STOCKHAUSEN: […] [The musicians] have performed the work [“Kontakte”] many times and rehearsed …[words lost in room noise]… can play from memory. I have done the sound projection several hundred times; I don’t know how many times. Just at the World Fair 1970 [in Osaka] 75 times […].

[…] …traditional parameters, traditional forming, so maybe new thoughts can help us to look into the future. Please, start! We have a few lights to put out… or not? Whatever you want!

Question (condensed): Tell us some general things about the interpretation of the work.

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes. We start with the stereo tape, once the individual sections are technically …[words lost in room noise]… and then, one by one, to bring the parts of the two players together. As soon as possible a third person is needed […] to listen and immediately interfere when there is no synchronicity, which is in the score… so it needs help. […] Practically, we don’t need scores anymore. At the beginning the percussion player had… one, two, three… four scores, depending on where he was; which instrument he was playing. […] So this depends on the teacher, it depends on the sound projectionist, when the synchronicity is becoming perfect; almost perfect.

Then begins the work, which I have done many, many times with the performers, to balance! Even this morning, yesterday, last night; this morning three hours – the main corrections, on my behalf, are dynamics; too soft, to hard, depending on the sticks. Most of the percussion players whom I have listened to have their own choice of sticks; it says “hard”, “soft” or “hard metal”, “hard wood” etcetera, what concerns the sticks, and many. Many times I have demanded players to change the sticks, and they cannot really know, and they say; “Well, what do you want?” etcetera. There is no fixed idea of just balance; no sound should completely stick out of the context; no sound should sound ugly, but it should all sound musical, even if it’s a log drum, but with a …[words lost in room noise]…, but it should [produce] a musical sound, which means have enough resonance, a good attack etcetera. There is an enormous amount of taste for the quality of the individual attack, the individual sound required, though I make them, maybe …[words lost in room noise]… of the intensity of the attack. Even in the piano, many times this morning, still, I corrected Antonio [Antonio Peréz-Abellán] for playing, at certain places, too hard, because the hall [the big hall – Stora salen – at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm] is very resonant; it has very good acoustics, so they [the musicians] are used to the rehearsal room – we rehearsed the last four, five days I think, in Hanover, in the rehearsal room, and now they came into this hall two times. Yesterday all day they have rehearsed without me; I had another work. Last night I came two hours, and this morning. The hall decides a lot about the dynamics as an overall intensity as well as the dynamics of the tape.
Even with a tape I don’t know how to explain to Bryan [Bryan J. Wolf; Medieningenieur Visuelle Kommunikation, Bachelor of Arts, Komponist, Stuttgart] who is there, for example – he has listened many times to “Kontakte” – to know exactly what the general level should be.
We have a test tape for the announcement of the four channels. We balance them out before we start a rehearsal every time, but then I show him, when he sits next to me, what I’m doing, and in the score there are many indications after 41 years, which are the result of a lot of rehearsals; it’s the second edition of the score, of the printed score, and I cannot make the tape again, so there are now in the score at many places indications plus (+), minus (-) or plus plus (++), which means something like up to five or six degrees more or less for the tape, and this is done with a special potentiometer in the mixing console, so one should always have a mixing console, what we call a VCA potentiometer, which means [that] a whole group of four channels can be changed in dynamics with one single potentiometer. These are special mixing consoles, which allow this. This is required for “Kontakte”.
We also have a VCA fader for all the instruments of the pianist, including the piano and all his percussion instruments.

