Almost every work that Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote in the 1950s seemed to break new ground, but few have had a more lasting impact than Kontakte, which he planned in 1958 and realised over the following two years in the electronic studios of West German Radio. The score exists in two versions – as a purely electronic work on tape, following the equally groundbreaking Gesang der Jünglinge that Stockhausen had completed immediately before it, and as an electro-acoustic piece (his first, and one of the first ever composed), in which the prerecorded sounds are combined with live instruments, a piano and percussion.
The electronic music was created as a four-channel tape, and that vivid, spatial element of the work emerges with startling immediacy in this first binaural recording of the electro-acoustic version, with percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys. Heard through headphones, their performance gives a tingling sense of the aural perspectives that played such an important role in Stockhausen’s musical thinking at that time, and which he had just explored in the concert hall with Gruppen, for three orchestras.
With the two live instrumentalists placed at the centre of the sound picture, too, it shows how the electronically generated timbres and live sounds come into “contact” in the score, and how the one can emerge from or merge with the other. High-frequency electronic tones seamlessly elide with crotales and sizzling cymbals, or mingle with the harmonics from a tam-tam, while low-frequency pulses can be matched with the lower registers of the piano. The textures change like the colours in a kaleidoscope, as the music moves in a non-linear way from one idea to the next, in what was one of Stockhausen’s earliest experiments with “moment” form. Barton and Rhys prove perfect guides to all these complexities; there may already be a number of recordings of this remarkable work, but theirs adds an extra dimension to it, both literally and metaphorically.
This week’s other picks
George Barton is also among the performers on the first recording of Frank Denyer’s The Fish That Became the Sun, which is part of the latest batch of releases from Another Timbre, and which receives its first complete public performance at the Huddersfield contemporary music festival this weekend.
These Songs of the Dispossessed are scored for an extraordinary array of instruments. Some are more or less conventional, but many more have been constructed from discarded materials. Together they create a soundworld that is full of raw, sometime shocking sounds in a ritual of sorts that’s quite unlike anything else.
