| 词条 | Alphabet für Liège |
| 释义 |
Alphabet für Liège, for soloists and duos, is a composition (or a musical installation) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and is Work Number 36 in the composer's catalog of works. A performance of it lasts four hours. The fundamental idea underlying Alphabet is the notion that sound vibrations can affect both living beings and inanimate matter {{harv|Maconie|2005|loc=341}}. There are thirteen scenes, or musical images, each illustrating the physical effects of sound, ranging from making acoustic vibrations visible to a demonstration of Asian mantra techniques. These ideas were developed in conversations with the British biophysicist and lecturer on mystical aspects of sound vibration Jill Purce, who also called Stockhausen's attention to the work of Hans Jenny ({{harvnb|Kurtz|1992|loc=192–93}}; {{harvnb|Jenny|1967}}). In a radio interview three months before the premiere, Stockhausen explained his purpose was to show "how sound waves always change the molecules, even the atoms of a being who listens to music, making them vibrate. And that is what we want to make visible, because most people only believe what they see" {{harv|Stockhausen and Lichtenfeld|1972}}. HistoryAlphabet was created as a commission from the City of Liège on the initiative of Philippe Boesmans, for the Nuits de Septembre festival, and was premiered during a "Journée Karlheinz Stockhausen" on 23 September 1972. Stockhausen envisaged the work for performance in a labyrinth-like building. The venue chosen for the premiere consisted of fourteen still-empty areas, all leading off of a central corridor, in the basement level of the half-completed radio and television building in the Liège Palais des Congrès, before the wall coverings, doors, and office partitions had been installed. The bare concrete and breeze-block surfaces were whitewashed especially for the performance, and the rooms were all open to each other through open doors and windows. In this world premiere, only eleven of the thirteen situations were included ({{harvnb|Kurtz|1992|loc=193}}; {{harvnb|Stockhausen|1978a|loc=193}}). Performers included members of the British instrumental group Gentle Fire (Hugh Davies, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Stuart Jones), five of the six members of the vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale Köln (Wolfgang Fromme, Dagmar von Biel, Hans-Alderich Billig, Karl O. Barkey, and Helga Hamm), Rosalind Davies, Dr. Johannes Kneutgen (an ethologist working at the Max Planck Institute who studied, amongst other things, bird song {{harv|Kneutgen|2010 [1964]|loc=124}}, mammals, and fish {{harv|Kneutgen|1964}}, and later worked in music therapy {{harv|Rösing|1980|loc=62}}), violist Joachim Krist, recorder players and singers Michael Vetter and Atsuko Iwami, pianist {{ill|Herbert Henck|de}}, and vocalist Jill Purce, with Peter Eötvös as "musical leader" ({{harvnb|Stockhausen|1971}}; {{harvnb|Stockhausen|1978a|loc=185–92}}). {{clear}}Form and contentStockhausen himself recognized in Alphabet a precedent for the theatrical conceptions he would explore later in Licht {{harv|Tannenbaum|1987|loc=82}}. The title originates from a programme of actions associated with the letters of the alphabet: Anrufen (call, appeal, implore), Begleiten (accompany), Chaos, Dudeln (tootle), Eintönig (monotone), etc. There are thirty "letters" in all: the familiar twenty-six of the English alphabet, plus SCHnell (rapid), SPringen (leap), STören (disturb), and Übergang zu (transition to) {{harv|Stockhausen|1978a|loc=195}}. Each is written on a little card, and the performers of each group draw two of these cards from the deck. These become the basis for excursions by the performers of each "situation" to visit one of the other situations and exchange tonal information—each group therefore does this twice in the course of a performance {{harv|Kurtz|1992|loc=193}}. Events are coordinated by acoustic signals given by a "musical leader": Japanese chimes (kane and rin) mark each minute; sustained tones mark the sequence of moments (the ends of which are "erased" by the sound of shaken bundles of Indian pellet bells); twice in every hour the coordinator runs through the space shaking strings of camel bells, which causes all activity to cease {{harv|Maconie|2005|loc=342}}. These cessations occur five times over the four-hour span {{harv|Stockhausen|1978a|loc=198}}. Alphabet consists of thirteen "situations" {{harv|Stockhausen|1978a|loc=193–95}}:
The verbal instructions for most of the scenes are either descriptions for physically inspired sound installations (e.g., situation 2: "Make sound vibrations visible") or appear to be intuitive music texts like those of Aus den sieben Tagen and Für kommende Zeiten, composed not long before Alphabet {{harv|Straebel|1995|loc=§3.2.2}}. Situation 10, in particular, strongly resembles Es from Aus den sieben Tagen: "Think NOTHING … / as soon as you start to think, stop / and try to reattain / the state of NON-THINKING …" {{harv|Maconie|2005|loc=342}}. Two performers each are required for situations 1, 5, 6, and 8. This brings the total number of performers, including the musical leader, to eighteen. Potential hazardsJohannes Kneutgen, who performed situation 11 at the Liège premiere, was a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, conducting research on the physiological effects of music or rhythm on the body and nervous system. He reported that there was a physical danger in the case of fish: For fish, the change of rhythm can be fatal. Normally fish breathe by opening and closing their gills. The lowest rate to which their gill movement can be reduced and still maintain life is 43 "breaths" per minute. If a clock ticks only 40 times per minute, the fish gill movement slows down too much, and the fish strives convulsively to breathe faster