It is wonderful when the year’s first gentle whirls of a summer wind entangle your hair. It’s wonderful when a solo clarinet whirls around you in a summer state of mind, spiraling in time with you thoughts and dreams, rising at will – or free of will - in an airy, flowing gesture of generosity, of artful existence.

Suzanne Stephens conveys an atmosphere of this artful existence in Stockhausen’s compositions “Harlekin” and “Der kleine Harlekin” – the latter being a development out of part of the first, pried lose and performed as a separate piece.

I think this is the first time I study a pure solo piece by Professor Stockhausen, and it is true that the solo idiom demands more of a composer than other, more complex compositional forms. The genius of an artist is revealed in his expertise handling of sparse and ascetic means, in the mastery of simplicity, in the full utilization of one single tool. Compare this with the haiku tradition, for example, or the Western aphorism – or the Japanese shakuhachi meditations. Sit down and watch a Japanese rock garden; the raked sand! This is it! It works!

Suzanne Stephens is like the Princess of Barefoot Dancing here, like an Isadora Duncan – or a Sandie Shaw of late; that is how physical all this metaphysical music really is: two aspects of the same state of being; of BEING! The head in the stratosphere; feet in the soil! This clarinet music is intellectualism with a loving, light-fingered caress attached; a steadfast, relentless gaze of Indian logic and a soft smile! Off you go, into yourself!

In Stockholm in May of 2001 Stockhausen underlined that all his compositions since the very beginning had been theatrical pieces, i.e. involving more than pure music, like movements, gestures, dancing and so on, and Harlekin is a dancer descending in a spiral from the skies.

The score of “Harlekin” holds exact notations of all the movements and the dance, but Stockhausen allows for different kinds of performances.
The original version is the one in which the clarinetist also performs the dance and all the movements.
A second version lets the clarinetist perform the purely musical notations of the score, while a drummer, using for example a Kandy drum or tabla, plays the notated dance rhythms, imitating the noises the feet of the dancer would make. The playing of the drum must be synchronized with the playing of the clarinet in such a way that it fits in well with the would-be treads of the feet. The drummer is to be seated on the floor some distance from the clarinetist, watching her, and both the clarinetist and the drummer plays from memory.
A third possibility lets the clarinetist play at the side of the stage, while a dancer dances the notated movements center stage, holding a clarinet. Isn’t it like a Potlatch ceremony! Let’s fight every Potlatch prohibition that might come along! Stockhausen is our Edward S. Curtis of a modern day spiritual derivation of the Potlatch!

When the piece commences Harlekin is an enchanted dream messenger, says Stockhausen. He moves in circles, whirling fast like a Persian dervish, and as he descends the circles form a downward spiral, like a Texan twister touching down at Little Elm or Mesquite, transforming the tornado watch to a tornado warning across all the flickering screens of a soap-opera-Texan-housewife afternoon.
In the guise of a playful constructor – again Stockhausen’s term – Harlekin forms a melody out of the spiral, gradually. It descends into the low register of the instrument, as it also gains contour and shape.
As Harlekin is approaching close, he transforms into an enamoured lyric. His melody has a magic quality, enabling the one who is quietly listening to keep the melody in his dreams and even turn that which is worn down by the disabling qualities of ugliness into sheer beauty.
When Harlekin is awaking, he again changes; now into a pedantic music teacher! He begins to write his whole ornamented melody in the air, and doesn’t stop until he has gone through the whole melody without a mistake, after initially getting sour when missing a note…
He is, however, not a rigid character, but can be observed poking himself a little, making fun of himself, and before we no it he is a roguish joker! He makes some almost ill-witted jokes, even impudent, like the goblin who by tradition and folklore used to live under the front porches or front steps of the old farmhouses and cottages of Scandinavia, and whom you always had to take into account and think nice thoughts about, or he would surely pull some dirty trick on you!
In this instance the Harlekin on stage can be seen struggling against an imaginary wind, hit his clarinet to make the pitches higher (!), etcetera; a funny but edgy and a bit poisonous character, with a pinch to his jokes, getting you on your feet!
As he struggles against the wind he evolves into a passionate dancer, as Stockhausen characterizes him at this stage of the music. He in fact gets so involved in his movements, in his dance, that he forgets to play some notes, causing the melody line to crack up, fall apart, leaving open holes of no-notes.
When there is practically nothing left of the melody but the intermittent holes, Harlekin comes to grips with himself again and recalls the fast, circular figures of his initial descending spiral, and he gets into a new, reverse, broad upward spiral which gradually narrows, and Harlekin is a spinning spirit! He emits wild birdcalls; long cries, between the melodic curves. He does this 12 times, until he has used up he whole melody in its entirety. A 13th cry is the highest of them all, and that concludes “Harlekin”.

