Stimmung

Shiraz Arts Festival September 1972: back (standing), technician Volker Müller, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, with the Collegium Vocale Köln (amongst others): Karl O. Barkey, Hans-Aldrich Billig, Wolfgang Lüttgen, Günther Engels, Christoph Caskel, front, Péter Eötvös, Dagmar von Biel, Gaby Rodens, Wolfgang Fromme, Helga Hamm-Albrecht

Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, is a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1968 and commissioned by the City of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale Köln. Its average length is seventy-four minutes, and it bears the work number 24 in the composer's catalog.

It is a tonal and yet also a serial composition.[1] It is "the first major Western composition to be based entirely on the production of vocal harmonics",[2] the first "to use overtones as a primary element".[3] An additional innovation is "the unique kind of rhythmic polyphony which arises from the gradual transformation/assimilation of rhythmic models".[4]

  1. ^ Toop 2005; Stuppner 1974.
  2. ^ Pegg 2001, p. 295.
  3. ^ Rose and Emmerson 1979, p. 20.
  4. ^ Toop 2005, p. 48.