but cannot. It swims rapidly to escape the ticking noise, but if it cannot retreat to a quiet area, it expires. {{harv|Anon|1965}} Another writer has recalled an "infamous" French series of experiments with a "super-whistle" in the 1960s that demonstrated that very powerful low-frequency sounds (in the 5–8 Hz range) could interfere with the biorhythms of living creatures, to the extent of killing cattle, and warns that Alphabets situation 9 ("harmonize the seven centres of the body") could prove similarly hazardous if done "scientifically … with physical vibrations coordinated to biological and brain rhythms" {{harv|Maconie|2005|loc=342 & 344}}. IndianerliederThe Indianerlieder (American Indian Songs)—also known by the opening words of the first song, "In the sky I am walking", and by their German translation "Am Himmel wandre ich"—constitute the only fully worked-out component of the Alphabet. It is also the only part capable of performance independent of the larger work, and the only part to have been published. The score is dedicated to its first performers, Helga Hamm-Albrecht and Karl O. Barkey, and bears the work Number 36½ in the composer's catalog of works. The texts employed are {{harv|Stockhausen|1978b|loc=201}}:
It consists of twelve scenes, each of which includes one American Indian song, for a pair of singer-actors. The scenes follow one another without interruption (Stockhausen 1978b, 205). The first song is intoned on a single note, C, the next song adds a second note to the first, the F{{music|sharp}} above, the third adds the G a semitone higher still, the fourth descends to E, and so on, until reaching a twelve-tone row in the final song, but with the notes in fixed registers: the basic formula of the work ({{harvnb|Frisius|2008|loc=255}}; {{harvnb|Kurtz|1992|loc=193}}). The songs were originally conceived for two women's voices, but then the composer decided they could be performed (as they were at the premiere) by a man and a woman. They have also been performed by two male singers {{harv|Stockhausen, Conen, and Hennlich|1989|loc=307}}. In a long version, such as is used in the four-hour-long Alphabet für Liège, the twelve scenes are sung straight through four times (with a pause of about fifteen minutes between each performance), with variations each time in dynamics and tempos. For an extremely long version (possibly alternating two different pairs of singers or exchanging singer combinations), the twelve scenes can be sung twelve times each, in the sequence: 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, … 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12, and then 2–12, 3–12, etc., down to 10+11+12, 11+12, and ending with 12. In such a performance, each song should be varied upon each repetition in dynamics and tempo {{harv|Stockhausen|1978b|loc=208}}. Performance history and receptionThe full Alphabet has been performed only rarely. After the 1972 world premiere in Belgium, the first French performance took place in the context of a cycle of eleven Stockhausen works at the La Rochelle Festival during the two weeks before Easter 1973. In contrast to the basement Liège premiere, this performance was presented in a long attic gallery, with the "situations" presented in individual recesses {{harv|Griffiths|1973}}. A third performance, also in France, took place in June 1974, at the second festival of the International Centre of Sainte-Baume in Provence, with the theme "Music and Magic". This performance was in a particularly beautiful natural setting: At the foot of the great cliff of Sainte-Baume, high above a Provence cut up by highways, magic took precedence over futuristic technology. A calm, gentle, tender magic, in agreement with the Mediterranean night, all fragrant with the scent of the garrigue. A reassuring magic speaking primarily through music. Very soon, indeed, from one to another of the twelve "cells" where the musician-celebrants were operating, sounds converged, answered one another, intersected, developed, weaving an unpredictable and subtle symphony of space. From the barn which opens onto the fields, fields that abut on the mountain, the music flowed into the evening air in a light aura all splashed with echoes. It was, revealed to the ear, like the very breathing of nature. And there were many of us there, lying prostrate for four hours on end, inside this music that had neither beginning nor end, nor any function other than to generate itself in the cyclical process of eternity. {{harv|Fleuret|1974}} The component Indianerlieder, on the other hand, had many successful performances in the years following the Liège premiere by the artists who had premiered the work, Helga Hamm-Albrecht and Karl O. Barkey. For example, they performed them in 1973 at the Metz Festival, in 1974 at both the Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikfest in Stuttgart and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and in 1978 in Luxembourg. They also recorded the work several times for various German radio stations {{harv|Frisius|2008|loc=253}}. The Indianerlieder have also been recorded twice commercially, and have been viewed as the "key piece" within Alphabet {{harv|Kurtz|1992|loc=193–94}}. However, one critic who had previously heard the Indianerlieder in the context of Alphabet found, after hearing them separately at the Metz festival in November 1973, that the "somewhat artificial religiosity and falsely naïve Indian Songs suffer from being given in a theatre, without the 'mystical' atmosphere and ambulatory meditation of Alphabet" {{harv|Lonchampt|1973}}. Filmography
Discography (Indianerlieder)
References
6 : 20th-century classical music|Chamber music by Karlheinz Stockhausen|Installation art works|1972 compositions|Serial compositions|Music dedicated to ensembles or performers |
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