Stockhausen, as mentioned above, has explained that his pieces always are theatrical, and in a piece like “Harlekin” this is very plain to see. It is the composer’s vivid and almost aggressive imagination which sees all these theatrical events appearing in the music, with the music, giving an added dimension to it, furthering the whole experience into a commedia dell’arte of a time when Death and Love, Joy and Grief, were simultaneous through the Black Death villages of Europe.

Of course, the Harlekin is a personality who spreads a jolly feeling where he threads, if you look at him historically. Stockhausen submits this quote from an English translation of “The Italian Comedy” by Pierre Louis Duchartre, except he has changed the gender of the Harlekin to a female one:

“	Pleasure follows her unceasingly; she spreads joy and gladness everywhere. Laughter springs from beneath her very feet, and her ready satire offends no one. So merry are her quips…”

Nonetheless, we all know that humor and whims always flourish against a backdrop of seriousness and tough antecedents. A carefree state of mind is reached through experiences of hardships and loss, if it is to be enjoyed thoroughly! We might also (not claiming a real similarity) compare the Harlekin figure with the Joker (Jester) present at all European royal courts of olden, who was allowed to tell the truth to the King without losing his head in the process, and to present the common man’s impression of the King to him in satire-like, joking guises, nonetheless thereby giving the Ruler healthy insights into the state of his dominion and his own standing with the people.

The description of the development of “Harlekin” is presented with such accuracy and detail in the CD booklet (a more formal version of the description above) that I chose to quote it in its entirety. I also recommend the listener to read it once while listening to the piece on the CD:

1.	The Enchanted Dream Messenger: The first trill begins at the left, backstage. Harlequin dances, coming in from the left in rather fast, circular movements, predominantly turning to his right. Until the beginning of the second part – The Playful Constructor – his turns form an inward spiral, ending at the front end of the center stage. He changes tempo, steps and body expression according to the musical figures, pauses and self-chosen breathing interruptions, freezing every now and then in a pose. The entire time he plays enchanted, completely lost in himself and often with closed eyes.
2.	The Playful Constructor: Having arrived at the front end of the stage, Harlequin is wide-awake, electric. His movements are loosely relaxed, interspersed with jerky marionette-like movements, and precise, almost geometric figures. He often freezes in a pose at pauses or sustained tones. This character gradually transforms into the following:
3.	The Enamoured Lyric: Harlequin is calm. Hardly moving at all, he looks into the void, standing thoughtfully surrendered. Very expressively he plays his melody slowly for the first time, then he kneels gradually, even more calmly, and plays his melody a second time very slowly in the lowest register, with eyes closed.
4.	The Pedantic Teacher: Harlequin becomes a strict, uncompromising music teacher. From now on, all instrument and body movements indicate the melody in the air, with all intervals (up-down), rhythmic durations (in mirror-writing from the left), and also the dynamics: from ppp (instrument directly in front of body in a straight vertical position) to ƒƒƒ (instrument and torso thrust as far as possible the front). The entire space from the floor to the highest possible position of the bell is divided evenly into a chromatic scale, which corresponds to the range of the clarinet.
5.	The Roguish Joker: From this point on, Harlequin gets into all kinds of burlesque difficulties. His instrument cannot play high enough; he himself is too short; he squeaks and purports to have saliva in the keyhole, and so on…
6.	The Passionate Dancer: In this section, all dance rhythms, as well as the various positions in space, are exactly notated. For the correct realization, dance shoes are required, the soles of which make a clearly audible tap when struck against the floor. The dance should not be a copy of folk or art dance, but should be a newly discovered personal dance, which includes traditional elements from various sources.
7.	The exalted Spinning Spirit: Harlequin dances, rotating to his left (right turns as seen from the public), forming a spiral, which winds up toward the exit at the right. During the long, sustained sounds he spins on the spot like a top – very fast with a ritardando. The movements in this last transformation, until the end of the piece (except when spinning “like a top”), correspond to those at the beginning, only turning in the opposite direction.

