Karlheinz Stockhausen - Klavierstück XI | Текст песни

• Тексты песен
• Karlheinz Stockhausen
• Klavierstück XI

Klavierstück XI, for piano (1956)

Herbert Henck, piano

Karl Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI (1956) was the composer's first essay in a large-scale \"open\" form--that is, one in which the overall structure is not fixed prior to performance. While Stockhausen made novel use of such techniques, such formal experiments find their roots in the music of composers like Henry Cowell, John Cage and Earle Brown. Cowell's 1935 Mosaic Quartet, for example, allows the performers to decide the order in which the movements are to be played, while Brown's \"mobile\" pieces of the early 1950s may be thought of as a musical parallel to Alexander Calder's kinetic sculptures.

Klavierstück XI consists of nineteen fragments of different lengths arranged on a single large page. The music within each fragment is fully notated as to pitch, register, and duration. The player begins with the first fragment randomly encountered when glancing across the page. For this first passage, tempo, articulation, and dynamics are left to the choice of the performer; at the end of each fragment, however, Stockhausen provides indications for these parameters, which are to be applied to the next fragment the pianist plays. If any fragment is encountered a third time, the performance ends, theoretically allowing for different performances of greatly varying lengths.

In Klavierstück XI, Stockhausen was able to reconcile several apparently incongruous technical and aesthetic approaches. Like many of his colleagues, he experimented with the potentially problematic ideas of performer freedom and unforeseeable results. Still, the quantified details of the work, such as pitch, duration, and tempo, are extensions of serial order and the techniques of total organization.

Klavierstück XI was first performed by Paul Jacobs at Darmstadt in July 1957. [allmusic.com]