Originale

''Originale'' (Originals, or "Real Characters"), musical theatre with ''Kontakte'', is a music theatre work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister. It was first performed in 1961 in Cologne, and is given the work number in Stockhausen's catalogue of works.

Composition history

''Originale'' was commissioned from Stockhausen and Bauermeister by Hubertus Durek, manager of the Theater am Dom in Cologne, and his stage director, Carlheinz Caspari, who wanted "ein Stück, in dem Schauspieler, Maler, andere Künstler oder eben einfach »originale« Menschen frei in spontanen Aktionen auftreten sollten" ("a piece in which actors, painters, other artists, or just simply 'genuine characters' would appear freely in spontaneous actions"). It was created while the pair were visiting Finland in August 1961. Stockhausen had been invited to lecture at the Summer University of Jyväskylä where, at a presentation of ''Kontakte'', they met the piano virtuoso and Sibelius biographer Erik Tawaststjerna. Together with the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, a summer house north of Helsinki on Lake Saimaa was put at their disposal, and the score of ''Originale'' was completely worked out there in just two weeks. The "silence" scene, in which the events on stage and the music stop for just one minute, and then everything resumes again, was inspired by the "unearthly" effect of the northerly summer light, which remained in the sky for just two hours or so during which the sun briefly dipped below the horizon, then rose again, "as the birds began to twitter, the fish stirred again, the wind came up, and there was day".

Roles

Performance history and protests

Performances of ''Originale'' subsequent to the twelve first performances in Cologne between 26 October and 6 November 1962 have been rare. Productions took place in New York in September 1964, organized jointly by Mary Bauermeister and Charlotte Moorman, in 1990 in San Francisco directed and organized by Randall Packer, and on 21 January 2007 in connection with a 2006–2007 exhibition of Mary Bauermeister's tetralogy ''Fama Fluxus''—''Mythos Beuys''—''Legende Paik''—''Atelier Mary Bauermeister'' in Sindelfingen.

The New York performances took place at Judson Hall, 165 West 57th Street, across from Carnegie Hall, as part of the second annual New York Annual Avant Garde Festival, during the early performative period of the avant-garde movement Fluxus. Outside the concert hall on the opening night, 8 September 1964, several New York artists calling themselves Action Against Cultural Imperialism, including Fluxus founder George Maciunas, Concept Art creator Henry Flynt, poet, journalist, and activist Marc Schleifer, violinist and filmmaker Tony Conrad, and actor/poet Alan Marlowe protested against Stockhausen as a "cultural imperialist" because of some reportedly disparaging remarks about jazz and folk music he was supposed to have made at Harvard in 1958. Some of the protesters seen before the event were actually performers involved in the piece, including poet Allen Ginsberg who, enlisting the support of Schleifer, extorted his way into the picket line against Flynt's wishes. Claims by Moorman and Stage Director Allan Kaprow that they also joined the pickets have been disputed. Meanwhile, Maciunas had recruited cast member Robert Delford Brown as a saboteur. Brown, performing the part of the Painter, came costumed as a huge papier-mache penis and, some way into the performance, lit a stink bomb on stage. This forced an evacuation of the hall and an unscheduled intermission to clear the air. Edgard Varèse, who had been seated near the front as guest of honor, had a violent coughing attack and had to be assisted out to the street. Needless to say, Brown disappeared during the interruption and in subsequent performances was replaced by the Japanese artist Ay-O, who was living at that time in New York. Thrilled press reviews reported that the protest and sabotage were actually part of the performance, a publicity stunt staged by Stockhausen himself.) Brown disputed the accounts that he was an intentional saboteur or that any rift developed between him and his friend Kaprow. Brown's only interest was to create as outrageous a spectacle as possible and embody the persona of the "Artist." His own documentation left no evidence of being involved in any way with Maciunas.

The May 1990 performance produced and directed by Randall Packer in San Francisco was presented by Zakros InterArts at Theater Artaud. It was the first West Coast performance of ''Originale'' and was the first time it had been performed since the 1964 New York City performances. The production draw from recent technological advancements to introduce digital techniques of sound manipulation and live video, replacing the analog media of the 1960s, to disrupt the linear flow of the work and to enhance its qualities of fragmentation and deconstruction of everyday events.

A performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1964 New York performance was produced in 2014 at The Kitchen by composer/performers Nick Hallett and Zach Layton.

In 2015 the Berlin State Opera produced a new version of ''Originale'' staged by Georg Schütky. It featured a mainly Berlin-based cast (e.g., Irm Hermann, Gerhard Rühm, Thomas Goerge, Max Renne, Vincent Stefan). The performances took place in the Werkstatt im Schillertheater which allowed the realisation of Stockhausen's principle of an inverted arena situation, with the actio in the centre, and the audience around it.

Concept and form

The surreal absurdity of ''Originale'' recalls Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet's books and film '' L'année dernière à Marienbad'', and, in its use of the commonplace, Harold Pinter. It combines the rigorous, tightly controlled compositional form of Stockhausen's serial music with the loosely structured improvisational framework of the early Happenings. The score to ''Originale'' is groundbreaking for its incorporation of performance events and other assorted "actions" into a musical organization with precise "timepoints" or temporal markings, typical of Stockhausen's musical scores. Within the 94 minute duration of ''Originale'' is a performance of Stockhausen's ''Kontakte'' for piano, percussion, and electronics, that is woven throughout the work, providing a central unifying element to this often disjointed work. In addition to ''Kontakte'', the Cologne performances included tape-recorded excerpts from Stockhausen's '' Carré'' for four orchestras and choirs, ''Gesang der Jünglinge'', ''Gruppen'' for three orchestras, and ''Zyklus'' for a percussionist.

