Mantra

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Mantra

Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky - piano

The formal plan and skeleton of MANTRA for 2 pianists came into being between May 1st and June 20th 1970, in Osaka, Japan. Every morning I composed for ca. 3 hours in my hotel room, before driving at midday to the spherical auditorium at the World Exhibition where, together with 20 young singers and instrumentalists, I performed my music daily from 3:30 p.m. to ca. 9:00 p.m., for over 1 million listeners. Then, from July 10th to August 18th, I worked uninterrupted on the score in Kürten, and on October 18th at 8:30 p.m. the work was premiered by the pianists Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky at the "Donaueschinger Musiktage für Zeitgenössische Tonkunst", as a commission from the Südwestfunk Baden-Baden. The gramophone recording for Deutsche Grammophon took place from the 10th to the 13th June 1971 at Munich, in the recording studio at 22 Kreillerstrasse.

The work arises in its entirety from a 13-note sound-formula, the "Mantra". For the title-cover of the record, I have drawn this "Mantra" in colour. The colours show the structural relationships of the "Mantra" (upper voice) with its mirror image (lower voice); with its 4 limbs - separated by pauses; with its 13 different characteristics which are given by its 13 notes, and each of which determines a large cycle of the work: 1. regular repetition; 2. decay-accent; 3. "normal" note; 4. quick grace-note group around the central note etc.

There is nothing except continual series of this "Mantra" and superimpositions of it over itself, in 12 forms of expansion and 13 x 12 transpositions. That is, in each of the 13 large cycles - in each of which a note from the "Mantra" is itself the central note around which the expanded forms arise - another of the 13 mantric characteristics predominates.
MANTRA, therefore, is not a variation form. The "Mantra" is not varied; not a single note is added, nothing is "accompanied", ornamented etc. The "Mantra" always stays itself, and appears in its twelvefoldness, with its 13 characteristics.
The fast passage before the end is a compression of the whole work into the shortest space of time; all expansions and transpositions are gathered extremely fast into 4 layers.
So-called "ring-modulation", which I have employed as a technical process, makes possible a new system of harmonic relationships. To this end, each of the pianists has an apparatus on his left hand side into which a microphone amplifier, a compressor, a filter, a ring-modulator, a scaled sine-wave generator, and a volume control have been built. The piano sound is amplified by 2 microphones, and ring-modulated by a sine wave. At some distance behind each piano stand loudspeakers which reproduce the modulated sound simultaneously with the played sound. The modulated sound should be somewhat louder than the original sound.
In each of the 13 large cycles of the work, each pianist introduces a sine tone, corresponding each time to the central note around which all the "Mantra"-transformations are centred. The 1st pianist presents the "upper" 13 notes of the "Mantra" in succession, and the 2nd pianist the "lower" 13 notes, that is, the "Mantra"- mirror.
Each 1st and 13th note of each recurrence of the "Mantra" are thus identical to the "mirroring" sine tone; hence they sound completely "consonant", and thus completely "natural"-like notes; and depending on the intervallic remoteness of the remaining "Mantra" notes from the "mirror note" of the ring modulation, the modulated sound sounds more or less "dissonant", and its spectrum more or less unlike the piano (minor seconds, and similarly minor ninths and major sevenths, produce the most "dissonant" modulator-sounds, octaves and fifths the most "consonant"). Hence one perceives a continual "respiration" from consonant to dissonant to consonant modulator-sounds, resulting from the precisely tuned relationships between the modulating sine tones and the modulated piano notes.
Naturally, the unified construction of MANTRA is a musical miniature of the unified macrostructure of the cosmos, just as it is a magnification into the acoustic time-field of the unified micro-structure of the harmonic vibrations in notes themselves. (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kürten, September 15th, 1971)


Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Mantra (1. Teil) {34:56}

Side 2

1. Mantra (2. Teil) {29:40}

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