Momente - Texts

Texts

Stockhausen draws on a variety of sources for the texts of Momente (Bosseur 1967, 121; Smalley 1974, 25; Stockhausen 2009, 128):

  • Primarily in the D moments, the Song of Songs, in the translation by Martin Luther. Many of the M Moments use shorter extracts from this source.
  • Extracts from a letter from Mary Bauermeister, mainly in moment I(k), where they are used with passages from the Song of Songs.
  • Brief quotations from The Sexual Life of Savages by Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropological report of the Trobriand Islands in British New Guinea, found, for example, in moment M(d).
  • A quotation from William Blake: "He who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity's sunrise", found in moment M(d) and, in the 1972 and 1998 versions, as an insert from M(d) in M.
  • Names from fairy tales, e.g., Rapuntzel (MK); invented names, e.g., Kama, Maka, Dodi; cries and exclamations heard from audiences at performances of Stockhausen's earlier works, e.g., "bravo", "pfui", "nein, das ist unmöglich", "da capo", "stop it!", "furchtlos weiter", "sortez", "bald?". "so?", "schon?", "jetzt?", "ja!", "nein", "awful!", "doch!", "immer", "wann?", "warum?", "wie?", "wo?", "sure?", "wozu?".
  • Invented onomatopoeic words, and phonetic texts written by Stockhausen himself.

The main compositional problem was to mediate among all these text fragments, in order to avoid the effect of mere collage (Stockhausen 2009, 128).

Read more about this topic:  Momente

Famous quotes containing the word texts:

    “The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.”
    —Paul Deman (1919–1983)

    “A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
    —Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

    “The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.”
    —Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)