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May 2007: a few months before his passing, Karlheinz Stockhausen is at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, and a couple of days later at the Teatro Lauro Rossi in Macerata, presenting an identical electronic music program: the "Wednesday Greeting" (1998) from the opera "Wednesday from Light" and the brand new "Cosmic Pulses," making its world premiere in Rome. One of the users of this site, Dante Cruciani, effectively described the sensations of the Roman concert, and I refer you to his review.
"Cosmic Pulses," the thirteenth part of the unfinished cycle titled "Klang" (Sound) and inspired by the 24 hours of the day. A piece of extreme musical density that begins with a slow introduction but soon moves toward a sonic paroxysm that presses the listener with dynamics almost always in forte or fortissimo, with deviant and mutating sounds arriving like incandescent stardust from eight different points, with myriads of cosmic pulses that suddenly burst into a concert hall.
32 minutes of music that represent the furthest frontier toward which Stockhausen has ventured in his long research. The piece consists of 24 melodic loops that rotate through 8 speaker groups arranged in a circle around the audience; they rotate up to 240 and a minimum of 1.17 times per minute in 24 different tempos; and there are 24 registers within a range of about 7 octaves. Each loop has a different number of pitches between 1 and 24, and they are overlapped one on top of another from the lowest to the highest and from the slowest to the fastest.
Stockhausen, February 2007: «For the first time I tried to overlay 24 layers of sound, as if I had to compose the orbits of 24 moons or 24 planets. Whether it will be possible to hear everything, I do not know yet. In any case, the experiment is extremely fascinating!»
Another innovation, the spatialization of sound: since each section of each of the 24 sound layers (synchronized by computers, and with the help of three collaborators) has its specific movement among the 8 speaker groups, Stockhausen composes something like 241 different sound trajectories in space.
This is what it meant for him to write music. This he showed us in those two evenings in Rome and Macerata: the last times I saw him at the center of the hall, sitting at the mixing desk, spreading the sounds of his burning imagination.
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