Once the levels are set – that’s what we did last night first – we started with each microphone; there are 12 microphones in all – for all this, though some of them, if you look at the mixer, use very little amplification, very little, and even that, I found out, finally, at the end of the rehearsal last night… today I changed two potentiometers only at the right side, and pushed a little bit in order to balance it, so the balance is a real task for a musician. It needs a perfectly trained musician and also one who knows what to do with a mixer […] and I think every musician who studies at a conservatory should, earlier or later, learn it, because even all my works for individual instruments – traditional instruments like flute, bassett horns, trumpets etcetera; you will hear tomorrow Markus, my son, play the trumpet in “Aries” with electronic music – so all of my music; even piano pieces, use microphones […] since 40 years, and some, like “Kontakte”, even the piano – that is 41 years – but even older pieces… The first piano pieces, which I wrote 50 years ago, I always – in any hall – even in a small hall, project it to the hall. Naturally, the sound should come from where the instrument is, basically, and it takes a special sight, if I might say, where to put speakers in the hall. So this all should be experienced by experiments. It should be taught by knowledgeable teachers how to project sounds in a hall, because all the music of traditional music for single instruments, even for singers, are not made for large halls. If you see the original halls, how small they are; even the classical music had very small halls; they’re all made of wood etcetera, but my music which I composed use these harmonics, very subtle sounds, even with a piano, and I want everybody to hear what the pianist hears, and I want everybody in the hall to hear what the percussionist hears when he is playing. This is a completely new orientation. Is that helpful, what I’m saying? That is a whole chapter by itself; performance practice.

Question (condensed): When you composed “Kontakte”, did you compose the electronic part before the instrumental part, or did you do it simultaneously?

STOCKHAUSEN: Yes and no. There are all these sketches, which you can study. They are available in he archives. They show already indications about the instrumental sounds. It is true that the precise place where certain attacks of the percussion or the piano finally were noted, but that took place towards the end of the [word lost in room noise], I mean, in 1959, but in all sketches you can see already indications [of] how I wanted to connect the world of known instruments with electronic sounds.

Question: Would you say that the instruments are accompanying the electronic music?

STOCKHAUSEN: The instruments are underlined. It’s like having a painting with special coloring and certain forms, figures, underlined with color – so that’s what I really did with the instruments. The whole structure is independent of instruments. That’s why “Kontakte” can be performed – could be performed! – just as electronic music in the dark, and that is in many respects something very special, because the inner experience of the music is more deep, is more engaging – but once the instruments are performing together with the electronic music, they point at certain events in the electronic music, underline, play along, so I would not say “accompany”, because the term “accompaniment” means to add something that is sort of like a harmonic or a rhythmic base, and sustaining more soloistic music, lines in a polyphony – but here they play along with what’s happening; sometimes even multiply, like at the beginning, the first two minutes, they really multiply what’s already happening in the electronic music. […]

Question: In your first talk today you pronounced several times the word “space”, and just once “time”. After the performance you pronounced several times the word “time”, but when we were discussing how many times your work had been performed. My question is: What happens with time and space in “Kontakte”? How would you describe the experience of time and space in “Contacts”?

STOCKHAUSEN: It’s very simple. You cannot separate an event, which happens in space from time, because whenever you notice the rear back, the rear left, it cuts the time, and then, when you hear front left, it cuts the time, and when you hear rotation, it articulates time with the individual attacks in the different speakers. I project them around the hall, …[words lost in room noise]… in a certain direction, clock-wise or counter clock-wise, so every change in space is automatically a change in time, which means [that] you cannot make changes in time without creating a rhythm, and vice versa. When I make a rhythm with the electronic notes they appear at certain places in space, so a rhythmic concept is directly related to the direction of the sound, and the speed of the sound, so I cannot separate… and that is as a matter of fact also the way I compose for traditional means; for voices, for choirs. In Cologne, since a long time, I’m composing a piece for choir, for five groups of singers from …[words lost in room noise]… by the public at the left side, half left, half right and at the right a group of choir singers. So the order of changes between the groups, and even when they perform together, in different tempi, simultaneously, the alternation and the individual events in each group creates space events, space impression, so we cannot – in the new concept of music – separate this anymore. In traditional music it is mutual, it is monophonic, even the longest piece, whatever… The placing of the instruments is not structurally clarifying the composition. It’s just automatically done in a certain way, but as soon as the sources of sound change, and even the speaker [which] speaks of the appearances of the sounds, change, then these events create rhythm, and are as important as changes in pitches or changes in dynamics.

Question directed to the musicians on the stage [Antonio Peréz-Abellán; piano & percussion & Andreas Boettger, percussion]: What is your personal relationship to this piece? What do you experience? The Maestro is talking about the inner experience of the music. How deep do you feel engaged in this?

