Karlheinz Stockhausen
Hymnen

1966 World Cup: England and West Germany in the final. Who knows if Stockhausen watched the match on TV: he was certainly well aware that the national anthems of various countries were broadcast on the radio and TV during sporting or political events, and generally during official occasions. National anthems as popular and familiar musical objects to everyone, hence the idea to integrate them into a musical composition, "Hymnen" indeed.

Realization period: 1966-1967. Duration: just under two hours. Genre: electronic music. Stockhausen chose the electronic medium for his musical fresco of/from the world because the national anthems were not simply quoted but, to use the term coined by Stockhausen, intermodulated: the rhythm of one fused with the harmony of another, this result then fused with the dynamic curve of a third anthem, and so on. Only electronics made all of this possible.

Structure of the piece: four large "regions". Some of the anthems used: The Internationale (i.e., the workers' anthem) and La Marseillaise (Region I); Germany, African anthems, USSR (Region II); again USSR, USA, Spain (Region III); Switzerland and the anthem of the utopian kingdom of Pluramon, with quotes from Ghana, USSR, and the Internationale (Region IV). The Russian anthem is entirely reconstructed with electronic sounds (for others, tape recordings are used): its 112 chords are broken down note by note by Stockhausen, who reconstructs them one sound at a time with sinusoidal waves then distorted and timbrally redefined with a filter. A beastly task, and only for one anthem.

But the national anthems, which almost always remain in the background of the piece and have less acoustic relevance than one might think, are just one among the very diverse sound materials of the piece: it begins with sounds recorded from a shortwave radio (long before web radios, they were used to retrieve signals, weak and far away, coming from the world). There is a strange croupier (voiced by Stockhausen himself) who roams around the two-hour span of this music, occasionally announcing in French: "Faites votre jeu, Messieurs, dames, s'il vous plaît", "Messieurs, dames, rien ne va plus".

There is a fugue built on four voices (the electronics go silent) repeating the word 'red' in four languages. There are snippets of conversation between Stockhausen and his collaborators, more or less accidentally recorded in the studio, and much more, including an anguishing breath (guess who: Stockhausen) that appears in the last ten minutes of the fourth Region and brings this very ambitious piece to a conclusion.

As was the case with "Kontakte", "Hymnen" also exists in multiple versions: for electronic sounds only; with soloists (four performers on electronium, viola, gong, and piano play in sync with the electronic sounds); with orchestra, which can intervene at the end of the second Region and throughout the third.

Highly recommended is the record edition by Stockhausen-Verlag, which you won't find in record stores or on Amazon: it's a box set of 4 CDs that collects the version for electronic sounds only and the one with soloists. The CD booklet, in German/English, has 196 pages (!), 33 photographs, and several diagrams. It costs 71 euros, and it's money well spent.