Telemusik - Materials and Concepts

Materials and Concepts

The substance of the work consists of recordings of a variety of traditional ethnic musics from around the world, together with electronically generated sounds (Stockhausen 1971b, 79). More than twenty of these recorded fragments are intermodulated on tape with electronic sounds and with each other to produce "odd hybrid-types"—modulating, for example, "the chant of monks in a Japanese temple with Shipibo music from the Amazon, and then further impos a rhythm of Hungarian music on the melody of the monks. In this way, symbiotic things can be generated, which have never before been heard" (Stockhausen 1996, 94). Only seven of the work's thirty-two moments—nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 16—are restricted entirely to electronic sounds (Kohl 2002, 97). The pitch range is deliberately kept rather high, between 6 and 12 kHz, so that the intermodulation can occasionally project sounds downwards, sections "that seem to be so far away because the ear cannot analyse it, so that it entered the normal audible range and suddenly became understandable". In this way, register becomes a means of bringing the “distant” close up (Greek tele, "afar, far off", as in "telephone" or "television") the concept from which the title of the work is derived (Stockhausen 1966).

The work was created using a six-track tape recorder custom-built for the NHK studios. One track was reserved for editing during production, with the completed music being intended for playback in five channels, arranged in a circle around the audience. However, there are none of the continually-moving-sound techniques found in other of Stockhausen's electronic works, such as Kontakte, Sirius, or Oktophonie from Dienstag aus Licht. The spatial conception of Telemusik is therefore closer to that of Gesang der Jünglinge, which was also originally in five channels. For performances elsewhere than at the NHK studios, Stockhausen mixed down several two-channel stereo copies, using a panorama console to approximately position the five channels from left to right as I IV III II V (Kohl 2002, 112–13).