Originale

Originale (Originals, or "Real People"), musical theatre with Kontakte, is a music theatre work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister. It was first performed in 1961 in Cologne, and is given the work number 12⅔ in Stockhausen's catalogue of works. It was influenced by the early Happenings pioneered by John Cage and Allan Kaprow.^{[citation needed]}

Composition history

Sunset over Lake Saimaa, where Originale was composed

Originale was commissioned from Stockhausen and Bauermeister by Hubertus Durek, manager of the Theater am Dom in Cologne, and his stage director, Carlheinz Caspari, who wanted a play in which actors, painters, other artists, or just simply "authentic" (originale) people would appear freely in spontaneous actions. It was created while the pair were visiting Finland in August 1961. Stockhausen had been invited to lecture at the Summer University of Jyväskylä where, at a presentation of Kontakte, they met the piano virtuoso and Sibelius biographer, Professor Erik Tawastjerna. Together with the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, a summer house north of Helsinki on Lake Saimaa was put at their disposal, and the score of Originale was completely worked out there in just two weeks. The "silence" scene, in which the events on stage and the music stop for just one minute, and then everything resumes again, was inspired by the "unearthly" effect of the northerly summer light, which remained in the sky for just two hours or so during which the sun briefly dipped below the horizon, then rose again, "as the birds began to twitter, the fish stirred again, the wind came up, and there was day" (Bauermeister 2011, 64–66; Kurtz 1992, 114).

Roles

Role	Premiere cast (Cologne, 1961)	New York cast (1964)	San Francisco cast (1990)	Sindelfingen cast (2007)
Pianist	David Tudor	James Tenney	Michael Orland	Aya Inokuchi
Percussionist	Christoph Caskel	Max Neuhaus	Don Baker	Christian R. Wissel
Sound Engineer	Leopold von Knobelsdorff	David Behrman		Wolfgang Mittermaier
Cameraman	Wolfgang Ramsbott	Robert Breer		Simone Speer
Lighting Director	Walter Koch (Theater am Dom)	Gary Harris Billy Klüver		Nikolaus Pirchtner
Stage Director	Carlheinz Caspari	Allan Kaprow	Henry Steele	Claudine M. Kolbus (choreographer)
Action Composer	Nam June Paik	Nam June Paik		Robin Rhode
Child	Markus Stockhausen Christel Stockhausen		Milena	Meret Zyrewitz
Model	Edith Sommer	Olga Klüver / Lette Eisenhauer		Sonja Kunz
Street Singer / String player	Belina Lilienweiß Kenji Kobayashi (violinist)	Charlotte Moorman (cellist)	Pamela Z	David Stützel
Hat-check woman	Liselotte Lörsch	Marje Strider		Rita Borchtler-Kracht
Newspaper Seller	Frau Hoffmann	Michael Kirby		an original from Sindelfingen
Conductor	Karlheinz Stockhausen	Alvin Lucier		Manfred Schreier
Monkey-house Attendant	a woman from the Cologne Zoo	(replaced by a small lady with a dog)		Jasmin Held
Painter	Mary Bauermeister	Robert Delford Brown (1st night) Ay-O	Hitomi Ikuma	Steffi Stangl Ole Aselmann
Poet	Hans G Helms	Allen Ginsberg	Michael Peppe	Hans G Helms
Actor	Ruth Grahlmann	Vincent Gaeta	Chris Maher	Jerry Willingham
Actor	Eva-Maria Kox	Gloria Graves	Diane Robinson	Barbara Stoll
Actor	Alfred Feussner	Dick Higgins	Lisa Apfelburg	Birgit Heintel
Actor	Harry J. Bong	Jackson Mac Low	Traci Robinson	Dorothee Jakubowski
Actor	Heiner Reddemann / Peter Hackenberger	Peter Leventhal	Elena Rivera	Markus Schlueter

