The Telemusik of Karlheinz Stockhausen

Sometimes it is better to let a piece of music speak for itself. This is especially true when dealing with works of magnitude and poetic complexity such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Telemusik”.

Listen to the German composer’s mid-1960s electronic composition below. And if you really need to … scroll down for an introduction by Stockhausen himself.

“telemusik”

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TELEMUSIK was composed between January and April, 1966, in the studio of electronic music at the Japanese radio Nippon Hoso Kyokai, Tokyo. During my first 8 or 9 days in Tokyo, I could not sleep: one vision came again and again, a vision of sounds, new technical processes, formal relationships, pictures of notation, human relationships – all at once and in a network too tangled up to be unraveled in one logical process. In all this I wanted to come closer to the realization of an old dream: to take a step further in the direction of composing not “my” music, but a music of the whole world, of all countries and all races.

I am certain you will hear them in TELEMUSIK, these mysterious visitors: from the Imperial Japanese court (the Gagaku players), from the happy isle of Bali, from the southern Sahara, from a Spanish village fiesta, from Hungary, from the Omizutori ceremony, in Nara, in which I participated for three days and nights, from China – a fantastic virtuosity! – , from the Kohyasan temple, from the Vietnamese highlands, about whom I read gruesome and distorted news every morning in an American-Japanese newspaper in the hotel, and again from Vietnam (what a wonderful people!), from the Buddhist Jakushiji temple, from the Nô drama “Hô Sho Riu”, and who knows from where else. They all wanted to participate in TELEMUSIK, sometimes superimposed and interpenetrating each other. I had my hands full in keeping the unknown world of electronically produced sounds open to these guests – I do not know how I did it , I was moonstruck, but I believe I succeeded in composing this TELEMUSIK.

Today, only three years later, I can already say that TELEMUSIK has come to the beginning of a new development. The situation of the “collage” of the first half of the century has been overcome: TELEMUSIK is not a collage anymore. Rather, through the process of intermodulation, old objects trouvés and new sounds, which I produced in the electronic studio, are combined into a higher unity: a universality of past, present and future, of distant places and spaces: TELE-MUSIK.

- Karlheinz Stockhausen (1969)

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