Karlheinz Stockhausen

Featuring: Ensemble Musique Vivante, Diego Masson

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (bumped corner) | Karlheinz Stockhausen's most radical gesture: in May 1968, as Paris erupted, he wrote fifteen text compositions that abandoned musical notation entirely. Aus den sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) consists of short verbal instructions - poetic, meditative, sometimes paradoxical - that describe states of consciousness rather than sounds. Stockhausen called the result "intuitive music," insisting it was neither improvisation nor indeterminacy but something else: musicians achieving a collective state of listening so deep that the sounds arise from necessity rather than decision. This LP presents two of the fifteen pieces - Setz die Segel zur Sonne (Set Sail for the Sun) on side A and Verbindung (Liaison) on side B - recorded 6-7 June 1969 in Paris by the Ensemble Musique Vivante directed by Diego Masson, with Stockhausen himself operating filters and potentiometers on the live electronics.

The personnel is staggering: Aloys Kontarsky (piano) - Stockhausen's foremost keyboard interpreter, the pianist of the Klavierstücke and Mantra; Michel Portal (clarinet) - already moving between contemporary music and free jazz; Jean-François Jenny-Clark (bass) - the great French bassist who would become central to European improvised music; Jean-Pierre Drouet (darabuka, tam-tams, crotales, cowbells, cymbals) - percussionist of seemingly unlimited imagination; Johannes G. Fritsch (viola), Harald Bojé (electronium), Alfred Alings and Rolf Gehlhaar - members of Stockhausen's own performing group. The combination of Stockhausen's inner circle with Masson's Parisian musicians creates a sound world that belongs to neither camp alone: too disciplined for free improvisation, too alive for the academy.

Masson founded Musique Vivante in 1966 after years as percussionist in Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts - son of the surrealist painter André Masson, he grew up surrounded by creative risk-taking of a different kind. Stockhausen dedicated Stop to him, and Musique Vivante gave the world premiere of Setz die Segel zur Sonne. The ensemble also recorded the definitive version of Boulez's Domaines (with Portal as soloist) and Berio's Laborintus II for the same label - three landmark Harmonia Mundi LPs that together document the most adventurous French ensemble of its generation. Insert notes in French by Diego Masson.

LP. Harmonia Mundi HMA 55795 (cover) / HM 795 (labels), reissue of Harmonia Mundi Musique Vivante 30 889 M (1970).