Karlheinz Stockhausen – Kontra-Punkte; Refrain; Zeitmasze; Schlagtrio [Ensemble Recherche]

2009 • Wergo

I first listened to this album with low expectations. Serialism has never been a genre I have enjoyed very much and I've always come away disappointed from albums like this. However, Stockhausen is a very well-known and highly-lauded composer in the genre so I was willing to give it another shot. I firmly believe that there is good music to be found in any genre; it's just that sometimes it may take a bit of digging to get to. But serialism and indeterminacy often, to me, just sound too random to be enjoyable—like trying to read a page of "lorem ipsum" and figuring out what it means. Perhaps it's a lack of understanding, as I'm still pretty new to the style, but despite my efforts it's still a very difficult type of music to get into.

One thing I do enjoy about this collection is the interesting different ensembles used to perform the pieces. Most serialism and indeterminacy I've heard (that I can think of now) was performed with very small ensembles, often just one or two instruments (like Cage's prepared piano pieces), probably to prevent it sounding too dissonant and random. But here we get a mix: in "Kontra-Punkt", ten players of various instruments; in "Refrain", piano, vibraphone, other unusual percussion, and odd vocalizing; in "Zeitmaße" woodwinds; in "Schlagtrio" piano and timpani. To me the pieces sound a bit more chaotic this way as opposed to the simple piano pieces I'm used to, although fortunately the sound never quite reaches the "orchestra warming up"-level because the compositions are all quite sparse, usually with only two or three instruments playing at once.

The composition still baffles me, though. I'm not unused to atonal or dissonant music but with these pieces I cannot understand the motivation behind their composition and performance. As far as I can tell, the musicians do a great job with the performance, but their skills aren't enough to make an enjoyable record. In the first two and last tracks, mostly, there seems to be zero structure and flow to the composition and they wind up sounding very random, like children timidly banging on the instruments to see what happens. "Zeitmaße", thankfully, has a bit more structure to it and the instruments actually play together at the beginning, although it frequently falls apart into dissonance throughout. This particular composition feels a bit more traditional; this is probably due to the instrumentation, but I find it easier to enjoy than the other three, if only a little bit.

I probably shouldn't be reviewing this album at all since, like I said, I don't know much about this style of music and after writing this review I am nowhere closer to understanding it. Enjoying it? Probably not. It's very complicated music, music which demands attention, otherwise it comes off as simply noise (and I know where to go to get good noise). Or maybe it's just not for me at all. There's clearly something Stockhausen and his fans are getting that I'm not; maybe one day I'll find out what it is.

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