Zeitmaße

History

Zeitmaße was composed more or less concurrently with three other works in contrasting media, which together formed the basis for Stockhausen's rise to fame in the 1950s. The others were Gesang der Jünglinge for electronic and concrète sounds, Gruppen for three orchestras, and Klavierstück XI for piano (Kohl 1998, 61).

In order to begin work on a commission for the new orchestral composition which would become Gruppen, Stockhausen interrupted work on Gesang der Jünglinge in August and September 1955 and took the opportunity to retreat to an inexpensive rented room in the attic of a parsonage in Paspels, Switzerland, recommended to him by a colleague in the WDR studio, Paul Gredinger. He had scarcely arrived in Paspels when a message reached him, requesting a short composition to celebrate Heinrich Strobel's tenth anniversary of service at the Südwestrundfunk, Baden-Baden (Stockhausen and Frisius 1989, 320).

I had to write something quickly, by that evening. I did not allow myself to take any time over it. And then, suddenly, I hear this whole little four-minute piece. I really chuckled to myself about it. It was for voice and wind quintet [sic]. Later I replaced the vocal part with a cor anglais, and the "piece" is the first four minutes of Zeitmaße. (Stockhausen and Oesch 1978, 577–78)

The humorous, caprice-like song—for alto voice, flute, clarinet in A, and bassoon—sets an epigrammatic text written by Strobel, in a French translation by Antoine Goléa (Kurtz 1992, 85; Maconie 2005, 146):

On cherche pour trouver quelque chose. Mais au fond, on ne sait pas ce qu’on cherche au juste. Et cela est vrai non seulement pour l’Allemagne musicale.

(We are seeking to find something. But at bottom, we do not know quite what we are looking for. And that is true not only of German musical life.)

The song (in which Stockhausen omits the last five words of the French text) was later published in a memorial volume for Strobel (Schatz and Strobel 1977, 88–89). Upon returning to Cologne, Stockhausen resumed work on Gesang der Jünglinge and returned also to Zeitmaße—now scored for flute, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, and bassoon—completing a first version that was recorded for the radio in December 1955 by the Wind Quintet of the WDR Symphony Orchestra (led by their oboist, Wilhelm Meyer), and first broadcast in January 1956. Stockhausen subsequently nearly doubled the length of the work by inserting five "cadenzas", which became the defining moments of the composition (Maconie 2005, 146). The planned premiere by the WDR Quintet at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in July 1956 fell through, but Stockhausen brought the score there anyway and showed it to his friends. Pierre Boulez initially dismissed Zeitmaße with a characteristically cutting remark to the effect that Stockhausen would do better to stay in the electronic studio, but soon changed his mind and asked to programme it in Paris on his Domaine Musical concert series. Stockhausen agreed, and the world premiere took place there on 15 December 1956, "before a quiet and extremely attentive audience" (Stockhausen 1964, 46; Kurtz 1992, 86). Five months later, Boulez included Zeitmaße in a programme taken on tour to London—a performance which was broadcast by the BBC on 6 May 1957—and after returning to Paris made the first recording for commercial release. This recording was made in the composer's presence over a span of eight days in June 1957 (Searle 1957; Vermeil 1996, 180; Misch and Bandur 2001, 169).

In the meantime, the WDR Quintet had made a recording for broadcast, and in February 1957 gave the German premiere in Bonn, followed in March by a tour to Baden-Baden, Linz, Vienna, and Venice, performing the piece twice on each program. In a letter to Wolfgang Steinecke (director of the Darmstadt Courses), Stockhausen reported a "quite unexpectedly huge, genuine success" on every occasion, and that he was "especially surprised by the spontaneous reaction of the Italians" (Misch and Bandur 2001, 160–61). Steinecke had already invited Stockhausen to give seminars at Darmstadt. One was titled "Time Composition" and focused on Zeitmaße and Klavierstück XI (Universal Edition had promised delivery of the printed score in time for the performance of Zeitmaße on 22 July). The other was on that year's announced topic, "Music and Speech", and discussed Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître and Nono’s Il canto sospeso, as well as Stockhausen's own Gesang der Jünglinge (Misch and Bandur 2001, 136–37, 158–59, and 167–68).

Material and form

Many of the conceptual bases of the work are explained in Stockhausen's famous article, "… How Time Passes …", which was written in September and October 1956, while work was in progress on both Zeitmaße and Gruppen (Stockhausen 1963a). In this essay, Stockhausen developed a serial organizational principle at the center of which stood the concept of a twelve-step duration series possessing the same structural properties as the basic twelve-note pitch series. This became the basis for the entire process of serial organization of Gruppen, but also formed the basis for the concluding part of Zeitmaße (Decroupet 1997, 40; Decroupet 1998, 352). This duration series, however, is expressed not as single units (which would correspond to single vibrations of a pitch) but rather as metronomic tempos in sufficiently long stretches of time to enable musicians to change tempo with precision. However, because the resulting "fundamental durations" are not small enough for use in the musical detail, subdivisions corresponding to the transposition of the overtones of a pitch's harmonic spectrum are used (Koenig 1968, 90–91). The German title Zeitmaße can be translated as "tempos", but in this piece has a broader meaning. There are five general categories of "time measures", which are found both separately and in various combinations (Stockhausen 1964, 47):