ANDREAS BOETTGER: At the best this piece makes me dance, like at the end, the dance is a very free kind of movement. Every sound that I produce is fixed, so I learned the tape very well, so that I can feel what’s coming next, and I feel those irregular pulses on the tape as a rhythm to which I can dance. So that’s my… For the end, I am very happy to play this, and I look forward, when I start the piece, to come to the point with my favorite part!

[Audience laughter]

ANTONIO PERÉZ-ABELLÁN: For me this piece is like a painting, and I am pleased to add color! When I studied the piece… [asking Stockhausen: Wie sagen Sie jedesmal?]

STOCKHAUSEN: Every time!

ANTONIO PERÉZ-ABELLÁN: Yeah, every time I learn something new, and I change… [asking Stockhausen to help find the English words]

STOCKHAUSEN: He says that it’s a great pleasure to play it. Can you speak German? [directed to the person in the audience who asked the question]. He [Antonio Peréz-Abellán] speaks German!

[Audience laughter]

STOCKHAUSEN: No, but Antonio is Spanish!

[Audience laughter]

The woman from the audience who asked the question: I’m Russian!

[Hollering audience laughter]

Question: Since you two play together now; how many times have you played it [“Kontakte”] together? How many times have you played this piece, Andreas, how much time did you need in the beginning to prepare each performance. We heard now that maybe four, five days you worked together now. This process from initial learning to, now, preparation for one performance… Just maybe give us some numbers! It might be exciting for…

[Audience laughter]

ANDREAS BOETTGER: I really cannot count. I met Karlheinz Stockhausen with this piece in, I think, 1985. [words lost in room noise] was my piano player at the time, and we started to learn the piece a long time before that. We decided to learn this piece, and we worked three months, I think, but after a while we had our own experience. We were organized by an agency, so it was easy for us to play, but after a while we wanted to meet HIM. We wanted to know something more about the piece, and it was very nice that he gave us his time, and it was a nice initiation of “Contacts”, so after these rehearsals and contacts we had several pieces, and the first time we made music [with Stockhausen] was 16 years ago now.

STOCKHAUSEN: Oh but he [the man from the audience who asked the question] wants to know if you can roughly say if you perform it [“Kontakte”] fifty times a years or five times a year.

ANDREAS BOETTGER: No, before it was more; it was three times a year; now it is once a year, and the rehearsal periods change. Sometimes we feel very strong, and we say okay, we can do it faster, but it was very helpful to do it this time. Mr. Stockhausen said: You have to prepare very well here, and then he said okay, doing it five days, and then Antonio came, and it was a nice period, because we found new ideas to interpret some different ...[words lost in room noise]... We found some new things, so this piece still stays alive with us. It’s funny, because the tape is fixed in timing, but when you take time to prepare, you find different ways to solve the interpretation, from the interpretation that was before, and it was nice to have four days, and I think we will keep this… because it’s more fun, to find always new things and to develop this interpretation. Every time it changes.

Question: How would you say “Kontakte” is related to more recent compositions?

STOCKHAUSEN: The more recent compositions combining electronic music and live performances are extremely more complex, because they are oktophonic; the whole space is involved, and the performers move. For example “Invasion”; the three trumpeters, three trombonists, one bass, one tenor and two percussionists – Andreas was one of them – with portable synthesizers, and cables and cable carrier, have movements to make through the space, at different speeds. It’s all composed in a sort of artful fighting between two groups who invade the space, from the left and from the right, and finally invade even the stage, and it is done scenically. They destroy a whole wall in front of them; penetrate through the wall, so there is that movement, which is choreographed, if you like, in addition to this performance practice, which is still very fixed, so all the works, which I have written later, involve more and more movements of the performers. Even the movements of “Ave”, which we are going to perform on Monday night, have the performers move a lot between fixed positions; even kneeling or laying on the floor and getting up. Even in “Invasion” sometimes they fall down while they’re playing and jump up again, so it’s a new dimension for the performers, to learn also that! [chuckling]. There is another composition already, rather early in “Licht”: “Michaels Reise in die Erde”. My son Markus performed it many times… and there is even a solo version for ten soloists, and he [Markus Stockhausen] is the solo trumpeter, and so the musicians, and in particular the soloists, move, sometimes with two clowns, who are two clarinet players, or bassett one player, who comes and gets him [Michael (Markus Stockhausen)] and leads him into another world, and they go outside, you hear them only at the scene, and don’t see them anymore… so the scenic character has increased.

