Uploaded December 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Original format: 8 inch, 33-1/3 rpm, monaural recording on flexible plastic. Recorded by Apple Music Publishing.
Original format: 8 inch, 33-1/3 rpm, monaural recording on flexible plastic. Recorded by Apple Music Publishing.


![Karlheinz STOCKHAUSEN: Stimmung
Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, is a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1968 and commissioned by the City of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale Köln. Its average length is seventy-four minutes, and it bears the work number 24 in the composers catalog. It is a tonal, and yet also a serial composition (Toop 2005, 39; Stuppner 1974).
The German word Stimmung [ˈʃtɪmʊŋ] has several meanings, including tuning and mood. The word is the noun formed from the verb stimmen, which means to harmonize, to be correct, and related to Stimme (voice).
Stimmung is in just intonation. Six singers amplified by six microphones tune to a low B♭1 drone, inaudible to the audience, and expand upwards through overtone singing, with that low B♭s harmonics 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 (B♭2, F+2, B♭3, D4, A7♭+4, and C+5) becoming in turn fundamentals for overtone singing. It is composed using what the composer calls moment form, and consists of 51 sections (called moments).
Stockhausen himself attributes a month spent walking among ruins in Mexico as his primary influence, Stimmung recreating that magic space. On the other hand, he also describes the snow on frozen Long Island Sound in February and March 1968 (when he was composing Stimmung in Madison, Connecticut), as the only landscape I really saw during the composition of the piece (Cott 1974, 163). In a letter to Gregory Rose written on 24 July 1982 (printed in the liner notes to Hyperion CDA66115), he describes how, in the small house his wife Mary had rented it was only possible for him to work at night because their two small children needed quiet during the day. He could not sing aloud, as he had done initially, but began to hum quietly, listening to the overtone melodies. Mary reports that Stockhausen first discovered the technique when listening to their small son Simon producing multiple tones while humming in his crib after falling asleep. In this way, Stockhausen became the first Western composer to use this technique of singing again—in the Middle Ages it had been practised by women and children in churches, but was later entirely supplanted by masculine Gregorian music (Bauermeister 2011, 217–18).
Commissioned by the city of Köln for the Collegium Vocale Köln, an ensemble at the Rheinische Musikschule (Rhenish Conservatory). Composed during February and March 1968 in Madison, Connecticut (US). Dedicated to Mary Bauermeister. Recorded at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln, October 30th & 31st 1969.
Baritone Vocals – Georg Steinhoff
Bass Vocals – Hans-Alderich Billig
Composed By, Directed By, Liner Notes – Karlheinz Stockhausen
Design – Holger Matthies Ensemble – Collegium Vocale Köln Liner Notes [Translated By] – Richard Toop
Mezzo-soprano Vocals – Helga Albrecht
Soprano Vocals – Dagmar Apel, Gaby Rodens
Tenor Vocals, Directed By – Wolfgang Fromme
Words By [Magic Names Collated By] – Nancy Wyle
© Stockhausen Foundation for Music, 51515 Kürten (www.stockhausen-verlag.com) Karlheinz STOCKHAUSEN: Stimmung](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KB981oiSuH4/mqdefault.jpg)





![John CAGE: Two2
Performed by Rob HASKINS / Louis GOLDSTEIN
Composed in 1989. Premiered in New York, May 4, 1990.
This is one of Cage’s few “number” pieces that does not utilize time-brackets. Being inspired by a remark of Sofia Gubaidulina, i.e. There is an inner clock, Cage created a composition consisting of 36 lines of music, each containing 5 measures. Within each line, 31 events occur: 5+7+5+7+7, as in Japanese Renga poetry. The pianists play a measure in their own tempo, but the next measure may only be played when both have completed the previous.
In Two2 (1989), written for the pianists Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles performing together as the piano duo Double Edge, Cage unites these two themes—a new kind of harmony and renga—in a marvelous way. One finds all manner of sonorities in this work: various triads and seventh chords, triads with other added notes, dissonances with two, three, or more notes, even single tones. More interesting, however, is the fact that so many chords—even identical successions of chords—recur in the piece. The manner of their overall succession, of course, is determined by chance procedures and performance, which guarantee a nebulous ordering that offers a modicum of coherence without any predictability whatsoever.[11] And so the logic of recurrence in Two2 resembles the way that our different friends and acquaintances pass in and out of our lives—a continuity that doesn’t make conventional sense but is meaningful nevertheless.
More about Cages works on http://www.robhaskins.net/ John CAGE: Two2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/L_yXK5F-Lmo/mqdefault.jpg)

![Morton FELDMAN: The King of Denmark
Realized by Max Neuhaus.
This recording should be played at very low volume - so that you almost dont hear it.
In many ways, The King of Denmark is an anti-percussion piece. It is to be played very softly using only the hand and fingers - no sticks or mallets. Its notation on a graph indicates how many sounds are to be played per beat and whether they are to be in high, medium, or low registers. Even though a tempo runs throughout, no rhythmic coherence emerges. Sounds simply float out, detached and weightless. One instrument has no more sonic gravity than another does. A small bell weighs the same - takes up the same acoustical space - as a large gong. An auditory illusion follows: close your eyes and you can imagine that the instruments are being played at their natural volumes. They are sounds in many different loudnesses, but they are being heard from different distances. The gong is really forte but it is heard from the distance of fifty yards. It sounds as soft as the little bell six inches from your ear. Mirages of distance appear and evaporate again into music. It is like rain or the sound of rain.
These illusions come from Feldmans love of the pulsating but rhythmically directionless canvases of Mark Rothko and other American Abstract Expressionists. Directionlessness is key here. The King of Denmark is music that refuses to dictate the way it should be perceived. It does not light a particular way nor lead you by the ear like an angry headmaster along a corridor of preferred comprehension. It simply floats in timeless ether to be looked at from any angle, any proximity, any point of view. Samuel Beckett, writing much later, in 1975, with no particular thought towards Feldman, comes closest to the heart of the King of Denmark:
only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come and gone was that it something like that come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time. [from That Time (1975)] Morton FELDMAN: The King of Denmark](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MQmDrHs9oXo/mqdefault.jpg)