Resting on my bed in the middle of the day I watch crystals of frost glittering through the still air outside my window, as I lie unresisting, letting gravity work its wonder of curved time (Einstein) on my anatomy as it does, gently, with the glimmering frost fragments dancing downward from the blue sky of November.
The splendor of reflections from the descending, dancing precipitation of frost out there has its correspondence in the air around me in my room as I immerse myself in Stockhausen’s choral music of GEBURTS-ARIEN on this CD, which like the previous on Volume 37 can be regarded as an offspring of the opera MONDAY from LIGHT, in a manner similar to what I described in the review of that issue; i.e. the inherent musical and contextual richness in the music of Stockhausen, which calls for a diversity of explicit expressions in different versions. We have seen the beauty that had resulted from these versions before, and this CD is yet another example of the limitless possibilities of this life and this universe, so diligently articulated in Stockhausen’s music and in his artistic example. (I think, for the future, that his personal example will be regarded with as much importance as his music, and for sure, Stockhausen’s life and music are one entity, indivisible, like the character of light, with it’s particle form and its wave form.)

For the textual content I direct the reader to MONDAY from LIGHT, which is reviewed elsewhere on the Sonoloco site. In this review I mostly dwell on the emotional-aesthetical impressions the music itself bestows on me.

MÄDCHENPROZESSION a capella is remarkable in its crystal clarity. It would be all to easy to come up with a blurred or contaminated result, but Stockhausen – who leaves no effort untried – works his music all the way up to the actual CD release, and this guarantees the quality of the outcome.
Nonetheless, it is startling to exist for a brief time inside MÄDCHENPROZESSION in this a capella appearance. It’s like treading into a hall of crystalline pillars, all reflecting each other in the luminous quality of the air itself – and all is fresh, clean; an aromatic fragrance rising out of the score.
This musical light is inherent in the smallest constituents of the music, on a microscopic level, in the glaring jitter of musically subatomic levels, where the interaction of the basic wave formations are causing auditive structures to grow and multiply into the higher order of these clear voices which blend and soar and hover on the level of our perception of beauty.
This choral bliss is a cleansing act unto my perception. I feel as though I’m thoroughly cleansed and rubbed with sweet-scented oils and ointments. There is not one single nuance of disturbing unevenness or incompatibility in here; it’s like a Utopia of pure vocal sound waves.

Stockhausen said at the Courses in Kürten of 2002 – I don’t recall the exact wording – that his legacy is his recordings; that they are what will be left of him; that they are what he has done; the sounding result of his life’s work.
He therefore places a good deal of importance in his CDs, in his Complete Edition, which it is my aim to present here in its entirety, humbly, to the best of my knowledge and intuition, little by little, CD by CD, as time goes by.
For me this is going to school, as I feel I learn important things from each new CD, and even from each time I listen to the CDs. If this is happening to me, who is no musician, but rather an observant listener; how much more will not these recordings mean to professional musicians and composers, who can observe and discern much more than I, as a layman, can appreciate!
I know that Stockhausen has taken measures even to spread volumes of his entire CD output to caches on each continent of the Earth, to ensure – as best can be done – the survival of the music for coming generations even through catastrophic world events. Some may regard this as putting an overly high importance in the works, but I think it just mirrors the importance that Stockhausen puts in life itself, and art as the truest, most refined, expression of life.
Stockhausen also said – again I can’t remember exact phrasings (but I have it on one of the minidiscs from the Courses which I will venture through) – that he is convinced that all his music is recorded anyway, on a higher level of existence, and that it will never be destroyed, also remarking, with a quirky smile from the corner of his mouth and a sudden humorous twinkle of his eye, that he had no idea what kind of play-back equipment would be used for those recordings!

BEFRUCHTUNG mit KLAVIERSTÜCK in the first of two versions on the CD opens with the call for Aimard to fertilize Eve, and the extended, thin web of voices hang like a curtain of shimmering, bleak light across the horizon of the sea, like a backdrop for mirages and visions.

