5. Pluramon, Hymunion in Harmondy

style perfected by James Joyce in Ulysses: the stream of consciousness, a multitude of impressions that spontaneously impose themselves on someone’s consciousness and that are expressed in a stream of sometimes not very coherent thoughts.

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, not used in Sinfonia, contains an absurd example of this in the monologue of Lukcy (‘Think, Lucky, think’). It is different in the sense that the sentences pouring forth from Lucky are not the result of a stream of personal impressions but form the enumeration of a choice from everything that happens to be nameable in the world. The result is an absurd caricature of the ‘stream of consciousness’ and a comment on the absurdity of the Western world.

- Fourth layer: This is a second perpetuum mobile, but this time it is its musical pendant in the form of the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony. The music itself, with its continuous sixteenth note movement, is also like a perpetuum mobile in the Second Symphony. Sinfonia is not only a composition in the literal sense of the word. It also gives the term a historical dimension: composition as a fusion of tradition with the new, as the result of a process in which much historical and recent music together really constitute something new. There is therefore not a trace of nostalgia or conservatism in this work, as would be self-evident in much work of composers working in the traditional vocabulary. 5 PLURAMON, HYMUNION IN HARMONDY

5.1 INTRODUCTION Stockhausen, as the icon of Modernism ventured only a few times into the world of quotations. And, like Berio and Zimmermann, he never considered himself to be a Post-Modernist, but a strong believer in the new language of Young Music. But since Hymnen, like Sinfonia and the later works of Zimmermann is completely embedded in quotations, these works are hybrid by nature and must find their place in this chapter.

5.2 STRUCTURE The colossal Hymnen is Stockhausen’s greatest achievement in the field of autonomous electronic music. The initial idea was to unite all national anthems of all countries to create an Earth-Music, a unification of all people in one music-dominated supercontinent called Pluramon. At the end of Hymnen Stockhausen composes the national anthem for this supercontinent, which he derives electronically from a phrase from the Swiss national anthem. This hymn is interrupted by deafening, slow

glissandi, symbolising the flight of B-52 bombers dropping their deadly cargo on Vietnam. Does this make Hymnen a political work? Not at all. The national anthems and their adaptation and juxtaposition are free-associative, more intended as play and memory. In the second part, Stockhausen quotes the Horst Wessellied, the anthem of the Nazis from his childhood. This is followed by a radio-play-like passage in which he states that he is only concerned with a memory, even though the quote may lead to böses Blut, bad blood.

Hymnen consists in several versions: as a tape piece, as an ensemble + tape piece, and an ensemble + orchestra + tape piece. In all instances the tape remains the same, and it is so rich, constructed so cinematically, that instruments, and especially an orchestra, are too much hindrance between the audience and the magnificent tape sounds. For that reason, I prefer the tape version by far over the other, augmented versions.

Hymnen is a composition of quotations in which all quotations have been manipulated electronically and far transcend their original rendition. The work also transcends all musique concrète that was being produced in Paris, both in technical skill and in ambition. The composition shows influences from the radio play and a fascination with the shortwave receiver, the device that, for the first time in history, made it possible to listen to radio stations from all over the world. To Stockhausen the anthems were objets trouvées [found objects]. He compared them to apples found on the moon: quite trivial objects that suddenly acquire meaning in a different environment. (which, by the way is a very apt description of one of Post-Moderns widely used techniques).

Stockhausen collected 137 anthems, of which only 40 are used in the four parts, which he called ‘regions’. Initially, he planned to add a Region V: Communist-bloc countries, and region VI: The United Arab Republic to the work, which already lasts 113 minutes.202 Each region uses certain anthems as centres: - Region I (dedicated to Pierre Boulez) has two: the Internationale and the Marseillaise. Region I also has a four-language ‘fugal’ section featuring the voices of Stockhausen and his studio assistants David

Johnson and the Romanian composer Mesías Maiguashca. They pronounce variations on the colour ‘red’. Stockhausen did not choose a political orientation, but rather used an enumeration of colours from the Artist’s Water Colours catalogue from the English art sup-

202Wolfram Schwinger, Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt: Stockhausens elektronische

Hymnen, 1967, p. 143; Monika Lichtenfeld, Stockhausens Frischzellentherapie für Nationalhymnen, 1968, p. 70.