Gruppen

Gruppen ("Groups") for three orchestras (1955-57) is amongst the best-known compositions of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Gruppen is "a landmark in 20th-century music . . . probably the first work of the post-war generation of composers in which technique and imagination combine on the highest level to produce an undisputable masterpiece" (Smalley 1967, 794). A large group of 109 players is divided into three orchestral units, each with its own conductor, which are deployed in a horseshoe shape to the left, front, and right of the audience. The spatial separation was principally motivated by the compositional requirement of keeping simultaneously played yet musically separate passages distinct from one another, but led to some orgiastic passages in which a single musical process passes from one orchestra to another.

The title refers to the work's construction in 174 units, mainly composed in what Stockhausen terms "groups"—cohesive groupings of notes unified through one or more common characteristics (dynamics, instrumental color, register, etc.): "a particular number of notes which are joined, by means of related proportions, into a superordinate experiential quality (namely, the group). The various groups in a composition have various proportional features—various structures—but they are interrelated in that the properties of one group may only be understood by comparing them in degree of relationship with the other groups" (Stockhausen 1963a, 63). This category is contrasted with the "punctual" style of early Darmstadt serialism, which nevertheless also occurs in Gruppen, along with a third category of "collective" or "statistical" swarms or crowds, too dense for the listener to be able to accurately distinguish individual notes or their order of succession (Stockhausen 1963c, 250–51). Consequently, the importance of individual notes is relatively low, so that sonority, density, speed, dynamics, and direction of movement become the main features for the listener (Smalley 1967, 795).

Nonetheless, a traditional twelve-tone row is used as its basis:

Gruppen tone row (Whittall 2008, 185)

This is a symmetrical all-interval row, in which the first half consists of the intervals of a descending major third, rising perfect fourth, descending minor third, descending minor second, and ascending major second. The second half consists of the retrograde inversion of the first half, transposed by a tritone (Misch 1998, 161). However, Stockhausen does not exploit the specific twelve-tone compositional applications of such a row, which suggests that either Stockhausen was not interested in or did not know about them (Harvey 1975, 57).

Many of the conceptual bases of the work are explained in Stockhausen's famous article, "… How Time Passes …" (Stockhausen 1963b). In this essay, Stockhausen developed a serial organizational principle at the center of which stood the concept of a twelve-step duration series possessing the same structural properties as the basic twelve-tone pitch series. This became the basis for the entire process of serial organization of Gruppen (Misch 1999, 53–54). This duration series, however, is expressed not as single units (which would correspond to single vibrations of a pitch) but rather as metronomic tempos in sufficiently long stretches of time to enable conductors and musicians to change tempo with precision. However, because the resulting "fundamental durations" are not small enough for use in the musical detail, subdivisions corresponding to the transposition of the overtones of a pitch's harmonic spectrum are used (Koenig 1968, 90–91).

References

• Harvey, Jonathan. 1975. The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Koenig, Gottfried Michael. 1968. “Commentary”. Die Reihe 8 ("Retrospective") [English edition], 80–98. (Originally published in German in 1962.)
• Misch, Imke. 1998. “On the Serial Shaping of Stockhausen’s Gruppen für drei Orchester”, translated by Dr. Frank Hentschel and Jerome Kohl. Perspectives of New Music 36, no. 1 (Winter): 143–87.
• Misch, Imke. 1999. Zur Kompositionstechnik Karlheinz Stockhausens Gruppen für 3 Orchester (1955–57). Signale aus Köln: Beiträge zur Musik der Zeit 2, edited by Christoph von Blumröder. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag. ISBN 3-89727-048-X
• Smalley, Roger. 1967. “Stockhausen’s Gruppen.” Musical Times 108, no. 1495 (September): 794–97.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1963a. "Gruppenkomposition: Klavierstück I (Anleitung zum Hören)". In his Texte zur Musik, vol. 1, pp. 63–74. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1963b. "... wie die Zeit vergeht ...". In his Texte zur Musik, vol. 1, pp. 99–139. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg. Revised and annotated version of the text first published in Die Reihe 3 (1957): 13–42. Translation by Cornelius Cardew, as "... How Time Passes ..." in the English edition of Die Reihe 3 (1959): 10–40.
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1963c. "Erfindung und Entdeckung". In his Texte zur Musik, vol. 1, pp. 222–58. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.
• Whittall, Arnold. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Serialism. Cambridge Introductions to Music. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-68200-8 (pbk).

Further reading

• Beyer, Peter. 2000. "Regelwerk und Theorie serieller Musik in Karlheinz Stockhausens GRUPPEN für 3 Orchester." In Musiktheorie: Festschrift für Heinrich Deppert zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Wolfgang Budday. Tutzing: Hans Schneider.
• Kohl, Jerome. 2004. “Der Aspekt der Harmonik in Licht.” In Internationales Stockhausen-Symposion 2000: LICHT: Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität zu Köln, 19. bis 22. Oktober 2000. Tagungsbericht. Signale aus Köln: Beiträge zur Musik der Zeit 10, edited by Imke Misch and Christoph von Blumröder, 116–32. Münster, Berlin, London: LIT-Verlag. ISBN 3-8258-7944-5.

External links

• Andrew Clements, "Stockhausen: Gruppen". The Guardian 1 June 2001
• Introduction to Gruppen by Albrecht Moritz
• Gruppen essay by Ingvar Norden
• Video excerpt
• Another video excerpt