The Klavierstücke (German for "Piano Pieces") constitute a series of nineteen compositions by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen has said the Klavierstücke "are my drawings". Originating as a set of four small pieces composed between February and June 1952, Stockhausen later formulated a plan for a large cycle of 21 Klavierstücke, in sets of 4 + 6 + 1 + 5 + 3 + 2 pieces. He composed the second set in 1954–55 (VI was subsequently revised several times and IX and X were finished only in 1961), and the single Klavierstück XI in 1956. Beginning in 1979, he resumed composing Klavierstücke and finished eight more, but appears to have abandoned the plan for a set of 21 pieces. The pieces from XV onward are for the synthesizer or similar electronic instruments, which Stockhausen had come to regard as the natural successor to the piano. The dimensions vary considerably, from a duration of less than half a minute for Klavierstück III to around half an hour for Klavierstücke VI, X, XIII, and XIX.
Klavierstücke I–IV: from point to group composition The first four Klavierstücke together mark a stage in Stockhausen's evolution from point music to group composition. They were composed in the order III–II–IV–I, the first two (originally titled simply A and B) in February 1952, and the remaining two before the end of June 1952. The set is dedicated to Marcelle Mercenier, the Belgian pianist who performed the world premiere in Darmstadt on 21 August 1954.
Klavierstück I Klavierstück I, the last of the set to be composed, was written in just two days, after the composer had previously "merely prepared some measurements and relationships". Group composition is used throughout the piece, permeating its many layers: not only is each group distinguished by the number of notes, range, direction, etc., but even the timescales of successive measures form order-permutations of a series of 1–6 quarter notes. There are six of these series (and therefore 36 groups), and when the six series are arranged in a square: +Klavierstück I 5 2 3 1 4 6 3 4 2 5 6 1 2 6 4 3 1 5 4 1 6 2 5 3 6 5 1 4 3 2 1 3 5 6 2 4
it may be seen that, reading down each column, one always gets the sequence 1 5 3 2 4 6 or a rotation of it. Stockhausen later used one such rotation, 4 6 1 5 3 2, to determine the number of constituent pieces in each set for his planned cycle of 21 Klavierstücke. The important thing here, however, is that each of these duration units is filled out by one of the "sound forms" (or "modes") of the sort used in Klavierstück II and many of Stockhausen's other works from 1952 to 1954. The first group, for example, has notes entering successively to build up a chord, while the second bar has five successive units of silence + sound.
The pitches divide the chromatic total into two chromatic hexachords, C, C, D, D, E, F, and F, G, G, A, A, B. These two hexachords alternate regularly throughout the piece, but the internal order of the notes is freely permuted from one occurrence to the next.) The registral disposition of the pitches is organised independently, around two "bridge piers" located and of the way through the piece. The first alternates perfect fifths and tritones (with one note, G displaced downward by two octaves); the second is an "all-interval" chord, a verticalisation of the all-interval "wedge" series which Stockhausen used repeatedly in works from 1956 to the mid-1960s.
The notation Stockhausen used for Klavierstück I attracted much criticism when the piece first appeared, notably from Boulez, and prompted several suggestions for how the player might deal with the complex, nested irrational rhythms. Leonard Stein's suggestion that the outermost layer of proportion numbers could be replaced by changing metronome values, calculated from the fastest speed possible for the smallest note-values, was later incorporated into the published score as a footnote, but has been dismissed by one writer as "superfluous" and "a mistake", holding that "the piece is playable in its own terms" by any pianist who can play Chopin, Liszt, or Beethoven.
Klavierstück II
The pitch content of Klavierstück II consists of rotations of two groups of five pitches. According to one writer, the piece is a study in vertical note groups treated as electronic tone mixtures, though Stockhausen composed it ten months before his first practical experience in an electronic studio. It consists of thirty groups, each of one bar, ranging in length from to and grouped in five multiples ranging from 4 to 8: 4 × , 5 × , 6 × , 7 × , 8 × . These groups are further organized using a set of characteristic shapes or "sound forms", also called "modes", which Stockhausen acknowledged to have come from Messiaen's concept of "neumes". Their exact nature and disposition, however, are a matter of debate. Register composition is often important in Stockhausen's works, but the only attempt to demonstrate a systematic treatment of registers in Klavierstück II has been only tentative.
