Get yourself a gong, and set it up in the garden. Go back inside, and gather as many objects as you can find: glass, cardboard, metal, wood, rubber, plastic. While you're at it, add a couple of microphones. Now call five or six friends. When they arrive in your garden, instruct two of them to strike the gong with the gathered objects; hand the other two the microphones to capture the produced sound; and the last two friends will sit at a station, each handling a filter and two potentiometers. The resulting sound will be broadcasted by 4 speakers placed in the corners of your garden. OK, start playing, and continue for 26 minutes.
All clear? If so, if you have managed to imagine and create a music of this kind, then you are called Karlheinz Stockhausen. If instead your imagination, no matter how fertile, doesn’t stretch that far, then you're called something else and you're reading this review.
What is certain is that "Mikrophonie I" is a brilliant piece, even if born from a somewhat simple idea: composed by Stockhausen in 1964, when he was thirty-six years old, it makes a single sound source, the gong, an incredible generator of timbres, so that essentially the piece is an investigation into the timbral resources of noise. The use of numerous objects striking the gong and the electroacoustic modification of the sound through filters and potentiometers that act on the sound captured by the microphones make this piece a very original experimentation in search of the unheard.
The same principles will be at the basis of "Mikrophonie II" from 1965, composed for a small choir of 12 voices, Hammond organ, ring modulators, and microphones. But it is with "Mikrophonie I," four years ahead of '68, that we have a clear example of (musical) imagination in power.
Tracklist
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