but changes from group to group in five widths derived from an underlying scale. For the pitches, Stockhausen built a scale which differs from the traditional tempered tuning system, in which an octave consists of twelve segments.
The intervallic here unit is a “spread semitone”, about 10% wider than the semitone of the equal-tempered twelve-tone system. Beginning at 100 Hz, this scale reaches to ca. 17,200 Hz, with a total of 81 equally spaced pitches. Because of the chosen basic interval, no octave duplications occur. The highest pitch, 17,200 Hz, is near the upper limit of human hearing, and occurs only in a single tone mixture, as the uppermost of its five pitches.

The five sections of the piece are differentiated in the first instance by the types of groups employed: horizontal (melodic) or vertical (chordal). Horizontal groups are either connected (legato) or separated by silences; vertical groups either attack all notes together and end with one note after another, or build up gradually into a chord and then end together. The pattern is as follows:

• horizontal, with linked sounds;
• vertical, with groups alternately beginning and ending simultaneously;
• horizontal, with silences between the sounds;
• vertical, as in section 2;
• combination of horizontal and vertical.
________________

GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE

In the autumn of 1954, Stockhausen conceived the idea of composing a mass for electronic sounds and voices. Gesang der Jünglinge (“Song of the Youths”) is an electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the WDR studio in Cologne and is work no. 8 in the composer’s catalog. The vocal parts were supplied by 12-year-old Josef Protschka. It is 13 minutes, 14 seconds long.

The work is significant in that it seamlessly integrates electronic sounds with the human voice by means of matching voice resonances with pitch and creating sounds of phonemes electronically. In this way, for the first time it brought together the two opposing worlds of the purely electronically generated German ‘elektronische Musik’ and the French musique concrète, which transforms recordings of acoustical events. Gesang der Jünglinge is also noted for its early use of spatiality; it was originally in five-channel sound, which was later reduced to just four channels and mixed to stereo for the version contained in this release.

Materials and form: There are three basic types of material used: (1) electronically generated sine tones, (2) electronically generated pulses, and (3) filtered white noise. To these is added the recorded voice of a boy soprano, which incorporates elements of all three types: vowels are harmonic spectra, which may be conceived as based on sine tones; fricatives and sibilants are like filtered noises; plosives resemble impulses. Each of these may be composed along a scale running from discrete events to massed “complexes” structured statistically.

The text of Gesang der Jünglinge is from a Biblical story in the Book of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzar throws Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a fiery furnace but miraculously they are unharmed and begin to sing praises to God. This text is presented in a carefully devised scale of seven degrees of comprehensibility, an idea which also came from Werner Meyer-Eppler’s seminars.