Karlheinz Stockhausen : Hymnen
(1967)

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The following detailed description of the piece was written by Jonathan Harvey in 1975.
Harvey is one of the most astute students of Stockhausen's music.

Contents

• Introduction
• First Region
• Second Region
• Third Region
• Fourth Region

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  Hymnen (1966-7) is electronic music to which Stockhausen has added schematic, rather than detailed, parts for six of the players with whom he has since this time worked and toured the world. He has also more recently added material, again rather free, for orchestra to two of the sections. The theme of Hymnen is the electronic transformation of recorded national anthems, and each of the four sections (called 'regions') so far is dominated by one of them. The banality of the basic material is used as a deliberate springboard for complex transformation--the more memorable the theme, the more it can be twisted in the 'variations'. There are passages of speaking, such as when 'red' is spoken in four different languages from the four loudspeaker groups round the hall. The 'openness' of the work is characteristic: 'Hymnen for radio, television, opera, ballet, record, concert hall, church, outdoors.... The work is so composed that various scripts or libretti for films, operas and ballets may be prepared for it. The ordering of the characteristic parts and the total duration are variable. Depending on the dramatic requirements, regions may be lengthened, added or left out.' There is a new openness also in Stockhausen's acceptance of the objet trouve; he says that his previous preoccupation with inner worlds of fantasy is here joined through mediation in a higher unity with the concrete external world of everyday sounds and noises (whose inclusion may perhaps owe a debt to Varese's Poeme Electronique of 1958), ending with 'pluralism' and 'monism' grandly united in the 'Utopian realm of Hysunion in Harmondie Inter Pluramon'.

  Hymnen is basically a unification of two worlds, namely pure sound structure and 'found' sound objects with all their associations. They are electronic sounds and concrete sounds respectively. Stockhausen makes the further distinction that they are also the inner imaginative world, and the external perceived world. Their unification is one of the fundamental processes and tasks of life, the forging of links between our deepest image-making selves and the external world, without which that world remains dull and merely utilitarian. Throughout Hymnen everyday, 'external' sounds, whose 'meaning', because it is so familiar, strikes one more powerfully than their attributes qua form, are modulated by electronic 'imaginative' ideas and thereby lit up as 'form' and at the same time their 'meaning' attributes are transformed. The constant mediation between the two worlds dissolves their difference. Let us see how the forty-odd anthems and sundry other recorded and short wave radio sounds are arranged in this 113-minute work, in many ways the most personal and clear of all his recent output. I should warn the reader that in the rough description that follows, many associative words are used to describe sounds that have been hitherto unnamed, and that it is vital for him not to be seduced into thinking that that is their meaning; he must forge his own links, make his own images - those that will do most for him - and they will almost certainly be different from mine!

  Stockhausen describes the first region, which he dedicated to Boulez, as having two 'centres', the 'Internationale' and the 'Marseillaise'. These anthems are used more than any others. The essential idea of the region, however, is a development of the very first sounds, the sounds of a short wave radio receiver (or several of them) being rapidly switched through the stations. One has the sensation of being swept off one's feet and blown round the world, catching fragments of national anthems, morse code, static and speech (a newsreader saying 'United Nations') as you go. There is a feeling of excitement and human commotion, an extrovert atmosphere which pervades the entire region until near its end, where hints of the inwardness to come are first discovered. Nearly all the sounds of the region can be traced back to this amorphous hotch-potch, the boiling primeval ooze from which the new births will come, as Wilfrid Mellers would say, an idea perhaps extended from the tenth piano piece. The first real opposition to this idea is a succession of two 'dominant' chords [G,B, Ab, F] and [Bb, G, Db], each tone separately synthesized from a wave form containing many high partials which is restlessly swept by filters and perforated with amplitude modulations (which control loudness). A background of whistles and shrieks and other sounds of commotion always accompanies this event. It is heralded by a brief, thick upward glissando--a sort of signal for most of the events in this region which itself (typically) is developed: its final and most elaborate version, occurring about two-thirds of the way through, transforms a low fog-horn sort of sound into an upward-rushing clamour of distorted human voices which remains suspended at the top of the texture in the 'hissing' frequency range until it plunges down again into recognizably human sounds at the beginning of the second region.

  The 'dominant' chords continue to appear and transform at regular intervals (seven times in all) with anthems, glissandi and station- switching fragmentation in between. They are finally phased out with one of the transformation4 of which Stockhausen is very fond, where the sound is modulated with a slow frequency giving a jerky, shaken effect, the sonic equivalent of stroboscopic lighting.

  The restless gibbeting of more or less distinctly heard sounds ceases now for the two-minute interlude on the names of 'red' in four different languages, chanted clearly and simply by the composer, some friends and the croupier on a few liturgical tones, ending with 'international red'. Colour, paint . . . likewise an international 'vibration' language?

