page_title: Mikrophonie (Stockhausen)
section_title: Mikrophonie II
hierarchical_section_title: Mikrophonie (Stockhausen) / Mikrophonie II
caption_attribution_description: English: Hammond Organ model L-112
context_page_description: Mikrophonie is the title given by Karlheinz Stockhausen to two of his compositions, written in 1964 and 1965, in which “normally inaudible vibrations. .. are made audible by an active process of sound detection; the microphone is used actively as a musical instrument, in contrast to its former passive function of reproducing sounds as faithfully as possible”.
  Together with Stockhausen's immediately preceding work Mixtur, for five orchestra groups, four sine-wave generators, four ring modulators, they form a tryptych of live-electronic works, where electronic transformations are accomplished during the performance. Similar to a group of three of the composer's works from the previous decade, Gruppen, Zeitmaße, and Gesang der Jünglinge, there is one work each for orchestral, chamber, and vocal forces.
context_section_description: Mikrophonie II (Work Number 17), for choir, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators, like Mikrophonie I composed in moment form, also consists of 33 "moments", though, unlike the earlier work, their order is fixed in the score. The durations of these moments are made according to the Fibonacci series (Frisius 2008, 171).
  The work combines the electronically produced sounds of the Hammond organ with vocal sounds from the choir through ring modulation to produce transformations that in many places achieve distortions evoking wizardry (Frisius 2008, 167). Stockhausen's original idea had been to combine a choir with the tamtam from Mikrophonie I but the sounds proved too contrary, and so he settled on the Hammond organ instead (Kurtz 1992, 139).
  The text used is Helmut Heißenbüttel’s "nonsense" poem, "Einfache grammatische Meditationen" (Simple Grammatical Meditations), from Textbuch 1 (Heißenbüttel 1960, 35–36). Rather than following the text as printed, Stockhausen redistributes its 44 lines over the 33 moments of his composition in such a way that the six large sections of the poem are all present in all parts of the work, reflecting the text's pictorial, temporally simultaneous character in a manner "congenial to the poetic principal of the text itself" (Peters 1992, 252 & 256).
  The choir consists only of high and low voices: two sections each of sopranos and basses, who sit in an arc with their backs to the audience, facing the Hammond organ player at the back of the stage. Each section is picked up by a microphone and the signal is fed into one side of a ring modulator; the Hammond organ's output is fed into the other side. The sum and difference frequencies of the modulators' outputs are played back over four groups of loudspeakers, but the degree of modulation is controlled by potentiometers in order to produce gradations of transformation. Occasionally there are transitions from natural to artificial sound, or the reverse, at which points “sound windows” open, through which recorded excerpts from three of Stockhausen's earlier vocal compositions are played over a fifth loudspeaker group (Peters 1992, 248–49).
  Mikrophonie II is interrupted eight times by coloured pauses (sections 2, 5, 8, 11, 17, 19, 20, 32): moments out of my earlier works Gesang der Jünglinge (Electronic Music 1955–56), Carré for 4 choirs and 4 orchestras (1959–60) and Momente for solo soprano, 4 choir groups and 13 instrumentalists (1962 to 1964) sound softly in the distance, and the choir singers of Mikrophonie II whisper synchronous and loudly to this. Vocal music of my past sounds through time-windows into the vocal music of my present. In the seventh time-window, music from Carré and Gesang der Jünglinge sounds simultaneously. (Liner notes to Stockhausen Complete Edition CD 9)
  Stockhausen remodels Heißenbüttel's text still further by the addition of interpretive directions for the singers, such as “solemn Levite chant,” “à la jazz, cool, almost like a plucked double-bass, gradually transformed into: like a conceited snob", "like a baby", “like drunkards, sometimes bawling, with hiccups.”
  The result is a fusion of the suggestive and the concrete, of words and music, of vocalists and Hammond organ—a meditation on and reconfiguration of Heißenbüttel's text which does not destroy it but rather recreates it, so that free association may cause the listener's response to “vary between phantasmagorical visions and mathematical procedures” (Peters 1992, 255).
  The world première of Mikrophonie II took place on 11 June 1965 in a Musik der Zeit concert at the Große Sendesaal of WDR in Cologne. The score is dedicated to Judith Frehm (Pisar).
caption: An L-series Hammond organ from the period 1961 to 1972
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