Performance history

Performances of Originale subsequent to the twelve first performances in Cologne between 26 October and 6 November 1962 have been rare. Productions took place in New York in 1964, organized jointly by Mary Bauermeister and Charlotte Moorman (Bauermeister 2011, 161), in 1990 in San Francisco directed and organized by Randall Packer (Kosman 1990; Tucker 1990), and on 21 January 2007 in connection with a 2006–2007 exhibition of Mary Bauermeister's tetralogy Fama Fluxus—Mythos Beuys—Legende Paik—Atelier Mary Bauermeister in Sindelfingen (Bauermeister 2011, 294). The Cologne and New York performances included video and performance artist Nam June Paik, who influenced Stockhausen in the composition of the work.^{[citation needed]} The New York performances took place at Judson Hall as part of the second annual New York Festival of the Avant-Garde, during the peak period of the avant-garde movement Fluxus.

Concept and form

The surreal absurdity of Originale recalls Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet's books and film L 'année dernière à Marienbad, and, in its use of the commonplace, Harold Pinter (Harvey1975, 90). It combines the rigorous, tightly controlled compositional form of Stockhausen's serial music with the loosely structured improvisational framework of the early Happenings. The score to Originale is groundbreaking for its incorporation of performance events and other assorted "actions" into a musical organization with precise "timepoints" or temporal markings, typical of Stockhausen's musical scores. Within the 94' duration of Originale is a performance of Stockhausen's Kontakte for piano, percussion, and electronics, that is woven throughout the work, providing a central unifying element to this often disjointed work. In addition to Kontakte, the Cologne performances included tape-recorded excerpts from Stockhausen's Carré for four orchestras and choirs, Gesang der Jünglinge, Gruppen for three orchestras, and Zyklus for a percussionist (Dörstel 1993, 199).

An unusual assortment of "characters" are introduced in Originale, including a pianist, a percussionist, a sound technician, a stage director, a cameraman, a lighting technician, an action composer, an action painter, a poet, a street singer, a coat checker, a newspaper vendor, a fashion model, a child (playing with blocks), a animal handler with animal, a conductor, and five actors reading a collage of unrelated texts (Stockhausen 1964, 111). Stockhausen, as a pioneer of electronic music, brought experimental recording technique into Originale by using tape recorders to capture excerpts from the performance that were later played back as an additional layer in the complex sound texture.^{[citation needed]} For the San Francisco performance in 1990, more recent technological techniques were introduced including digital sampling and live video to disrupt the linear flow of the work and enhance its surreal quality and strange juxtaposition of events.^{[citation needed]}

According to the musicologist Karl Heinz Wörner, "Originale is a musical composition. The macrorhythm of scene continuity and the ordering of moments are musical. The individual scenes are composed musically, regardless of whether or not there is any 'music' in them. The verbal counterpoint is musical, as are the 'monodic' word melodies and the polyphony of speaking voices" (Wörner 1973, 192). Originale is constructed in 18 scenes, grouped into seven self-sufficient "structures", which may be performed in any order, either successively or with as many as three structures simultaneosly, on three separated stages (Stockhausen 1964, 110). Each character's actions are specified to take place within a specified number of seconds or minutes, and at one point the actors even speak in what Stockhausen calls "formant rhythms": in a span of four minutes one actor speaks three equally spaced words, a second actor has five equally spaced words, a third has eight, and yet another has thirteen, while a fifth provides a "noise band" of completely irregular rhythms (Harvey 1975, 90).

In the chronicles of 20th-century theater and performance art, Stockhausen's Originale stands alone as a work that dismantles all traditional notions of music theater, an important precedent to experimental forms of contemporary multimedia performance that have emerged in the digital age.^{[citation needed]}