Question [condensed]: Could you elaborate on the relation of the new sounds to the piano?

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, when I composed “Kontakte” I had already composed “Piano Piece 11”, but there is nothing comparable in the whole literature of the world which uses these kinds of jumps – cluster technique – in many, various, different fashions; the cluster technique, the technique of harmonics ...[words lost in room noise]..., and producing resonating harmonics. “Piano Piece 11” is the key, and then “Kontakte” [is] directly related to the technique, which I discovered in “Piano Piece 11”, but in traditional music I don’t see any piece that you might think of.

Question: [words lost in room noise, but question having to do with the controlled micro tonalities of the tape in relation to the pitches of the piano and the way they relate to the rest of the instruments and the whole fabric of “Kontakte”]

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, they either double the same pitches which I notate, which means there are also chromatic pitches on the tape, or they …[words lost in room noise]… sometimes, between, which is very interesting. Of course it is easier to listen to the […] music of the piano, but in fact, the fact that the piano sounds are most of the time simultaneous in connection with the percussionist groups: cymbals, high-hat, cow-bells, antique cymbals, wood blocks etcetera, creates a kind of piano through the …[words lost in room noise]…, which is rather unique for this piece.

Question: Did you have an idea from the beginning about the sounds and colors of the piece; there are so many colors and sounds through the piece. Did you know every sound and color musically from the beginning to the end, or was it emerging during the work?

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, the basic families of timbres, which I mentioned at the beginning of tonight, were clear to me, because there are dates and dates and dates of sound material identifiable by the dates when I made it, though the main categories, I prepared, but during the work I decided, naturally, from musical moment to the next - and there are 14 main, large musical moments of different lengths - which kind of timbres should predominate, so, as you know, there is clearly the moment when the skin sounds predominate, and then another moment when skin sounds …[words lost in room noise]… through the piano, and the tom-toms and the bongos; similar attacks; clearly moments when just the bell sounds come to the surface, or the chimes, the wooden chimes, wood blocks – so through the whole work, one by one, certain instrumental timbres – in the tape as well – come to the surface; predominate! Which kind of timbre predominates at a certain moment I decided during the composition. I thought now it’s time that the colored noises come to the surface; with brushes and cymbals, high-hats, tam-tam etcetera, or, towards the end, I go more and more into the high registers; Indian bells tinkling and brushes of metal against metal, so the register of the timbre rises, towards the end. Whenever I use the material, or an ensemble of the material, I try not only to …[words lost in room noise]… between different families of sound, but to give to each material its own time, when it has its time, so to speak. […] So this is then the result of the process of living with the piece.

Question: You are talking a lot about the future, and it seems like you have a strong urge to go further on. [The general question then deals with the possible developments of “Kontakte” in the future]

STOCKHAUSEN: This piece should not be changed. It can maybe be …[words lost in room noise]… acoustically by even more subtle techniques of projecting the instrumental sounds in the hall, but I do not wish that someone fools around with the music, which they do! Many musicians do that. Not so long ago I got a tape of a young composer in Wupperthal who said in a letter: ”I’ve made a new piece mixing together excerpts from three of your pieces. What do you think about it?”

[Audience laughter]

I wrote back that he should study a bit about Urheberrecht…

[Audience laughter]

… about copyright!