  The next sections are complex. The dominating elements are distant festive singing with brass band, high pitched 'flood-sounds' (like a chorus of crickets), cut into by the loud glissandi already mentioned and burbling, jerky distortions of anthem material. As the Marseillaise begins to make its presence felt so the overall colour changes and more sounds are introduced, principally motoric buzzing sounds, reverberated flue-pipe sounds not dissimilar to the tingling sounds of Studie 2, and glissandoing non-harmonically related clusters.

  The final section is an impressive fight between loud brass chords, which become ever softer edged - Stockhausen slows them down and causes the reverberation on them to sound wavery, loose, as if some monster is plunging ever deeper into the black depths between this and ever more hesitant, nervous textures in which, again, one seems to be whirling through space and time catching soft echoes of vast choirs, flood-sounds, and any sounds that have appeared previously in the region. It is a brilliant passage of sound-imagination. A last attempt at the Marseillaise is shattered by a big synthesized column of sound, leaving finally only the cricket-like flood-sounds to carry over into the second region.

  There is one element more. Four times, every four minutes, a sinister, filtered casino croupier's voice says a few words, such as 'Faites votre jeu, Messieurs et 'dames, s'il vous plait.' He is nearly always surrounded on either side by complete silence. He seems to be separate, to belong to some other world running concurrently, but hidden. He appears thrice in the last movement with the same words. Does this ambiguous Joycean figure, perhaps a symbol of another sort of internationalism, have the function here that the Japanese chimes had in Telemusik: keeper of the musical time?

  The second region begins, like the third and fourth, with continuations of the preceding ideas. One can see from this that the work was not conceived in four discrete movements, and that the flexibility ('regions may be lengthened', etc.) is really present and not a factor that is likely to destroy shape. As in previous works, moods change, elements come and go, and large-scale symmetry is not the most vital consideration. The crickets continue to chirp and to transform back and forth into maracas, hung bamboo clusters and the unknown, but all within a narrow range of timbre. Nine very sharply attacked chord columns cut in to introduce this region's first anthems, among them, 'God save the Queen', in very perforated, fragmented form. As the cricket-sounds at last begin the descent to become the shouting crowds of people mentioned previously, and as the high frequencies are all drained off, so an important new element is introduced, a synthesized tone or tones in the middle to high frequency range. For recognition purposes, it sounds at times like a painful jet whine, at other times like an electronic organ. It is often varied with different speeds of amplitude modulation. In each of its three extended appearances in this region it transforms, broadly speaking, from the harsh to the soft, and in the third appearance it makes an important formal reference across the regions in that it transforms itself into the element I described as 'dominant chords' in the first region, which consisted also of synthesized pitch, and this in turn gets mixed up with the Russian national anthem, the only one Stockhausen synthesized rather than recorded, which, with many variations of wave-form (such as fierce saw-tooth waves) and distortion techniques (such as violent perforating) but also with many simple and quiet triads, dominates the region to the end.

  But let us return from the history of one event to the history of the region where we left it. Shortly after the crickets were revealed as humans speeded up to cricket-tempo, the humans are speeded up to a point in between human and cricket-tempo which sounds something like a chorus of birds, and a little later a flock of geese and ducks. (Real birds are added to reinforce the transformation.) Nothing could better illustrate Stockhausen's theories about the universe's different vibrational levels being different tempi of the same 'thing'. Although Stockhausen may not be wanting to express the extraordinary empathy with birds that Messiaen exhibits in those late pieces where something of the intensity, the higher body temperature, the quicker movements, the higher frequency range of utterance and hearing, the shorter life-span is understood and transferred into the breathtakingly fast, complex and dense bird choruses, yet there is no doubt that Stockhausen's intellectual and intuitive grasp of the idea, vastly extended into Germanic metaphysics, is profound.

  The element descends again, becomes human (talking this time) and is eliminated by means of a further echoing descent and retardation into the murky depths.

  The main anthem section - mostly the Federal Republic of Germany's and Austria's - is prefaced by a long soft bass note which slowly sinks by semitone steps and is swept by filter changes giving off different vowel sounds (see my remarks on Stimmung) and occasionally joined by memories of past sounds. At first the Marseillaise is recalled as in a deep sleep; low, slow, soft-edged. It is significant and characteristic that the first two chords of the Marseillaise were first heard in the murky elimination of the crowd sounds four-and-a-half minutes previously. There is a short and grandiose section for the Austrian anthem (with a slow outward glissandoing prolongation of the last chord of the second line), followed by much complexity (including a ship-launching scene) and rapid changes of texture. The control of dramatic pace in these long movements is the most obvious manifestation of large-scale formal thinking, and this is the pace-climax of the second region.

