Karlheinz Stockhausen

*2022 Stock. Includes 124-page booklet in German and English.* “Stimmung” was a commission from the City of Cologne, for an ensemble at the Rheinische Musikschule; Collegium Vocale Köln. It was written early 1968, in February and March, in a house on Long Island Sound in Madison, Connecticut, where Stockhausen and his wife Mary Bauermeister and their children lived a couple of months. This commission for a vocal work took on a completely new direction when Stockhausen – out of consideration for the children who needed to sleep – started to hum to himself instead of singing out loud. That was when Stockhausen discovered the strange and hidden properties of vowels, and the overtones he could set free by sustaining these vowels, molding them through his oral cavities. With the lust for discovery which is Stockhausen’s, he indulged in the practicing of overtone singing for extended durations. After the initial discovery came the structuring phase, in which he listed the vowels and their overtones, and from then on he completely abandoned the sketch he’d already made for the commission, and began from the beginning – a new beginning.

“Stimmung is certainly meditative music. Time is suspended. One listens to the interior of the sound, to the interior of the harmonic spectrum, to the interior of the vowel, TO THE INTERIOR. The most subtle fluctuations – rare outbursts -, all senses are alert and calm. In the beauty of the sensual shines the beauty of the eternal”. - Karlheinz Stockhausen

As you listen to the CD it becomes clear to you how meditative – hypnotic – this piece really is. It grows on you in a strange vexation, and Stockhausen takes on the guise of a magician. “Stimmung” belongs in a tradition of shamanistic rites, no doubt, whether this was known to Stockhausen at the time or not; if the piece was mostly intuitive, on the basis of the hours in the holy ruins and the time traveling, or if it mostly was a conscious construction of sounds with the intent to arrive at this result. “Stimmung” is like a purification rite or an initiation ceremony.
- Sonoloco.com