[Audience laughter]

That is very often the case now in pop music. I meet regularly works which sample from my works, and then even transform it to such a degree that I think “Hm… that sounds like ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ or ‘Kontakte’ “, but you see, they can transpose it or you can make out of a two-second sound a sound of twenty seconds. These days these transforming devices go very far, so in the future “Kontakte” should remain as it is, as a result of a historical moment… but for new works… I cannot live long enough to realize what I have in my head; what should be done; what I want to do, what concerns composition of space movements and in particular also the transformation technique of known sounds literally sampled from the world, going much further than my own “Telemusik”, which has intermodulations between different stylistic realms which I found in different cultures, together with electronic sounds. That for me is closed, that chapter. I’m not interested in going on further with that, but in transforming a given, a known phenomena – what I call a …[word lost in room noise]… - into another; this metamorphosis interests me very much. It will develop enormously in music, I’m sure. The relationships in music will increase. That naturally brings very high the consciousness of acoustic relations, acoustic familiarities etcetera, in open space, which has just begun. It needs an enormous ability to perceive, identify, remember sound events.

Question: [question is dealing with Stockhausen’s perception of “Kontakte”, and how that might change over time]

STOCKHAUSEN: I try to identify, I try to recognize what’s happening, even now, after hundreds of performances. It’s amazing! It is there, but in certain moments I was unaware of it …[words lost in room noise]… that I hear, all of a sudden, relationships, which I didn’t discover before. It is very complex.
Perceiving is remembering, and perceiving is recognizing something that is not yet stored in the memory; the two together. In fact, that is what I mean by complex. That is constantly developing, because one has heard many, many new works of music, events of music that all of a sudden sharpens the perception. Every new experience that is original sharpens the perception of pieces that you seek to know. You think; “Ah, I wasn’t aware of it”, but our perception has developed; it’s constantly developing through what we hear.

Question: Could you perhaps say a little bit more about the source material you used to make the tape for “Kontakte”?

STOCKHAUSEN: Better not! You know why? There is a book, thick like that [shows with a gesture of the hands the size of the book], printed since 1962, which is called “The Realization Score of Kontakte”, and in this score you find a description of 150 pages or more of every little detail, exactly described; how it was made from the very first vibrations, the very first pulse sequence which I used, and how the spacing was made; it has drawings, numbers, everything is described – so it needs the time of study, and I would not dare to presume this now in a few seconds: it doesn’t make sense. So please, “Realization Score of Kontakte”.

Question: You said something about the way you work with electronic music has influenced your orchestration, the treatment of instruments – I’m thinking for example of “Trans”. I suppose it sounds like it does because you work with electronic music, and the comment that Stravinsky made, when he said that he thought working with electronic music was very good for composers, because they learned to think in registers, to estimate what is good in a certain register. Could you say something about that?

STOCKHAUSEN: The very first composition for orchestra I have classified in families like plucked sounds, gestrichene… bowed sounds, blown sounds; geblast, struck sounds; geschlagt, and I made my sound families for “Punkte” for orchestra in 1952 according to these basic differences, and this is what you also do when you work in an electronic music studio. You first differentiate sound families by the attack, by the decay and by the body; the envelope, and what’s inside – and this more important than the spectrum. Even now, writing for the five choir groups, I have very specific differences between the five groups, like five languages, mainly concentrating on the attack; attack being even speaking a few syllables, and then singing for the rest of the sound event, like a body of… - I said before; like a person who has a head, a body, tail, legs etcetera. I’ve treated already since 1952 sound events like that; I make a head, an inside, a body, and a tail. I started 1952 in musique concrète like that, to work like that – so this is essential, and I think working in a studio teaches us to have completely new attitudes towards traditional instruments and voices. There is the link, which is very important! I call that die Tonformen, and in my work “Licht” I started with 36 Tonformen, and I gave every note of the three-layered formula – original super-formula – an individual Tonform, what concerns the …[word lost in room noise]…, the beginning and the end, and then naturally there are more Tonformen; one with an echo, one with a pre-echo, one with a scale of connection to the next note, one with a scale of connection from the previous note. Every note has its Tonform, like different beings, living beings. Human beings and animals, plants etcetera, have their special Tonform, their special forms, and when composing electronic music one has a completely new attitude towards traditional means; that is the most important [aspect].

