Kontra-Punkte (Stockhausen)

"Kontra-Punkte" is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen which resolves contrasts among six pairs of instruments, as well as extremes of note values and dynamic levels, into a homogeneous ending texture.

The first, untitled version, written in 1952–53, was a sparse-textured, "punctual" composition scored for flute, E-flat clarinet, contrabass clarinet, contrabassoon, trumpet, contrabass tuba, piano four hands, harp, violin, and double bass. This score was almost immediately rejected by the composer, who created a new version in the spring of 1953 for flute, A clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, piano (one player), harp, violin, and cello. This version adds progressively longer insertions of denser note groups, often in single instruments, while at the same time gradually replacing more and more long notes with groups of rapid, shorter ones in a technique called Ausmultiplikation (Kohl 2004). This gradual erosion of the originally sparse texture, reflected in the hyphenated title (meaning "Against Points"), complements three parallel processes already present in the first version: (1) the heterogeneous timbres of the full ensemble are gradually reduced to the "monochrome" of the solo piano; (2) widely fluctuating durations reduce to similar values; (3) wide-ranging dynamics reduce to a generally soft level. Countless minor changes have been introduced in subsequent revisions, the last of which, in January 2004, replaced the A clarinet with the B-flat instrument.

"Kontra-Punkte" was first performed during the World Music Days in Cologne on 26 May 1953 by members of the WDR Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hermann Scherchen. This performance, however, was only of roughly the first two-thirds of the work, owing to lack of sufficient time for the pianist to prepare the extremely difficult closing part. Later that same year, Scherchen conducted the first complete performance on a Domaine musical concert in Paris (Kurtz 1992:58).

Somewhat confusingly, an earlier, orchestral work by Stockhausen was titled "Kontrapunkte" (without the hyphen: "Counterpoints"). This work, suppressed by the composer at the time on grounds that it was unplayable, was drastically recomposed in 1962 and issued under the title "Punkte" (Points), by which name the original work is also now called (Kurtz 1992:52; Blumröder 1993:99).

References

* Blumröder, Christoph von. (1993). "Die Grundlegung der Musik Karlheinz Stockhausens". Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 32, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
* Kohl, Jerome. (2004). "'One Superordinate Principle': The Origins of Stockhausen’s Serialism." Paper presented 13 November, 2004 at the National Conference of the Society for Music Theory, Seattle, WA.
* Kurtz, Michael. 1992. "Stockhausen: A Biography". Translated by Richard Toop. London: Faber and Faber.
* Schnebel, Dieter. 1972. “Kontra-Punkte oder ‘Morphologie der musikalischen Zeit’”. In "Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952–1972", ed. Hans Rudolf Zeller, 213–30. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.