Question and answer ARTS

CHARLES REID

Was the Proms performance (first in London) of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen fiir drei Orchester (composed, 1955-57; premiere, Cologne, 1958) worth the trouble? Readers who can't wait for the answer are referred to the

last sentence of this article. For those who can, here are notes about the trouble's nature and extent. For a piece that runs only half an hour there has been little like it in the history of the BBC or mankind.

Three orchestras, each thirty to forty strong, sat with their backs to each other, one on the Albert Hall platform, the others in the arena. There were three conductors—Pierre Boulez, Edward Downes and Michel Tebachnik—who faced and occasionally signalled to each other, Now and then the three orchestras were in direct rhythmic or 'colour' correlation. Most of the time they worked independently and at different tempi. Whether for instrumental groups, solo instruments or 'kitchens,' Stockhausen's writing presupposes playing and conducting of the highest virtuoso standard.

For this single performance (5 September), the sac orchestral department went to work in

April. The score calls for highly integrated per-

cussion teams, twelve players in all. The BBC had three players of their own. Nine others

were specially recruited. The percussion sec- tions alone had a dozen rehearsals beginning in May, supplemented by private practice—as necessary for scores of this type as for the solo parts in piano concertos. Then the three orchestras. Working simultaneously, each under its allocated conductor, these had preliminary

rehearsals in separate quarters—`a hell of a thing to fix, commented a BBC man, 'with re-

hearsal space at such a premium.' But just how many? The official answer, based on the notion that three sometimes equals one, is twelve again.

Since the threefold rehearsals were independent, each with its own boss, I am tempted to put the •score at thirty-six. In a room all to them- selves, no piano to hand, not even a tuning fork, Boulez, Downes and Tebachnik peeled off for four silent rehearsals, beating and count- ing their way through the score and co- ordinating by hand signs. Finally, there were two full rehearsals with everybody pre- sent and astonished to hear what everybody else was up to.

That gives a total on the BBc's reckoning of thirty rehearsals, on mine of fifty-four. A stan-

dard rehearsal is three hours long. It follows that the man-hours put into Gruppen would, on my estimate, spread over most of two years all round the clock.

What did I get out of it?

After three hearings (actual performance plus two runs of excellent tapes, one by courtesy of the Bac) I'm left like several other commentators with only one revelatory passage in my head, namely Gruppen 119 to 122 (inclusive) in a score which runs to 147 such 'groups' or brief episodes. First comes a relay from orchestra

to orchestra of chords for trumpet, horn and trombone sections which swell from very soft to very loud or swell out in the middle only, usually clipping themselves off with savage sforzandos. Then a stretch of earnest knock-

about for solo piano. After that Stockhausen lets loose everything bangable, beatable and clangable; sound and noise escalate elatingly.

The relayed chords for brass (we'd better call them note clusters, perhaps, since conventional harmony doesn't enter into it) are especially good. I could hear them twice a day for a week. On the strength of this blazing page alone, and leaving aside the hard, precise intellectualism of the score as a whole, I am as sure as I can be of anything that Stockhausen means what he writes and that his aim is lofty. He is re- ported to have said resignedly: 'I'll have to put up with being labelled as a clown' The only clowns are those who think a down could con- ceive anything remotely like Gruppe 119.

It doesn't follow that our grandchildren will flock to Gruppen sixty years on as the grand- children of Stravinsky-haters flock to The Rite nowadays. Roger Smalley probably thinks they will. Mr Smalley, who has been profes- sionally associated with Stockhausen, writes about him in the current Musical Times. As it happens, the The Rite is one of his yardsticks. For him Gruppen is a work of 'similar epoch- making stature.' Elsewhere he credits Gruppen with 'Beethovenian strength.' These emphases would impress more if not coupled with gratuitous pokes at another school. In what way are we helped to understand Stockhausen by being told that Penderecki's St Luke's Passion is 'a flaccid attempt at music-making'? Must contemporary music always. be turned into tit- for-tat partisanship, devotion to Composer A being symmetrically offset by disdain for Com- poser B?

According to Mr Smalley's admirable tech- nical analysis, the bits we all fell for the other night are part of Gruppen's main climax. But how relate this climax aesthetically with the `groups' that precede and follow it? By grub- bing away analytically at the seminal tone- row? Or by taking each bit as it comes and revelling in contrasted sonorities, textures and 'densities' for their own sakes? Having tried both methods I report that during my third hearing, as during my first, my mind wan- dered. There seemed no rails for it to run on.

Another way of putting it would be: No structure to explore, take in or be stunned by. At any rate there was none that I could hear or sense. Am I missing something that ought to be as plain as the nose on my face? Possibly not. While praising Stockhausen's all-intervals. tone-row, Mr Smalley warns us that it is no use listening for motives or themes—though one might have expected this sort of thing to emerge from it. The piece as a whole is some- if at formless • . ' he asserts, as though this were on the whole a matter for handshakes all round. Formlessness in the arts, whether `somewhat' or absolute, is something most of us were taught to repudiate lispingly at our mothers' knee; and it will take more than Stock- hausen's powerfully imagined sound fragments to convince me that our mothers' knees were all wrong. In the Albert Hall sound-complexes followed each other in dazzling and dizzying succession, but in such apparent dissociation that I felt the need of something extraneous, preferably visual, to explain them. Not for the first time when listening to 'astructural' music I got the impression of a soundtrack to some brilliant impressionistic film. But the film seemed to have got lost.

In reply, then, to my opening question: Sorry, but I don't think so.