Then comes the question of… color, which is the timbre, the inside timbre [words lost in room noise], mainly is the Tonform, which you also have to realize in the studio, because usually all composers use sounds as they come from the generators, but that is not really interesting, because it makes a very uniform music, and creating these Tonforme is not easy. For example, when I …[word lost in room noise]… “Gesang der Jünglinge” already… at that time we had tape, white tape and brown tape. The brown tape is the tape that you use for modulation. At that time it was 76 cm per second, so I was able, with a razor, to put brown tape, which had to be modulated, on a table, fixed it with tape inside the same piece of 20 cm, 23 cm, whatever it is, and took a razor and I cut an envelope of that brown tape, and glued what was remaining with acetone, which is a special kind of liquid glue, on my tape, and then I modulated this, and I had a dynamic form, like the shape of a body, which was the result of what I had cut, and I made loops, and then copied a given spectrum on that kind of envelope, on the Tonform, and one should consider doing that, making a whole series of shapes of sounds, and then, so to speak, modulate it, or fill it with spectral modulation.

Question: What time is it now? [asked by one of the musicians or by Bryan J. Wolf]

STOCKHAUSEN: I’ll give you… because we have another rehearsal, that’s why. I have to go to Berwaldhallen [The Berwald Hall]. It is two minutes before 6.

Question: I have a question about placement of instruments. I was very interested in the two instruments there [tam-tam and gong in the middle of the stage], because it looks like there’s one group for one performer and another set of instruments for the other performer, but there are two instruments in the middle, and it really visually attracted me in the performance that one person comes straight to the center, which gave me a visual color, and I interpreted a very important thing in the middle, and then I was thinking about the bamboo [hanging rattles made of bamboo claves], [the man from the audience showing the gestures of the performers when they grab the bamboo claves], and I was wondering if the placements of those instruments were the way they were because you had two performers, and if you could, you would like to put someone else up in the ceiling…?

STOCKHAUSEN: Why not!

[Audience laughter]

What he is trying to say is this: Since my very first work – “Kreuzspiel” – where the way the musicians walk on the stage is prescribed in the score, where it says that the piano has to be in the middle, with the keyboard towards the public; you see only the back of the player on the piano stool; the conductor is sitting next to the pianist, also on a piano stool; you see only his back. He makes very small movements. The oboe player is 1 meter 55 cm high [on a rostrum], sitting here, with a scale to his back, the bass clarinet player sits there [pointing around the stage, indicating the placements], and the percussion players – the three – have their drums exactly at the height of the rim of the piano, around the piano, so when they play, and the pianist just pushes the pedal, then there’s resonance in the piano; there’s no lid on the piano, but microphones etcetera - so the whole thing is a theater piece, it’s a ritual, from 1951, and since then, every work I have composed, even if it’s for solo flute; it is a theatre piece!

Question: I would like to know if there is any serial technique in “Kontakte”.

STOCKHAUSEN: Oh yes! Also this is analyzed in several texts that I’ve written – “Analysis of Kontakte”; very extensive. There was a big change from the previous serial composition of parameters, which means pitches, dynamic degrees, durations, space, location... In “Kontakte” I changed completely the technique from quantitative – I hope you understand – proposition of series to qualitative propositions of series, which means I worked with 36 degrees of changes from one event to the next, and while I was realizing I was free to decide if change number one is a change of the smallest …[word lost in room noise]… in pitches, or in dynamics or in duration or in timbre, and 36 was in all 6 parameters; maximum degree of change; 6 – so I had 6 degrees of changes, and I had 6 parameters, and I would change according to my series in a given parameter, so sometimes I could change 3: degree 1 in pitches, degree 1 in dynamics, degree 1 in durations, or 3 in 1 parameter, and then there are overall definitions in the piece, which parameter dominates in which section, so then there are a lot of changes in one parameter, or sometimes two parameters, or …[word lost in room noise]… in all six parameters, which makes an enormous variety of Gestalten; of events, yes; Veränderungsgrad; that was the new word for me at that time; Reihen der Veränderungsgrad – so from zero change to maximum change there are series of change; degree of change and then a predominant parameter where a certain degree of change is active. That was a very, very big step for me, from quantitative to qualitative compositions.

I think we have to make a change; a degree of change which will be rather strong, which means I go!

[Hollering audience laughter]

Goodbye!

Applause and applause and applause!