Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Stimmung (1965) for six vocalists
Kings Place writes:
We welcome Theatre of Voices to Kings Place for this 50th-anniversary performance of Stockhausen’s revolutionary vocal work. Stimmung returns us to the fundamentals of musical sound, the 24 partial overtones of a single chord. Using just six singers with microphones the composer radically redefined the concept of vocal music, and the relationship between word and tone. With its roots in ‘Stimme’, voice, ‘Stimmung’ not only refers to the tuning of voices but the inward tuning of one’s soul; when people feel in tune with one another they are said to be in a good ‘Stimmung’.
Director of Theatre of Voices Paul Hillier, who first sang the work with Singcircle in the early 1970s and created the Copenhagen version in 2006, writes: ‘Stimmung offers a mirror to the world seen as a continuous process of transformation: words, syllables, and even individual phonemes are constantly being changed into new forms, their meanings set spinning as one process stimulates another.’
Theatre of Voices
Paul Hillier, artistic director