Musical - notes : Aum Bhu-r Bhuva Svaha…Aum Bhu-r Bhuva Svaha…Aum Bhu-r Bhuva Svaha…
Aum Bhu-r Bhuva Svaha…Aum Bhu-r Bhuva Svaha…Aum Bhu-r Bhuva Svaha…
Just because something doesn’t have the familiar sign of Aum, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t embody aum in some ways.
By 1970, Stockhausen had been composing almost exclusively non-notated music for six years. There were the text scores of Sieben Tagen, the titular arithmetic symbols of Plus-Minus, and the coded gestures of Spiral. Stockhausen was deeply immersed in music that owed a lot to John Cage’s interest in handing over some of the authorship to the performer.
Spiral would be performed some 1300 times in the breathtaking pavilion at the Osaka World Fair. In classic Stockhausen fashion, he had built a spherical auditorium where the audience could be completely immersed in his music, having the sound come at them from a full 360 degrees, doubling the spatial feat of Gruppen.
Mantra is for two pianists, who also play wood blocks and antique cymbals, as well as manipulate sine-wave generators and ring modulators. The demands on the performers are profound, but the final result is a mystical experience ‘above and beyond any criticism’ as Paul Griffiths put it. Stockhausen calls the piece a ‘miniature model of the stellar constellations’, but more importantly, it is the first full-fledged work to use his formula method.
Unlike a tone row, a formula can, and does, have pitch centers. For instance, the formula for mantra begins with four repetitions of the same note:
This formula and its permutations were worked out during his time in Osaka, and in a flurry of activity, Stockhausen wrote out the entire piece in one 5-week stretch. If you ever get a chance, peruse the score for Mantra, and it’ll give you a profound sense of what an extraordinary clarity of mind he possessed in order to do this. Stockhausen said of this period that it was ‘the happiest composition time that I have ever spent in my life’.
Stockhausen insisted that Mantra is not a set of variations, but it is. The mantra (or formula) is repeated some 300 times in forms that stretch it to the limit. The variations are derived from the 13 characteristics that Stockhausen assigns to the formula. Factor in transposition and the sound processing, and the piece sounds infinitely varied, yet entirely cohesive.
Cage’s prepared piano has nothing on Stockhausen’s processed one. Mantra is a riveting concert experience, and a little over an hour doesn’t seem enough time to fully encounter its brilliantly imaginative sound world.
Source Stockhausen via Analog Art Ensemble
Tags: Aum, Om, Om music, om score