Karlheinz Sight

We'll continue the end-of-September memory lane with this, a 50th anniversary special.

That this footage exists at all is enough of a treat; that NRK-TV in Norway rebroadcasts stuff like this in HD makes it a sumptuous feast indeed.

I haven't posted a video thing in a while, so let's do this.

If you don't know who this guy was, I can't help you and you're gonna need to go get a basic grasp on the music of the last 60 years or so.

When he began in the 1950s, Electronic music barely existed at all, and what there was operated at the absolute fringes.

By the time he passed in 2007, Electronic music had become not just its own, thriving genre with a million different subgenres flourishing, but ideas from it had been integrated across the entire musical spectrum forever.

If you had to trace these developments to one central figure, you'd likely place their impetus at the feet of Karlheinz Stockhausen, perhaps the premier composer in the field of our lifetimes.

What we have today was taped 50 years ago today and tomorrow in Norway, and might be the best visual evidence of him in full Go Mode, leading a small ensemble through two of his most famous compositions.

Karlheinz Stockhausen & Ensemble

Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter

Høvikodden, Norway

9.29+30.1969

Part I (9.29.1969)

01 Kurzwellen (Short Waves)

Part II (9.30.1969)

01 introductory remarks by Karlheinz Stockhausen

02 Es (It)

03 Discussion with Karlheinz Stockhausen and seminar participants

Total time: 57:41 (26:17 + 31:24)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - electronics, shortwave receiver, harmonica

Aloys Kontarsky - piano, shortwave receiver

Harald Bojé - electronium, shortwave receiver

Johannes Fritsch - viola

unidentified - percussion, shortwave receiver

HD FLV files from two consecutive NRK rebroadcasts

998 MB FLV/September 2019 archive link

Imma try to do something tomorrow to close out the month, but I gotta work on that some so we shall see.

Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this utterly astonishing hourlong foray into the universe of sound as interpolated by one of our age's most innovative and iconoclastic composers.--J.

8.22.1928 - 12.5.2007