  There was earlier, in the middle of Deutschland, reference to the Nazi HorstWessellied, then, just as we hear a hint in the 'cricket' sound of an African anthem, there is an abrupt switch to an interlude in an electronic studio. Amidst noises of rewinding and switch-clicks, Stockhausen and another are heard recalling that Otto Tomek said that to include the Nazi song created bad feeling, to which Stockhausen replied that he did not mean to do that, it was only a memory. 'Otto Tomek has said, had said, said . . .' each of these versions is used and this prompts them to the notion that the simultaneous presence of different tenses could be taken further, is another aspect of the multi-time layering in musical structure that Hymnen is all about.

  After this interlude, the previous texture is taken up exactly, and is continually mixed with the colourful marimbas and drums of African anthems, eventually merging into the concluding synthesized 'organ' sounds already described. It is a structured conclusion, with regular alternation between rapid and disconcerting anthem references and the 'organ' progressions, both elements changing a little at each appearance. This region is dedicated to Henri Pousseur.

  The third, dedicated to John Cage, is the shortest, and structurally the easiest to grasp. The first 7l minutes are devoted to a continuation of the synthesized meditation on the Russian anthem. It becomes gradually more distorted--the main chords are rapidly filterswept, panned from channel to channel, ring modulated and amplitude modulated (these are the four principal operations in all the music of this element). When the distortion is at its height the same procedure as in region two is adopted, namely that one chord is sustained and gradually allowed to slide down in both pitch and volume, accompanied by its distortions (filtered ring-modulator fuzz), until, after 3 whole minutes, its extinction can no longer be doubted. At the same time, a morse-code idea has been slowly growing and finally loudens to introduce 'The Star Spangled Banner', over which it continues to hover for a bit as one of those favourite 'permeable' sound elements which does no harm to the clarity of any other idea Stockhausen likes to put under it.

  The Russian anthem had the longest, most exclusive treatment of all the anthems. By contrast and appropriately, the American one is the most wildly inclusive. It is constantly losing its identity in some other anthem, often neatly spliced on by means of a pivot chord common to both. The first region may be thought of as pluralistic, with its many international references, the second, with its prolonged meditation on Germany, has monistic tendencies. The third juxtaposes the two opposites in sharp contrast, and as we shall see, the fourth is an act of homage to 'Pluramon', the marriage of the opposites.

  After four minutes of considerable vivacity centered on the U.S.A. there follow four minutes (a frequent 'rhythm' in Hymnen) of noise, at first reminiscent of an ocean-going liner's engine, later reducing to a deep coloured-noise rumble. Some of the filtering here is violent and alarming, and the distorted radio sounds are distinctly eerie. A desolate seascape is suggested by soughing coloured noise and brief tern-like calls. Out of the coloured noise we hear Stockhausen himself (presumably) transforming 'from one event to another' with a series of unvoiced consonants starting with 'thy which is indistinguishable from the soughing wind, and finishing with something very close to a whistle. There is a short spoken dialogue between Stockhausen and 'David' in two languages: 'We have to get from America to Spain across the ocean in a few seconds', before we get to the goal of the transformation, namely the whistles which traditionally accompany a Spanish singer and guitarist.

  The final, 'Spanish' section is the most hyperextrovert of all. Just as the outgoing American section followed the inward, questioning Russian one, so the even more extravagant Spanish one follows the even more withdrawn 'seascape'. The emotional contrast is widened. The chief interest in this section lies in the multi- layered treatment of the Spanish anthem, which gets faster and faster (without always rising equivalently in pitch), but some levels get faster than others and form mere permeable texture at the top.

  (An example of permeable texture used low down in the frequency range occurs undermost of this section: a coloured- noise wind-like rumble, a continuation of and link with the previous section. It is sufficiently soft and spongy in character to absorb harder objects without loss of identity to either.)

  Levels of distinctness and indistinctness interweave with levels of sharply contrasting volume in a kaleidoscope of Spanishry. But things are never as simple as they seem on first hearing. What, for instance, are those two prolonged bell dyads doing near the end? They are followed by a third, much higher, which also has a changing continuation, right until the end of the region. They are prolongations of pitches attacked at great speed--the 'rise time' for notes becomes extremely short when the Spanish anthem is played over at such break-neck speed, it becomes similar to the very sharp rise-time characteristic of bells--so Stockhausen has made an association which arose naturally out of the original idea.

