Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra
Stockhausen
Each note a sun
Mantra for two pianos and ring modulators (1969/1970) assumes a special place in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s oeuvre. After a series of works that gave the artists performing them great freedom, this was a return to precisely specified sheet music. The work’s most striking feature is the use of live electronics in the form of a ring modulator that takes away the music being played and reflects it back into the two pianists’ playing as a modulated voice.
Besides this advanced technology, Stockhausen also gives the soloists small antique cymbals, or crotales, that are used in ashrams and Buddhist monasteries. At the centre of everything is a twelve-tone melody of 13 notes, which Stockhausen understood as a mantra. Out of these he organised all the other musical processes in the work, which lasts over an hour. He saw every single one of these notes as a sun, around which he composed their own galaxies.
Performers
GrauSchumacher Piano Duo
Andreas Grau piano
Götz Schumacher piano
Jan Panis sound
Programme
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Mantra
Series
NDR das neue werk