Karlheinz Stockhausen, Saxophon (1977)

Saxophon is a duo for soprano saxophone and bongo that is apart of the score The Course of the Years of Tuesday from Light. Light (Licht) is an enourmous opera that contains within it seven full length operas, one for each day of the week. Saxophon appears is Tuesday night's opera.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. Modarath, near Koln, 22 August 1928) Stockhausen entered the Music High School in Cologne in 1947, and later studied at the university. In 1951, he married and went to Paris, where he studied with the composers, Oliver Messiaen, and for a time, Darius Milhaud. Returning to Cologne in 1953, he confounded its celebrated electronic music studio by becoming director in 1963. From 1954 to 1956, at the University of Bonn, he studied phonetics, acoustics, and information theory and composition. After lecturing at the contemporary music seminars at Darmstadt (1957), Stockhausen gave lectures and concerts in Europe and North America. From 1955, he was the co-editor of the theoretical journal, "Die Riehe" (The Row).

He has worked at the musique concrète studio in Paris, at the Studio for Electronic Music in Köln, and has taught Darmstadt summer courses. He's worked with serial, aleatory, and electronic procedures, with spatial placements of sound sources, and with graphical notation. Some works are constructed from discrete units of musical time called "groups" or "moments."

Stockhausen is relatively unconcerned with musical tradition and history; he explores fundamental psychological and acoustic aspects of music, an attitude that was intensified by the development of electronic music. As a counterbalance to the increasing mechanization of music, Stockhausen gives performers a large role in determining certain elements ("parameters") of a composition, even to the extent of determining form. In each work, certain elements are played off against one another, simultaneously and successively: in "Kontrapunkte," (Counterpoints; first performed in 1953 for 10 instruments) pairs of instruments and extremes of note values confront one another in a series of dramatic encounters; in "Gruppen," (Groups; 1959, for 3 orchestras) fanfares and passages of varying speed are flung from one orchestra to another, giving the impression of movement in space; in "Zeitemasse," (Time-Mass; 1956, for 5 woodwinds) various rates of acceleration and deceleration oppose one another.

In his electronic music, these procedures are taken still further. In "Kontakte" (1959-60), one version of the work contains "contact" between the instruments and the electronic sounds to which they respond. In addition, there is contact between the different electronic sounds themselves: all of them are created in similar ways. Thus, every sound or sound-complex or texture can be heard in relation to the others (e.g. "Momente," 1962, for soprano, 4 choruses, and 13 players). In such works as "Klavierstuck XI," (Piano Piece XI, last of a series, 1956) the music consists of separate fragments, and the performer is given a certain freedom in regard to the dynamics, attack, and the order or number of fragments played.