Three men and three women, seated in a circle, hold microphones in their hands.
The first voice softly intones a small rhythmic motif on a single note, which it repeats, as if muttering a magic formula in an unknown language made up of vowels. Whether a vowel is more or less open, the voice, by moving its lips or tongue, emits high-pitched harmonics of this fundamental note: the partial tones that make up the harmonic spectrum of any sound, and which, to be audible, require us to open our ears to the imperceptible.
In German, Stimmung means accordance – like an instrument being tuned, a chord played on the piano, a voice finding its right intonation, but also a state of mind, a way of being, an atmosphere, or an agreement, a union, a sense of harmony. And finally, Stimmung contains the word Stimme, meaning voice.
As the score indicates, while the first voice sings, the others can rest. They can also sing, and reproduce its motif but at a different pitch; or gradually transform the motif they were singing to fuse with it, except for the pitch; or reproduce its motif, only with variations in rhythm, intensity or pitch; or sing here and there, aligning themselves with the pitches of the other singers with little glissandi that generate inner melodies. When the first voice perceives that all the voices are in tune, it signals to move on to the next motif, and another voice intones a new note.
At certain points, the “magic name” of one or more deities from all the world’s religions – Aboriginal, Hebrew, Indonesian, Buddhist, Aztec, Sioux, Egyptian, Muslim, Greek, Maori, etc. – is repeated. On three occasions, an erotic poem composed by Stockhausen is recited, as the score states, “with many variations in pitch, without exaggeration, in a joyful and serene manner, accompanied by gestures addressed to the other voices”. At other times, the mumbling of vowels gives way to a word, a whisper or a breath.
Karlheinz Stockhausen transcribed into the international phonetic alphabet the vowels that need to be pronounced in order to ring the expected harmonic, noted as precisely as the rhythmic formula of the motif and the tempo in which it is intoned. He also determined the sequence of the 51 moments, each corresponding to a different motif, that make up the entire form of the work, and at which moments the magical names are pronounced. He has predefined which of the six voices first intones a motif, on which note, and on which other note the other voices each tune to the first one.
The six fundamental notes on which the voices harmonise correspond in turn to the harmonics of a low B-flat that will never be heard. When the voices sing together, a gentle chord resonates in the dominant ninth over B-flat, shimmering with overtones. Stimmung is this single 70-minute chord, animated from within by the superimposition of pulsations repeated at different speeds, generating new motifs. The work, which greatly contributed to establishing Stockhausen’s legend, has been performed hundreds of times, including in the spherical auditorium designed for the German pavilion at the Osaka World Expo in 1970, where several million visitors heard his music.
The meditative, mystical dimension of the work has been explained by the influence of Eastern thought and the new age tendencies of hippie culture – indeed, Stockhausen taught composition at the University of California at Davis in 1966-67, the year of the “Summer of Love”. The vocal techniques used to produce the harmonics in Stimmung have also been compared to Mongolian overtone singing. But it was after returning from a trip to the Aztec and Mayan ruins of Mexico that the score, imbued with deep ritualism, was written. “There’s only the sound, the general feeling that the Mexican plains inspired in me, with their buildings rising towards the sky. Total stillness on one side, and sudden disruption, on the other.”
Stimmung was composed during the winter of 1968 on Long Island. “The wind kept blowing with unimaginable force; through the window I could see snow falling on the water, and that was all I saw the whole time I was composing.” Responding to a commission from the city of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale, he first sketched out music made up of numerous melodies, which he sang at the top of his lungs, in the small house he then occupied with his wife, the painter Mary Bauermeister, to whom the work is dedicated, and their two children, barely a year old. But the children demanded attention during the day, and silence at night. So Stockhausen stopped singing, and started whispering, at night, harmonic melodies inspired by the multiple sounds hummed by Simon in his cradle. “Nothing Oriental, nothing philosophical: just two babies, a little house, silence, solitude, night, snow, ice (nature too was asleep): a pure miracle!”
Lambert Dousson