An unusual assortment of "characters" are introduced in ''Originale'', including a pianist, a percussionist, a sound technician, a stage director, a cameraman, a lighting technician, an action composer, an action painter, a poet, a street singer, a coat checker, a newspaper vendor, a fashion model, a child (playing with blocks), an animal handler with animal, a conductor, and five actors reading a collage of unrelated texts.

According to the musicologist , "''Originale'' is a musical composition. The macrorhythm of scene continuity and the ordering of moments are musical. The individual scenes are composed musically, regardless of whether or not there is any 'music' in them. The verbal counterpoint is musical, as are the 'monodic' word melodies and the polyphony of speaking voices". ''Originale'' is constructed in 18 scenes, grouped into seven self-sufficient "structures", which may be performed in any order, either successively or with as many as three structures simultaneously, on three separated stages. Each character's actions are specified to take place within a specified number of seconds or minutes, and at one point the actors even speak in what Stockhausen calls "formant rhythms": in a span of four minutes one actor speaks three equally spaced words, a second actor has five equally spaced words, a third has eight, and yet another has thirteen, while a fifth provides a "noise band" of completely irregular rhythms.

References

Cited sources

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Excerpt on ''Originale'', pp. 1–5, 7, 8; reviews reproduced from international press clippings

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Further reading

* Anon. 1964. "Avant-Garde: Stuffed Bird at 48 Sharp". ''Time'' (18 September): 81.
* Colton, Jack. 2014.
Karlheinz Stockhausen's ''Originale'' at The Kitchen
. Snack Art Review (7 November; accessed 23 July 2015).
* Custodis, Michael. 2004. ''Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945''. Supplement to the ''Archiv für Musikwissenschaft'' 54, edited by Albrecht Riethmüller, with Reinhold Brinkmann, Ludwig Finscher, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Wolfgang Osthoff, and Wolfram Steinbeck. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. .
* Fricke, Stefan. 2004. "Inklusieve Vergnügungssteuer: Karlheinz Stockhausens ''Originale'' und Fluxus". In ''Experimentelles Musik- und Tanztheater'', edited by Frieder Reininghaus, Katja Schneider, and Sabine Sanio, 161–165 Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, no. 7. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. , .
* Griffiths, Paul. 1981. "Review: 4711". ''The Musical Times'' 122, no. 1664 (October): 685.
* Johnston, Jill. 1964. "Dance: Inside Originale". ''The Village Voice'' (1 October): 6 & 16.
* Kirby, Michael, and Richard Schechner. 1965. "An Interview with John Cage". ''Tulane Drama Review'' 10, no. 2 (Winter): 50–72.
* Krones, Hartmut. 2008. "Sprachkompositionen in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, inbesondere am Beispiel Österreich". In ''Музички модернизам—нова тумачења: Зборник радова са научног скупа одржаног од 11. до 13. октобра 2007'' ethinking Musical Modernism: Proceedings of the International Conference Held from October 11 to 13, 2007 edited by Dejan Despić, Melita Milin, and Danica Petrović, 231–245. Naucni skupovi, no. 122; Odelenje likovne i muzicke umetnosti, no. 6. Belgrade: Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti. .
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* Oren, Michel. 1993. "Anti-Art as the End of Cultural History". ''Performing Arts Journal'' 15, no. 2 (May): 1–30.
* Prial, Frank. 1964. "''Originale'': A Wacky Show with Frenzied Story Line". '' New York World-Telegram and Sun'' (9 September).
* Rich, Alan. "Stockhausen's 'Originale'". ''New York Herald Tribune'' (9 September).
* Rigoni, Michel. 1998. ''Stockhausen: ... un vaisseau lancé vers le ciel'', 2nd edition, revised, corrected, and enlarged. Lillebonne: Millénaire III Editions. .
* Ruppel, Karl Heinz. 1961. "Neodadisten". ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' (3 November).
* Siano, Leopoldo. 2016. "Between Music and Visual Art in the 1960s: Mary Bauermeister and Karlheinz Stockhausen". In ''The Musical Legacy of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Looking Back and Forward'', edited by M. J. Grant and Imke Misch, 90–101. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. .
* Straebel, Volker. 1995. "'...that the Europeans become more American': Gegenseitige Einflüsse von Europa und Nordamerika in der Geschichte der Musikperformance". In ''Musik, Labyrinth, Kontext: Musikperformance'', 80–94. Schriftenreihe Offenes Kulturhaus, no. 13. Linz: Offenes Kulturhaus des Landes Oberösterreich. , .
*Uroskie, Andrew V. 2012. "Visual Music After Cage: Robert Breer, Expanded Cinema and Stockhausen's ''Originals'' (1964)". ''Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology'' 17, no. 2 (August): 163–169.

External links

Film of the New York premiere, September 1964
on UbuWeb

2007 Originale performance in Sindelfingen
with photographs

Analog Arts information page
about the 2014 production, with a program note and archival photos of the 1961 premiere.

{{Authority control

Compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen
1961 compositions
Serial compositions