The piano and the choir begin simultaneously, extending in one tinkling elasticity of smoke on the water, as the piano twirls and twists and blowing, wheezing mouth sounds are inserted.
The piano speaks in full, warm, rounded tones, and the choir extends in strata of reassuring tenderness.
The choir appears in between pauses, and the piano ripples and roars, at one section being played on the strings directly.

WIEDERGEBURT introduces a very different vocal texture, quick voices rambling through a pattern of dense, charged but also light motions, on a backdrop of more static layers of voices, like light on choppy sea in the outer reaches of the archipelago, flocks of seabirds on the wind, a salty breeze… and you reach for your sunglasses!

MÄDCHENPROZESSION and BEFRUCHTUNG mit KLAVIERSTÜCK for girl’s choir, piano, choir, modern orchestra and sound scenes (tape) offers yet another rendition of the composition.
It is of great value that Stockhausen takes the time to draw on the inherent richness of his compositions in this way. It also gives an insight into the flowing energies of Professor Stockhausen, that he manages to allow for these ventures in his work day; that he can find space in time to elaborate on works already composed, when one knows that he has innumerable ideas and plans for yet uncomposed works. Most composers, without the urgent drive of Professor Stockhausen, would probably tire already at the prospect of these elaborative deductions, which in Stockhausen’s hands evolve into musical gems of our time.

To begin with this version comes across in a gentle sacral manner, in a universal kind of way, a drone simmering low down, on which the voices paint their shrill signs, and sparse, tingling percussion, or maybe percussion-like tones out of a synthesizer, stand like blue-light points of access through the sliding motion of the vocal body of the composition.
It is easy to get both physically and spiritually moved by these wondrous vocalisms, vibrating on that extended reach-out of a low, droning synthesizer timbre…
In some ways this music is as much a state of mind as it is what we call music.

Considering what I’ve just recently read in the book The Elegant Universe; Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for The Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene, wherein some sections deal with the theory of the infinitesimal strings at the core of matter, which actually are said to vibrate matter into existence by different patterns of vibration, it is not farfetched to feel that the vibrations that spread out of Stockhausen’s music should affect you even in more ways than one might at first realize. Some parts of the aforementioned book – the first book that I feel has given me more than just superficial insights into the theory of relativity and the even more difficult theory of strings – are entitled Pure Music; the Basis for Super String Theory, the Music of String Theory, the Cosmic Symphony etcetera.
Given some knowledge of old Indian writings, such as the Veda scriptures and other examples of important human knowledge over a widely varied field of thought, it seems nowadays that much is indeed coming together in… vibrations!
If it indeed is true that these strings at the core of everything – just one Planck length long; a Planck length vis-à-vis an atom having the proportion of a normal tree vis-à-vis the whole known Universe! – are the vibrating cause of everything, it is only quite normal that the pure vibrations of these vocal works by Stockhausen should have that transforming, cleansing effect that I described before. These timbres of purity may set resonances in motion inside you that put you in obvious connection to the All, or should I say, makes you realize this connection, which in fact is acting on us all the time.

This second roundabout through these same works, i.e. BEFRUCHTUNG with KLAVIERSTÜCK and WIEDERGEBURT in different set-ups, also contain short sound scenes, which only add to the magic. The attendants at the Stockhausen Courses in Kürten 2002 learned a lot about these sound scenes, and about their origin in a rather intuitive tapping into the subconscious, from where these scenes appeared, in the sense that the choice of material for the sound scenes were guided by subconscious energies, subconscious preferences, that I believe were embraced in an almost somnambulistic way by the composer. This is why these objectively unconnected sounds still come across in such a poignant and decisive persuasiveness, after a while feeling completely natural to the listener, in their trans-realistic occurrences.

All in all, this CD – Volume 38 of The Complete Stockhausen Edition (which may well be overlooked in the generous output of The Verlag) – has proven to be one of the most beautiful collections of choral works of sound art that I have experienced. The purity of timbres, the transparency of the sound and the angelic loftiness of the serene vocal progressions are wondrous, mystical.