2004
Zyklus
Notes
Karlheinz Stockhausen, No. 9 Zyklus For One Percussionist
Zyklus was written in 1959 and is one of the first solo pieces to utilize such a large number of percussion instruments (twenty-one). All the notes are written out specifically with respect to loudness (shown by one of twelve sizes of notes), the instrument to be played (by a symbol for the instrument), the pitch on that instrument (by a staff of some sort), and when the note occurs in time (by correlating time with horizontal space on the page).
However, in the case of many of these notated groups of notes the performer is given specific choices in their juxtaposition. These decisions can be made either before or during the performance. The performer begins with any note, plays through the complete piece, and ends with the note he began with. If the score is placed in one position, the performer's main playing area moves gradually in a clockwise direction; if it is turned upside down, so to speak, the playing area naturally moves counter-clockwise. These recordings include performances in both directions and with various starting points.
When I first started to learn to play Zyklus there were only three other percussionists in the world who could play it – one Japanese, one French, and a German, Christoph Caskel. It was the latter who did the first performance. Stockhausen's idea was that a performer would play the piece spontaneously, making its complex decisions on the fly. No one played it that way; it was too difficult. Everyone wrote out his own version of the score and played from it. I decided to play it for my graduation recital from Manhattan School of Music. Coming from the world of jazz I also wanted to take up the challenge of playing it spontaneously.
At that time percussionists generally played only one instrument at a time. Playing twenty-one simultaneously was unheard of. I quickly realized that the only way to do it, in fact, was to think of all of them together as just one instrument – one multi-surfaced bank of timbre. Actually playing this huge group of instruments as if they were one was quite another matter. The challenge was gaining control over the large number of surfaces. In order to be able to do a pianissimo on a surface behind your back, without looking, you have to have a precise kinesthetic sense of exactly where the surface is. In order for this to happen, the instruments always had to have the same spatial relationships. I had to find a way that they were always in the same position every time I set them up; otherwise I would never find them with just may hands. I invented some special frames which allowed me to always place the instruments in the same precise relationships and that were possible take apart and light enough to transport.
I also had to invent some new techniques. For example several times in the work you have a trill on the vibraphone at the same time as you're playing fast riffs on other instruments. How do you trill on the vibraphone and riff on other things at the same time? You do the trill by taking two mallets in one hand; you put one under the vibraphone bar, one on top and quickly move them up and down. You play the riffs with two sticks in the other hand. It sounds simple but nobody had ever thought of that before.
I decided to travel to Europe and go to Darmstadt where Stockhausen was teaching. I wanted to talk to him about the piece. When I met him, he was interested in my idea that the twenty-one instruments had to be physically formed into one instrument and in the fact that I had done so much work on it already. Six months later, when he was preparing his first US tour, he remembered our conversations and asked me to perform Zyklus on the tour. I was twenty-three. It was a big opportunity.
He came to New York to hear me play it, but wasn't satisfied with my improvised version. It was too long. I was determined to teach myself how to do it for this tour. I had another six months. I got it down to seven minutes; and I was still improvising it, not writing it out.
The first concert of the tour was in New York, and Zyklus was the first work on the program. The whole music world was there to see who this German composer was. Just before I went out to play, though, Stockhausen went out on stage and made an announcement disavowing responsibility for me, implying that a young American could never do justice to his music. It backfired on him. I was ready to play that piece, and I played it like nobody had ever heard it before. The applause afterwards was tumultuous.
Max Neuhaus