2004
Stockhausen, Neuhaus, Zyklus
This compact disc, with its four realizations by the solo percussionist Max Neuhaus of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus, is of interest in itself, because it sounds cool, but also for the larger careers of both Stockhausen and Neuhaus. The Stockhausen score and its realizations mark a time in music and in both men's careers when the roles of composer and performer were blurring, and when Neuhaus' latent ambitions as a composer, or architect of sound, were taking shape.
Stockhausen, born in 1928, is a strange case, but a strange case who has composed some wonderful music. He started as an ambitious young man on the German avant-garde scene of the 1950's, and Zyklus, composed at the end of that decade, can be heard as an example of that era's fascination with fragmentation and disjunction, yet with a powerful coloristic component that was to prove prescient.
In the 60's, after Zyklus had been composed, Stockhausen evolved into almost a full-bore hippie, capped by stints in northern California. His music of that decade, extending into the early 70's, remains his most powerful and beautiful, blending the freedom and mysticism of California counter-culture (although it was never purely popular in any commercial sense) with the grand tradition of European art-music. Since the 70's, Stockhausen has been obsessed with his seven-part operatic cycle Licht; what posterity will make of these cosmic musical grab-bags remains to be seen.
Stockhausen claims to have written the first notated score for solo percussionist with Zyklus, although he was actually beaten to that mark by John Cage, with his 27' 10.544". Neuhaus suggests that Stockhausen's graphic notation here also owes much to Earle Brown's pioneering works from the early 1950's. In any case, the notation for Zyklus gives the performer considerable latitude, within strict Teutonic limits. Hence the four different realizations here, each a separate and equally legitimate response to the suggestions proposed by Stockhausen's notation, represent an early example of Neuhaus making his own compositional choices.
He had a good head start, to be sure, given his early interest in jazz improvisation. In a sense, the system set up by Stockhausen's score, which points directions and sets limits, is rather like the tune and chord changes of jazz, or the rules Neuhaus invents for himself in his own later sound-works, whether on the radio or the Internet. And his ample use of electronic instruments to supplement pure percussion in other works also points in the direction on which he was to embark in the early 70's.
The result is a technical tour de force, less evident from a purely aural CD than it would be from a DVD, let alone from having attended one of these performances. Each of these four recordings is a document of a true solo performance, one person and two hands, with no additional live help and no overdubbing (not that the technical constraints of the mid-60's, with editing limited to what could be accomplished with Scotch tape and a razor blade, would have permitted much in that regard).
This CD also offers four different kinds of beauty, four proofs that the latitude that Stockhausen allowed, when capitalized on by a performer with creative imagination, could validate Stockhausen as a composer and an entire aesthetic of freedom and control.
John Rockwell, New York City, 2004
These texts were published as liner notes for the CD: Max Neuhaus: ZYKLUS, Four Realizations of Karlheinz Stockhausen. (1963-1968) Plana P 23NMN.054 CD, 2004