Improving the practice and performance of contemporary music

Unanimity

From the 1991 rehearsals:
  • Stockhausen (listens to the reading of the text to UNANIMITY): “Mmh....telepathy!”
  • ‘Extremely long sounds’ is not identical with the instruction ‘repeated sounds over a long period of time’.
  • The plural ‘sounds’ indicates that these must be clearly different from each other.
  • General remark: ‘and’ in one of the texts means ‘together with’ (synchrony and mixture)!
  • (Remark for piano: Do not use clusters in an inflationary way, as a stylistic feature. Clusters only make sense in an artistic way when they are used to contrast single tones and intervals as a dense/too dense chord.)
  • It should become clear to the listener what is happening with the players, in terms of method, objective and background of the given performance.
  • The probability of synchronous entrances (of the short tones) increases with the increase in tempo. A method has to be found to guarantee that more and more single events are synchronous (without giving visual signals). Even in a slow tempo this can be realised, for example with a slow, non-obvious periodicity (if necessary wait until the others have assimilated). The breathing of the other players can also give orientation – just like upbeats.
  • The ideal is a “purely musical”, music-immanent synchronisation – however, simply conducting is clearly not allowed (‘without visual signals’), while other possibilities as outlined above are acceptable.
  • Note: Do not enter when others, or everyone else is playing – this way it is impossible to enter together. (Thus, in a way, listening to the pause of someone else, and the end of this pause, is very important, in order to be synchronous with the following entrance). “You can only play synchronously (with as many as possible) if there is silence before.”
  • For the ending, inner movements, lively inner textures can be musically pursued in a long and soft sound that suggest the expectation of a loud, short and bang-like ending (suggested exercise, if possible almost without crescendo).
  • Another exercise: Play different audible upbeats to short tones that enable the group to enter synchronously. Practiced techniques that generate synchronous entrances ‘will be helpful in the actual performance’ and are a legitimate preparation of this intuitive piece.
  • The upbeat should be a specifically marked attack that makes the “head form” of the next tone recognisable rather than a melody, motif or “group”.
  • Remark: Already two beats can establish a periodic metre that latently continues and later allows for more synchronous entrances.
  • The end of the piece should be characterised by the increasing density of synchronous entrances. But also within the felt, not too slow metre, syncopation and variations of durations should occur. Only the metre is uniform (in order to allow syncopation), which does not mean that the entrances should be uniform throughout.
  • Make your own entrances clear to the others “like an engineer”.