Gruppen (Stockhausen) - History

History

Early in 1955 Stockhausen received a commission from WDR for a new orchestral composition, but his ongoing work on Gesang der Jünglinge prevented him from starting right away. In August and September, he took the opportunity to retreat to an inexpensive rented room in the attic of a parsonage in Paspels, Switzerland, recommended to him by a colleague, Paul Gredinger. Surrounded by the splendour of the Graubünder alps, he created the entire plan of Gruppen, "with a completely new conception of musical time" (Stockhausen and Frisius 1989, 320). The surroundings provided more than just a conducive environment for work.

in Gruppen … whole envelopes of rhythmic blocks are exact lines of mountains that I saw in Paspels in Switzerland right in front of my little window. Many of the time spectra, which are represented by superimpositions of different rhythmic layers—of different speeds in each layer—their envelope which describes the increase and decrease of the number of layers, their shape, so to speak, the shape of the time field, are the curves of the mountain's contour which I saw when I looked out the window. (Cott 1973, 141)

Originally the work was to have been for multi-channel electronic music with large orchestra, with metrically indeterminate parts for the orchestra. Once having decided to divide the orchestra into three parts, each with its own conductor, Stockhausen gave up the electronic sounds and incorporated some of what had previously been thought of as electronic music into the orchestra. The indeterminate tempos also proved impractical, and were dropped after a few experimental pages of score had been written out (Kurtz 1992, 79–80).

Upon returning to Cologne, Stockhausen resumed work on Gesang der Jünglinge and then composed the wind quintet Zeitmaße and Klavierstück XI, before turning to working-out the details of Gruppen, which occupied him for all of 1957. The premiere of the work took place in the Rheinsaal of the Kölner Messe in Köln-Deutz, as part of the WDR's concert series Musik der Zeit, on 24 March 1958 with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stockhausen (orchestra I), Bruno Maderna (orchestra II), and Pierre Boulez (orchestra III). The score is dedicated to Herbert Eimert, director at that time of the WDR electronic music studio (Stockhausen 1971, 22).