INART 55

History of Electroacoustic Music

Gesang der Jünglinge



From Gregorian chants onward, the music of the early Christian church underlies the structure of Western music. For centuries, tradition had it that composers would test their mettle by writing a version of the Catholic mass. A devout Catholic, Karlneinz Stockhausen began work on a Mass for electronic music, to be played at Cologne Cathedral. When the Cathedral denied to allow loudspeaker music to be played on their premises, Stockhausen created a religious concert work Gesang der Jünglinge (1956). This was the first major work produced at Cologne, and many consider it one of the earliest masterpieces of electroacoustic music. It featured the voice of a single twelve year old boy reading and singing of a bilibcal text, the Song of Praise of the Three Youths from the Book of Daniel, Chapter 3. Three boys, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refuse to worship a golden idol are cast into a burning furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. The boys sing praises to God, and the flames do not harm them. Stockhausen combined the sound of a boy's voice reading the text with electronics.

Stockhausen had studied with Werner Meyer-Eppler at Cologne University, taking classes in acoustics, phonetics, and information theory. He had experience with breaking words up into phonetic fundamentals, studying the various sounds of human speech at the smallest levels of detail. The song is a praise for God's creation in its many permutations -- fire and summer's heat, sun and moon, fall of rain, light and darkness. Similarly, the sounds of the text were treated to Stockhausen's permutations, most particularly the phrase "Preiset den Herrn" ("Praise ye the Lord"). The soprano of the boy's voice had a similar sound to that available with the sine wave oscillators. Stockhausen sought to create a sound continuum from the sound of the boy, unprocessed, to a complete electronic sound environment, and in between were combinations of the two. He categorized vowels as being analogous to pure tones, plosive consonants as being analogous to white noise, and voiced consonants (n, m, v) as analogous to buzzy waveforms made up of many harmonics.

This was a turning point in the artistic output from the Cologne studio, as it departed from the "first principles" doctrine of synthesizing sound from sine waves exclusively. This piece in many ways bridged the marked differences in ideology between Cologne and Paris, by integrating natural and electronic sounds.

It was a serial work, with rows not just of pitches, but also of durations, loudness, thickness of texture, spatialization, level of comprehensibility of the vocal recordings. Serialism was taken as the contemporary form of counterpoint, mastered by J.S. Bach. A set of rules that form the basis of a spiritual exploration that transcends their constraints.

The piece was produced onto five tracks of tape, and played in the Cologne Radio Station's broadcasting studio over five loudspeaker groups. Sound paths in the space were also a large part of the composition. This was one of the first pieces to make a systematic exploration of spatialization, to create the effect of sounds moving around, towards, and away from listeners.

This piece was to signal Stockhausen's pursuits beyond technical experimentation into attempting to create transcendental and spiritual experiences for listeners. For him, this section from the Bible pertained to universal knowledge, and had numerous unconscious associations for listeners who had memorized the passages, having heard it at the close of the Catholic Mass. By choosing key "buzzwords" from the passage and putting them into a musical collage context, he was attempting to create an abstract suggestion of spirituality and ritual.

Columbia University, Masterpieces of 20th-Century Multi-channel Tape Music: Stockhausen