The cradles of electronic music part 10

(excerpt from my e-book “New Concepts for Music and Sound”: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/537)

One of the “backbone” devices in the studio of electronic music of the WDR broadcasting station in Cologne, Germany was the Tieftone Generator.

The perhaps most famous user of this generator is Karlheinz Stockhausen. In his piece “Kontakte” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XWNR_TcPFI) he used this Tieftone Generator for producing structure (it can be used as an LFO with cycle lenghts up to 10 seconds) as well as for modulations (it goes up to 1.1 kHz).

“Kontakte” is a piece for electronics, piano and percussion. In the performance two solists (a pianist and a percussionist) play live together with the pre-recorded electronic parts coming from a tape.

According to Stockhausen the name “Kontakte” means the contact between the human performance and the fixed electronic music from the tape, and builds a symbiosis between these seemingly contrary worlds.

It also means the contact of the audience with so far unknown sounds and completely new kinds of musical compositions (Stockhausen says).

In “Kontakte” the principles of “classic” serial music are translated into electronic music and expanded from mere tone/pitch related rules to the realm of timbre, sound and spectra.

A more detailed description and explanation of “Kontakte” is given here: http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/2015/11/kontakte-planning-design.html.

Please let me say a little “warning”: in the blogspot article, which is very interesting and helpful otherwise, they mention the compositional element of “moments”. Stockhausen has written and lectured about the structural element of a “moment” a lot (I have found only some of it on the Internet unfortunately, but I write a bit more about it in my e-books about generative music - https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/331). The kind of definition of a structural “moment” given in the blogspot article is a bit too much “compacted” and destilled down, I think.

The Tieftone Generator is also one of the devices in the software Berna 3.

... to be continued

Cradles_1: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/507

Cradles_2: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/511

Cradles_3: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/512

Cradles_4: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/517

Cradles_5: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/531

Cradles_6: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/541

Cradles_7: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/543

Cradles_8: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/546

Cradles_9: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/551