Stockhausen, Karlheinz - Klavierstücke I-XI - Henck, Herbert (piano)

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Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote his „Klavierstücke I-XI“ ( Pieces I-XI) – his „drawings“ as he once called them – in the ten years between the ages of 24 and 33. His ideas during his period were stimulated by such issues as “electronic music”, “pointillistic music”, “spatial music”, “group form”, “chance”, “silence”, “noise”, “notation”, “statistical composition”, “musical processes”; in many cases these issues were so confidently formulated and exemplarily applied by him that the unmistakable results attracted immediate attention. These were Stockhausen’s pioneer years, the years between his studies and world-wide recognition; formed and strengthened by Schönberg’s twelve-tone teachings, Messiaen’s orderly assemblage of material, and Webern’s model for consequent structural principles, he arrived at a fundamentally new definition of the elements of music and their relationship to one another. This “serial” way of thinking influenced by methods and precision of the natural sciences enabled him to design compositional systems of a previously unattained rationality, especially by assigning to musical elements measurable values, numbers, and arranging them in tabulated predetermined sequences.