Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a major avant garde composer in post WWII Germany. He is considered to be one of the heralds of electronic music. His early life is wrought with tragedy. His mother, a singer in her early life, was committed to an asylum in 1933 where she later died during the height of the Nazi eugenics movement. Karlheinz later worked in a military hospital during the war when his father died in Hungary as a German soldier. He later studied at the Cologne University of Music and the University of Bonn. While studying in the musical conservatory at the University of Cologne, Stockhausen developed his radical reinterpretation of musical sounds that was later typical of a Stockhausen piece

Stockhausen’s piece, Kontakte, is characterized by shattering clangs, bangs, bongs, whistles, and static that all pierce the sonorous space produced within the work. The amplified reverb produces an aura of spaciousness colored by distorted bouncing percussive elements that seem to just splat onto the auditory background like a Pollock piece on canvas. The sounds, while definitely products of the technological revolution of 20^th century, nevertheless emit a sense of naturalness. At moments, the wobbling distortions coming from Stockhausen’s electronic manipulations appear as a scene in the woods. One can hear a frog, a bird’s whistle, and the patter of a woodpecker. These sounds all appear randomly, which parallels the unpredictability of nature and yet, at the same time, organizes itself into an organic and aesthetic whole.