Klavierstück III Klavierstück III, the smallest of the cycle and the shortest of all Stockhausen's compositions, has been compared by Rudolph Stephan to a German lied: the (unspecified) tone-row is used in such a way that some notes appear only twice, others three times, four, etc.; the formal concept is that of a continuous expansion. Other writers have held that such appeals to traditional formal procedures are inappropriate, and find Stephan's analysis "helpless in the face of the true significance of the work". Rhythmically, according to one analysis, the piece consists of variants and superpositions of the initial sequence of six values, expressed as two groups of three (long-short-short and short-long-medium)—a possible but surprising early reaction to Olivier Messiaen's rhythmic cell method, whereas Klavierstück II introduces non-retrogradable (i.e., symmetrical) rhythmic patterns, also used by Messiaen. According to another analysis, it is the pattern of the first five notes, and thus a proportioned time structure based on fives runs through the entire piece.
Analyses of the pitch material have fallen broadly into two camps. One, initiated by Robin Maconie, holds that the piece is constructed from chromatic tetrachords; the other, founded by Dieter Schnebel and continued by Jonathan Harvey, maintains that the basis is actually a five-note set, consisting of that same tetrachord plus a note a minor third above (0,1,2,3,6), and ordered as a series: A, B, D, A, B, in a "succession of 5 proportions [that] runs subcutaneously through the whole piece". In a passing reference to this piece, the Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw presents these same five notes in ascending scale order, which he describes as "rudiments of the 12-note series", but does not explain whether his diagram is to be understood as an ordered row or an unordered collection. This same set, treated as unordered, has been taken as a starting point for a lengthy analysis by David Lewin, while Christoph von Blumröder has published one nearly as long favouring Maconie's view. One reviewer has judged Blumröder's analysis as a conclusive demonstration that the tetrachord is in fact the compositional basis, while conceding that Harvey and Lewin's view remains a valid construal of the piece viewed as a finished product.
Klavierstück IV The composer specifically cited Klavierstück IV as an example of point music. Nevertheless, its "note points" are collected into groups and layers by means of some features that remain constant (e.g., a constant dynamic or direction of motion), resulting in a fusion of "punctual" constellations and "group forms", characteristic of all four pieces in this set.
This piece is written in strictly linear two-part counterpoint, and features progressive shortening of fundamental durations by serial fractions. Each note is either followed or preceded by a rest, and so the termination of a note can serve as a reference to a point in time (as an alternative to the beginning of the note playing the same role). The identities of the two contrapuntal strands are achieved not through register or pitch material, but solely through dynamics: one line is loud (predominantly ff), and the other soft (predominantly pp). However, these distinct dynamic categories are eroded over the course of the piece by the increasing addition of intermediate dynamic values. Pierre Boulez was an early admirer of the piece: he praised it in a 1953 article written for Pierre Schaeffer, and sent John Cage a copy of the ending.
One writer believes the pitch structure is built from the opening trichord of the piece, D, C, F. Two others on the contrary describe it as a succession of chromatic aggregates, organized primarily by registral position. This starts from fixing the notes in a perfectly regular pattern of minor ninths, "wrapping around" from the extreme high to the extreme low register (or low to high, depending on the direction taken) as the upper (or lower) limit of the keyboard is reached (twice), so as to create an unbroken cycle. In the ascending direction: C6, D7, D1, E2, E3, F4, F5, G6, A7, A1, B2, B3. From this starting disposition, progressive changing of note registers somehow plays a role in shaping the subsequent course of the piece.
Klavierstücke V–X: variable form The second set of Klavierstücke was begun late in 1953 or at the end of January 1954, while Stockhausen was in the midst of work on his Second Electronic Study. His decision to again compose for conventional instruments was prompted chiefly by a renewed interest in unmeasurable, "irrational" factors in instrumental music. These were expressed by such things as modes of attack involving complex physical actions, or the interplay of metrical time with durations determined subjectively, by physical actions notated as grace notes, to be played "as fast as possible". Stockhausen's collective term for these kinds of subjective elements is "variable form".
The first four pieces of this second set, V–VIII, originally conceived to be of about the same size as pieces I–IV, were composed fairly rapidly, during 1954. Having gotten this far, however, Stockhausen seems to have found them unsatisfactory for two reasons: (1) they were all quite short, and (2) they were too one-dimensional, each concentrating too obviously on one particular compositional problem. Klavierstück V was considerably lengthened from its original conception, and the original pieces VI and VII were discarded and replaced by new, much larger pieces. Though planned at the same time, numbers IX and X were not actually composed until 1961, by which time their conception had completely changed, and the set was only published in 1963, by which time Klavierstück VI had undergone several further substantial revisions. Over the course of this second set, it becomes increasingly easier to perceive the overall, as opposed to local, structure, as the basic types of material become more highly differentiated and are isolated from each other by increasingly significant use of silence.
The original plan for these six pieces, drafted early in 1954, is based on the following number square: +Klavierstücke V–X (matrix) 2 6 1 4 3 5 6 4 5 2 1 3 1 5 6 3 2 4 4 2 3 6 5 1 3 1 2 5 4 6 5 3 4 1 6 2