  The fourth region has fewer types of sound than any other region, thus completing the direction of the work as a whole in its movement from diversity to unity. The main ones may be described briefly as:

  1. the Swiss anthem, which started to appear at the end of the third region, is made clear, then increasingly distorted for about nine minutes. Its final choral triad is prolonged into a breathing-rhythm ostinato of soft edged immensity, impressively treated within narrow limitations by variations of pitch and rhythm, by the addition of what sounds like a host of angelic sopranos, and so on. This prolongation lasts 11.25 minutes.

     It finally becomes, after a brief break, the breathing of a solitary sleeping man, apparently lying quite still ~ an almost disconcerting phenomenon after all the elaborate spatial movement that the other sound elements have been subjected to. His physical location is disturbingly real. For the final 11 minutes of the work he breathes through the dreaming 'R.E.M.' phase into apparently deeper and deeper sleep, and then shows signs of coming to the surface again with his last breath. All this from the Swiss national anthem!

  2. deep, cavernous rumbling, a continuation of this idea from the end of the third region. It becomes deeper and gives way after nearly 4 minutes to:
  3. a vibrating sound which varies between 'hard' (tapping) and 'soft' (oscillating). This gives way after about 4 minutes to:
  4. a red-hot searing siren-sound, with a fierce cutting edge of high partials, made up of parallel lines falling in steady glissandi, a new one fading in imperceptibly at the top as an old one fades out at the bottom, giving that perpetuum mobile sensation of eternal descent (it was first heard briefly at the end of the second region). Punctuations are added by girl's laughter, distant birds and five shouted names which echo as in a labyrinth of subterranean caves. The fifth of these shouts finally, after 8.5 minutes, stops the process.
  5. a soft duet of near sine-tones derived from the echo of last shout, moving in and out of exact interval ratios; it calms the air for 3 minutes over the last chords of the choral ostinato (sound type number 1).
  6. the casino croupier, who says: 'Messieurs et 'dames, rien ne va plus' at the climax of the red-hot parallel glissandi (4), and later, after (5): 'Faites votre jeu, Messieurs et 'dames, s'il vous plait' twice, the second time surrounded by startling silence, bringing the choral ostinato to its end and marking the beginning of the breathing.
  7. seven complex columns of sound which cut across the breathing. They are made up from these elements: an initial violent attack followed by a sustained low pedal note of much energy with a high one at a thrice varied interval above it, memories of the synthesized 'dominant' chord element, of several anthems including the anthems of Ghana, Russia + 'Internationale', 'Internationale', Gt. Britain, India (in that order) and of talking events ('a Chinese store'). The pedals, which frame the recapitulated elements - they are sustained before, during and after them - are finally sounded alone and form the last massive sounds we hear; only the sleeper is left who draws a few more breaths.
  8. the word 'Pluramon' spoken slowly as if in a sleep by the breather, and soon afterwards repeated faster with gentle awakeness by the same voice Stockhausen's own - between an exhalation and an inhalation this time, therefore one presumes by some 'other' than the material body of the breather. This symbol of Stockhausen's obsession for bringing together diversity, the pluralism of black and white comprehended in the monism of grey, he calls the ruling principle of the Utopian realm of 'Hymunion in der Harmondie', to which centre the latter part of this region is dedicated.

  Hymunion is a Utopia Stockhausen has often talked about recently: 'What I'm trying to do, as far as I'm aware of it, is to produce models that herald the stage after destruction. I'm trying to go beyond collage, heterogeneity and pluralism, and to find unity; to produce music that brings us to the essential ONE. And that is going to be badly needed during the time of shocks and disasters that is going to come.' In Stockhausen's mind the Utopian fantasy is clearly associated with the sadistic fantasy of 'the fantastic catastrophe that will come ... killing hundreds of millions of the human race'; it is the 'rebirth' that 'can only happen when there is death. A lot of death!' Elsewhere he has spoken of destruction by fire. This is one of many points at which my personal interpretation of Hymnen touches 'The Ring'. The destruction of the old world by fire in Gotterdammerung is the sort of image I see in the extremely fierce and almost painfully prolonged climax of element 4, particularly when the sound is momentarily stopped for the croupier to say in his peculiarly enigmatic voice: 'Messieurs et 'dames, rien ne va plus,' after which it burns in again with the utmost violence. There is also the similarity of technique in handling very long time-spans, the broadly conceived dramatic planes, the use of very easily recognizable material which, in a very large free-flowing form is a workable way of achieving coherence, the contrast between extroversion and introversion, the transition from one to the other achieved by chromatically 'sinking' basses (more especially in Tristan) or slow glissandi-the Hindu meditative process of sinking into the self that both composers knew about so well - their shared dislike of Hanslick's 'pleasure in beautiful forms' and music as intellectually frozen architecture, and so on.

  Description from, Jonathan Harvey, The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Berkley: University of California Press, 1975), pp102-109.

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