References

• Bauermeister, Mary. 2011. Ich hänge im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen. Munich: Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann. ISBN 978-3-570-58024-0.
• Dörstel, Wilfried. 1993. "Situation, Moment, Labyr, Fluxus, oder, Das verbrannte Original: Das Musiktheater Originale von Karlheinz Stockhausen". In Intermedial, kontrovers, experimentell: Das Atelier Mary Bauermeister in Köln 1960–62, edited by Wilfried Dörstel, 186–205. Cologne: Emons. ISBN 3-924491-43-7.
• Harvey, Jonathan. 1975. The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0520023110.
• Kosman, Joshua. 1990. "Doing Stockhausen in Boxer Shorts". San Francisco Chronicle [final edition] (05 May): C7.
• Kurtz, Michael. 1992. Stockhausen: A Biography, translated by Richard Toop. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0571143237 (cloth) ISBN 0-571-17146-X (pbk).
• Maconie, Robin. 2005. Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 0-8108-5356-6.
• Tucker, Marilyn. 1990. "Avant-Garde Icon Of '60s Revived: Theatrical Touches in Stockhausen Music". San Francisco Chronicle [final edition] (02 May): 2.
• Wörner, Karl Heinz. 1973. Stockhausen: Life and Work, revised edition, introduced, translated, and edited by Bill Hopkins. London: Faber and Faber; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02143-6.

Further reading

• Anon. 1964. "Avant-Garde: Stuffed Bird at 48 Sharp". Time (18 September): 81.
• Custodis, Michael. 2004. Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 54, edited by Albrecht Riethmüller, with Reinhold Brinkmann, Ludwig Finscher, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Wolfgang Osthoff, and Wolfram Steinbeck. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 3-515-08375-8.
• Fricke, Stefan. 1998. "Attacken auf Karlheinz Stockhausen: Fluxus im 'Kampf gegen das musikalische Dekor des Faschismus'", Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 159, no. 4 (July-August): 38–41.
• Fricke, Stefan. 2004. "Inklusieve Vergnügungssteuer: Karlheinz Stockhausens Originale und Fluxus". In Experimentelles Musik- und Tanztheater, edited by Frieder Reininghaus, Katja Schneider, and Sabine Sanio, 161-165 Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, no. 7. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89007-427-6; 3-89007-427-8.
• Goodman, Susan. 1964. "Anti-Art Pickets Pick on Stockhausen." Village Voice (10 Sept.)
• Griffiths, Paul. 1981. "Review: 4711". The Musical Times 122, no. 1664 (October): 685.
• Kirby, Michael, and Richard Schechner. 1965. "An Interview with John Cage". Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter): 50–72.
• Krones, Hartmut. 2008. "Sprachkompositionen in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, inbesondere am Beispiel Österreich". In Музички модернизам—нова тумачења: Зборник радова са научног скупа одржаног од 11. до 13. октобра 2007 [Rethinking Musical Modernism: Proceedings of the International Conference Held from October 11 to 13, 2007], edited by Dejan Despić, Melita Milin, and Danica Petrović, 231–45. Naucni skupovi, no. 122; Odelenje likovne i muzicke umetnosti, no. 6. Belgrade: Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti. ISBN 978-86-7025-463-3.
• Ruppel, Karl Heinz. 1961. "Neodadisten". Süddeutsche Zeitung (3 November).
• Oren, Michel. 1993. "Anti-Art as the End of Cultural History". Performing Arts Journal 15, no. 2 (May): 1–30.
• Rich, Alan. "Stockhausen's 'Originale'". New York Herald Tribune (9 September).
• Rigoni, Michel. 1998. Stockhausen: ... un vaisseau lancé vers le ciel, 2nd edition, revised, corrected, and enlarged. Lillebonne: Millénaire III Editions. ISBN 2911906020.
• Schonberg, Harold C. 1964. "Music: Stockhausen's 'Originale' Given at Judson". New York Times (9 September).
• Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1964. "Originale (1961), musikalisches Theater". In his Texte zur Musik 2, edited by Dieter Schnebel, 107–29. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.
• Straebel, Volker. 1995. "'...that the Europeans become more American': Gegenseitige Einflüsse von Europa und Nordamerika in der Geschichte der Musikperformance". In Musik, Labyrinth, Kontext: Musikperformance, 80–94. Schriftenreihe Offenes Kulturhaus, no. 13. Linz: Offenes Kulturhaus des Landes Oberösterreich. ISBN 978-3-85307-003-1; 3-85307-003-5.

External links

• Film of the New York premiere, September 1964
• "On Originale," Excerpt from "Robert Delford Brown: Meat, Maps and Militant Metaphysics" by Mark Bloch, 2008
• 2007 Originale performance in Sindelfingen, with photographs