Sara Overholt

Stockhausen¿s Musical Shapes: How a Master Composer Moves Sound Sara Overholt

Karlheinz Stockhausen's music defies convention, and hence standard analytical techniques are not enough to approach a full understanding of this colorful and profound repertory. This book provides a new pictorial approach to illuminate structures of spatial designs on the surface and at deeper structural levels within two of Stockhausen's masterworks, chosen as examples of his formative and mature styles respectively: Gruppen (1957) and Oktophonie (1991). In both his acoustic and electronic compositions, Stockhausen found ways of creating sounds that seemingly fly around the performance space. This study addresses just how these "magic spots" of aural illusion were crafted in these two works, and, with Gruppen in particular, assesses the importance of the sole electric guitar part in the three-orchestra texture and shows how Stockhausen wove his own signature into the row design (a discovery that has so far gone unnoticed by scholars). This book should be especially interesting to music theorists, composers, guitarists, those who enjoy post-tonal music or code breaking, and anyone who follows the career of the great German master composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.