(Regarding the last sentence of number 4 above; study also the score and the performance description of “Inori”)

The performance instruction reveals some interesting requests, like: “Breathe as seldom as possible. Wherever it is necessary to breathe, stop suddenly in the middle of the figure, quickly and briefly look around – grin roguishly -, look again to the front; without moving, breathe in deeply through the nose, make an upbeat with the head, and continue to play from the same spot beginning with the note which was played last. Always breathe at different points within the passage, each time changing the articulation (stacc. – leg. – stacc. – leg. – etc.). If possible, do not take more than 6 breaths before the first fermata.”

The numbers referring to different points of the score, the performance instruction also presents the player with these requests:

1.	At the fermatas, point clarinet up very high.
2.	All of these fermatas must be long and like wild bird screams.
3.	At these long tones, spin on the spot to the left, beginning extremely fast waving the clarinet up and down, starting high and gradually sinking, with ritardando.
4.	Dance the fast passages turning to the right, making an accelerando, while slowly raising face and clarinet.
5.	At each pause, freeze in a complicated, upwards-reaching, spiral-like position, (arrive in these poses organically through the preceding body movements), then “swing” or wind up to the right in increasingly larger gestures, letting loose into the next “scream”.
6.	These pauses before the long notes should become increasingly longer (for example count 1,5 – 2 – 2,5 – up to 7 seconds)

The so called “Dialogue with a foot”-instructions are clarified like this by Stockhausen; numbers again referring to certain points of the score (In the booklet the numbers run 1 –5 and 1 – 4, but since that doesn’t make sense in this rendering of the text, I number them 1 – 8, excluding number 2, which only makes sense if you have the score in front of you:

1.	With the toes of the right foot, make large strokes on the floor like a trained horse (“counting”); toes are far forwards, and when stroking backwards, do not leave the floor; when bringing the foot back to the front, knee is lifted quite high.
3.	Stand up straight, shoulders high, teaching the foot as thought it were a student:
4.	Raise index finger as if to say: “I have an idea”.
5.	After each stroke (count) of the foot, nod head and count with fingers.
6.	Suddenly, bowed far forwards, look at foot again (shocked expression).
7.	Lean far back, with bowed legs – one foot on tiptoe.
8.	Make gestures as though continuing to play, suddenly stop – then count the groups again quickly and very periodically: Leave the fingers in the air for a moment after counting each group – look at the last finger which was raised – take the hand(s) away quickly – pause – fist in the air – continue to count.
9.	Happily raise upper torso and head.

Other quotes out of the score might be exclamative instructions like “glücklicher Ausdruck!” (“happy expression!”) and so forth – so you don’t just get up and play the notes in a Stockhausen piece, if you want to adhere to the composer’s intentions. As he has expressed; these are theatrical pieces!

Stockhausen stresses that “Harlekin” was written as a whole. The segments that form the named sections of the work were identified by the composer only after the whole composition had taken on the shape it now has. Of course, this is what we all do when we, in hindsight, learn about the different constituents of language, after we already know how to speak that language; our native language that we absorbed as infants and small children. We do not think about verbs and nouns, datives and accusatives – when we’re children. Only afterwards, in school, do we look back on what we know, and learn how the fabric of language can be sorted out by these terms – and apparently this is the way Stockhausen looked back on his composition, identifying certain – if not constituents – sections of it by their specific characteristics. It is not uncommon to work like this in other disciplines. I have made quite a few recordings of my son Ivan, for example, when he was little, just leaving the tape-recorder on in the room, and only afterwards, when I’ve listened through the material and transferred it onto CDs, have I identified different sections of the recordings with index points and suiting names, like “You don’t know what ‘goodbye’ means”, “I sneak across the street when nobody watches”, “a sack full of eggs”, “God destroys cars”, “Excrements and stars down on the ground”, “Chicken pox music” etcetera from a couple of recording sessions in 1989, when Ivan was 5 years old!