1. Metronomically measured tempos, in twelve different degrees, measured as a chromatic scale
2. "As fast as possible", dependent on the abilities of the player and the nature of the musical passage
3. "As slow as possible", with the passage to be performed in one breath
4. Fast, slowing down to about a quarter the initial speed
5. Slow, speeding up to "as fast as possible"

An important aspect of the piece is an absence of thinking in terms of separate voices. Instead, there are note complexes (or "chords") which may be shaped in several ways. The notes may be struck together and then drop out one by one, or do the opposite by entering one at a time and building up into a dense structure. During a sustained chord the internal dynamics may change as different instruments enter or fade away. Individual lines tend to disappear in favour of changing statistical densities, and transitions between the linear and the simultaneous is always present (Grant 2001, 138).

Although it is a serial composition, this matters most on the levels of rhythm, polyphony (control of density), and articulation. Serial pitch (dodecaphonic) procedures are not terribly important from the listener's perspective. The decisive thing is a very homogeneous and rigorous harmonic texture conforming to the principles of Webernism (Pousseur 1997, 177). Put another way, what matters most is gesture, which is the product of contour, intensity, and note density (Zaparinuk 1989, 20). However, in both the melodic and harmonic realms, and especially in slow passages, Stockhausen strongly favours the succession of a semitone and a major or minor third (Marcus 1968, 144).

The positioning of the instruments on the platform as prescribed in the original version of the score (Stockhausen 1957a, [i]) is slightly unconventional (from left to right: oboe, flute, cor anglais, clarinet, bassoon), and is intended to evenly distribute the edgy timbres of the three double-reed instruments across the stage, and balance them with the purer flute and smoother clarinet timbres. This stage placement is reflected in the ordering of the parts in the score (Kohl 1998, 64). In the revised edition printed in 1997 and 2004, the order of the instruments on the platform is reversed to read: bassoon, clarinet, cor anglais, flute, oboe (Stockhausen 1957b, [ii]).

The original version of Zeitmaße (before insertion of the "cadenzas") fell into three parts: a quartet (for flute, cor anglais, clarinet, and bassoon), a trio (for flute, oboe, and clarinet), and a quintet for the full ensemble. This 4:3:5 proportioning is representative of a serial mentality that operates throughout the work in many different ways (Toop 2005, 29).

The first section (bars 1–29) corresponds to the original song (Rigoni 1998, 142). Durations are governed here by sets of five values, arrayed in a basic square:

The first series uses the quaver as counting unit, the next uses semiquavers, and so on (Toop 2005, 30). The pitches begin with a twelve-note row (C♯ D A C G♯ E D♯ F♯ F B A♯ G) which generates further series, where the last note of each row becomes the first of the next one, and the intervals of the first series are taken in succession as the starting points of the subsequent ones (Rigoni 1998, 141–42). Because of this common-tone strategy, each row is effectively reduced to just eleven notes. After completing the twelfth row, the pitches start over again from the beginning, only omitting from each row the original second member, producing a succession of ten-note series. The section ends part way through the sixth of these reduced rows (Kohl 2017, 33–34). The dynamics, like the durations, draw on a field of five levels: f, mf, p, pp, ppp (Toop 2005, 30).

The second section is much longer, extending from bar 30 to 271. It is built upon a permuted series of seven character types:

These seven types occur four times, permuted as follows (Decroupet 1998, 351):

These are interlarded with four of the interrupting cadenzas, which are very long and complex. All of them are regulated by a single 9 × 9 number square (Decroupet 1998, 351–52; Kohl 1998, 62; Kohl 2017, 92–93; Rigoni 1998, 142–43).

The third section has the most complex rhythms (apart from the cadenzas), utilizing duration sets of twelves, nines, sevens, sixes, and fives. It is interrupted in bars 275–89 by the last and shortest of the inserted cadenzas (Kohl 1998, 62; Kohl 2017, 117–20). A sketch found amongst those for Gruppen shows that the twelve tempo-defined subdivisions of the original version are derived from the inversion of the Gruppen row (Decroupet 1997, 40; Decroupet 1998, 352), a fact that had been previously discovered by York Höller through examination of the score. The counting values are varied among crotchet, quaver, and semiquaver. However, the fifth and twelfth elements (E = 66 and G = 80, respectively) are exchanged, probably because the fourth, fifth, and sixth tempos otherwise would have been too close together (Höller 1994, 86–87):

The five cadenzas, which account for about two-fifths of the total duration of Zeitmaße, are spliced into the score in such a way as to flow out of and back into the previously composed music, and yet create a perceivable structure of mutual interruption. The first and last cadenzas are the shortest, and the central one by far the longest; the six segments from the original structure, on the contrary, begin and end with the longest values, while the four intermediate ones generally decrease in length. The result is an interlaced pattern of eleven sections, played continuously (Kohl 2017, 120–21).

Discography

In chronological order of recording.

Filmography