Karlheinz Stockhausen
Kontakte

THE REVIEW

Just over thirty, Karlheinz Stockhausen spends much of the 1959-1960 biennium in the Electronic Music Studio of the Cologne Radio, working on "Kontakte". The strength of this composition lies in the rich variety of sounds created by Stockhausen with relatively limited means: an impulse generator, a couple of filters, an echo plate, and little else.

At that time, making electronic music meant producing a piece lasting three or four minutes; rarely did it surpass ten minutes. "Kontakte" lasts 34 minutes and is a soundscape where nothing is ever the same, nothing repeats, and where the sonic events maintain an undertone of dark menace, of sonic aggressiveness that sometimes can only overwhelm the listener.

Thanks to the dizzying manipulations of which he is capable, Stockhausen brings to life what is cold, and makes organic what is synthetic. Not by chance would this work inspire much subsequent music, including those rock musicians who in the late '60s adopted from Stockhausen the technique of quadraphonic sound diffusion. "Kontakte" had already arrived there, not by chance the title refers to the contacts between various forms of spatial movement of sound (rotations, loops, alternations, with different speeds and directions).

It also refers to the contacts, which produce friction between self-sufficient, strongly characterized musical moments (the work is indeed divided into 16 short structures). Finally, the work exists in two versions (without one taking away or adding anything to the other): for electronic sounds alone, or with the addition of two performers, one on piano and one on percussion, playing live in sync with the music broadcast by the speakers: and in this latter case, the contacts refer to the encounter-clash between two contrasting sound families: the electronic and the instrumental.

A decisive work, of particular and inimitable intensity, "Kontakte" has made us more aware and freer listeners.