Stockhausen also instructs anybody who is to perform “Harlekin” to play it straight through seamlessly, without any break or pause between the titled sections, letting the piece appear as an organic entity of approximately 44 minutes.

A stylized description of “Harlekin” might say, as Stockhausen puts it in the CD booklet, that the “traditional figure of Harlequin is reborn into a new form – a clarinet player. Harlequin is now a musician through and through. Descending from the heights he unwinds out of a spiral, until, kneeling in front of the audience, he reveals his entire melody. He then winds up into the heights, again in the form of a spiral.”
Stockhausen goes on to say: “The work forms a single, large wave, which expands over the entire range from above, and slows down, contracts into the low register, calmly vibrates there, and then – almost like a mirror image – climbs up again and in the heights contracts to one tone.”

Naturally, this description gives nourishment to many analogies, like the descent and ascent of Christ, for example, or just the way our life, in the consecutive chain of lives, appears and disappears in – from an Eon view-point; an Ylem view-point – a flickering sequence of offs-and-ons, changing so fast - every life passing so fast, replaced by a new one - that the sequence forms a tone, the tone of life, through the bottomless expanses of space and time.

For sure “Harlekin” is an intense, isolated, lighthearted and also serious (lightheartedly serious; seriously lighthearted) moment in time that is appearing to us in a ray of light from the stars; this cunning, artful and subtle – fairytale-like, commedia dell’arte-like – soap-bubble-hovering, soap-bubble-shimmering suspense of artistic imagination.

“Der kleine Harlekin” (“The Little Harlequin”), originates in “Harlequin’s Dance” – a section from “Harlequin” – but has become a separate piece. “Der kleine Harlekin” features a close-knit polyphony of the rhythms played on the clarinet and the dance rhythm. The sounds of the dancing feet of Harlekin are therefore as important as the actual clarinet sounds, really appearing as full-fledged percussion. The three possible methods of performance indicated for “Harlekin” are applicable on “Der kleine Harlekin” too.
“Der kleine Harlekin” – also being a much shorter piece – fully dedicates its duration to the part of the Harlekin character, which indulges in roguish, exuberant dance and a bubbly performance. The piece rocks and rolls, for sure, in a never-ceasing outburst of joyous and cunning energy and wit!

The performances of Suzanne Stephens – to whom both works are dedicated – are outright wonderful, conveying the intentions of the composer in glittering extravagance!

When you first – unknowingly, un-suspecting, laymanish - approach these pieces, you might think they are but interludes in the oeuvre of Stockhausen, with their single clarinet, like divertimentos of sorts – but there are no such divertimentos in the life’s work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Each and every work of his is important, is elaborated, thought-out and realized in the utmost precision. “Harlekin” and its offspring are very carefully carved out to express the exact apparition of sound and sight alike, in its gross-form as well as in its minute musical and theatrical details. Stockhausen here works with the gestures and movements of the performer in much the same spirit in which he spliced tape and worked meticulously with his early electronic pieces. The almost obsessive energy and carefulness with details – and the overall expression – is there, as with no other composer to date.
When a mainstream composer considers his composition finished and ready for the premier; that’s when Stockhausen really goes to work!
This is something to consider and hopefully view as a good example of what imagination, energy, stubbornness and iron will can achieve. I can sort of identify with the feeling, albeit in a completely different field of creativity; biking: When I’m out on a particularly tough round, feeling exhausted after maybe 50 kilometers of fast asphalt, reaching a steep incline, against the wind, I just think to myself, sometimes even aloud: “C’mon Loco, don’t be such a sissy!”, and then I get that extra strength and keep on going beyond my limits, as it were. I suppose Stockhausen must feel that way many times during his compositional and rehearsing act, and he keeps on keeping on!