Perspectives of New Music

THREATS AND PROMISES: LUCIFER, HELL, AND STOCKHAUSEN’S SUNDAY FROM LIGHT ROBIN HARTWELL HE COMPOSITION of the Licht cycle, seven operas, one for each day of the week, took Stockhausen some twenty-six years. For those watching the evolution of the work each new segment was greatly anticipated and the unveiling at the first performance often came with many surprises; extreme examples include the notorious Helicopter String Quartet from Mittwoch or the requirement to have simultaneous performances in adjacent halls in Hoch-Zeiten from Sonntag. Stockhausen’s announcement that with the completion of the postlude to Sonntag the work was finished and that he was moving onto a new cycle of works based on the hours of the day perhaps was received with the most surprise of all, as there was at least one large piece promised, now never to be composed. The question which arises is way the work can be taken as T 394 Perspectives of New Music complete, given that the plans so clearly indicated an additional scene, the Luciferium, and how the final scene, Hoch-Zeiten, ends Sonntag. One of the changes to the plans resulting from this announcement affected the number of scenes in Sonntag. It was to have been in six scenes, ending with movements called Hoch-Zeiten (East-West) and Michevael (Licht-Paar). In the finished form these were replaced by two performances of Hoch-Zeiten, to last the same duration as the projected two scenes. An additional surprise was the decision not to complete a separate layer of the piece based on the Lucifer formula, the so-called Luciferium. The reaction, which mixed variously bemusement, disappointment, incomprehension and a degree of disbelief, was for two main reasons. The plans for this had been made public in a number of places. For example, Stockhausen had talked of the piece in the public summer courses, and notes for the work had appeared in sketches (for example) in the booklet for Composition Course on Lichter—Wasser in 2001, which re-appeared in the booklet for the course on Hoch-Zeiten in 2003.1 The promise, it seems, was implicit from the start of the composition of Licht. To summarize, the work Licht is based on a three-voiced polyphonic structure, the superformula (Example 1 is a copy of the superformula with Stockhausen’s annotations for its use within the work Sonntag). Each of the three lines is named, from the top down Michael, Eve, and Lucifer. These not only stand for figures in the human world but also as three points of division of all aspects of the world. The lines appear in a concrete form here playable by trumpet, basset-horn, and trombone, and are used as the musical material for all aspects of the Licht cycle. The superformula is itself an elaboration of the Kernformel, or nuclear formula (Kohl 1990, 265) which in turn is a rhythmicized version of the background pitch scheme (Example 2). The formulas are divided into seven segments, following the days of the week, and each of these segments, vastly slowed down, becomes the basis of the “music-drama” of a particular day. At this level of expansion the superformula now forms the skeleton of the whole work and each of the days is then an ornamented presentation of a segment of the superformula . One option for ornamentation is to overlay the segment with a version of the superformula with the duration of the course of the day (rather than over the week, as in the slowest level). Sonntag is such an instance, with an additional superformula transposed down a minor third, as is seen in the sketch for the day (Example 3). It is possible then to superimpose the superformula again at the level of the segment or movement, at a faster level again, in a manner reminiscent of a fractal, a technique Stockhausen termed “Ausmultiplikation” (Stockhausen 1989, 323–24). Threats and Promises 395 EXAMPLE 1: SUPERFORMULA FOR SONNTAG 396 Perspectives of New Music EXAMPLE 1 ( CONT .) Threats and Promises 397 This way of connecting the local form and the global form is something of a feature of Stockhausen’s work. Most famously it is the technique used...