(22 pages in English with numerous musical examples and 2 colour photographs)
9 Euros / 11$

Preface
Back in the late 1960s, a couple of small books in the Darmstädter Beiträge series published by Schott-Verlag documented the genesis, so to speak, of two ’composer-collective’ projects that had formed the basis of Stockhausen’s composition seminar at the Darmstadt Summer Courses: Rolf Gehlhaar wrote about Ensemble (1967) and Fred Ritzel about Musik für ein Haus (1968). Over thirty years later, these books remain unique within the Stockhausen literature: though very many of Stockhausen’s own writings address issues of performance practice, they don’t chronicle processes of preparation, discussion and gradual implementation in the way that Gehlhaar and Ritzel did.

The following report occupies a sort of middle ground, in the sense that it documents a week of rehearsals for a recent work – SONNTAGS-ABSCHIED / SUNDAY FAREWELL (2003) – that was clearly not a ’collective composition project’ in the sense of those described by Gehlhaar and Ritzel: it may be a while before we see such Utopian initiatives again. Nevertheless, it did call on the performers to make a large number of personal creative decisions (above all in terms of synthesizer timbre programming) prior to the rehearsal period, and to do so in relation to a performance practice that, in many ways, is still in its infancy. The musical outcome of the preparation period and rehearsal period was in no way ’definitive’: rather, it marked a significant first step within a highly problematic domain (actually, one could say much the same of Ensemble and Musik für ein Haus). But it is for that very reason – in addition to the obvious one of seeking to record Stockhausen’s rehearsal practice at the start of the 21st century – that such a report seems valuable. Applied to art of any kind, the old saying that ”it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive” may be highly questionable; nevertheless, a journey such as the one described below may have an innate instructive value of its own.

Richard Toop,
Sydney, February 2005