I too struggle with this piece. Struggle that is, to hear any reason why one 'phrase' or 'passage' should follow another. Struggle to hear whether what goes on in the vertical dimension (ie. harmony) has any coherence or if it is irrelevant to the construction. If it is based on some sort of serial technique I'd like to know what rationale governs the composers choices.
Perhaps Jeremy or someone else has some of the answers and could explain.
You see for me, although some of KS's orchestral and ensemble pieces are fairly approachable if one sticks to reveling in exotic textures and their 'sound design', (Gruppen is an example of a piece that can excite on a purely sensuous level), I find piano music to be the great leveler. It exposes the composers bare musical thoughts without the 'window dressing' of novel timbre or instrumental colour.
I am struggling to find the musical 'content' so to speak...
In Klavierstuck X, if a performer left out say, bars 50 - 60 (random choice to use as an example) would it matter? Would the piece suffer?
This is not a wind up but a serious question. If you reversed the order of notes on one page would the piece lose something? Audibly?
Let me assure you that Stockhausen's
KlavierstĂĽck X has a fully defined, fully worked out and tightly disciplined structure, just as much as has the
Hammerklavier sonata. The differences are that (a) the KS piece is an order of magnitude more complex and (b) a twelve tone idiom is intrinsically (far) harder to understand aurally. Leaving out any part of the work would be as damaging as leaving out a chunk of the
Hammerklavier.
I don't have the many hours it would take (and, in the absence of the necessary skills, access to enough analytical material) to respond adequately. But I don't want to shirk my task so I hope the following will help. I must acknowledge my debt to Jonathan Harvey for his 'bird's eye view' of the piece published in his book on the composer.
Harvey says "the main idea of the piece is a big gesture followed by tiny isolated vestiges or after-echoes of it". I hear that idea, at the macro level, in the overall arc of the work as I said in my earlier post: it's like a comet with a dense head followed by an extended, increasingly etiolated, tail. Of course, this is an entirely novel way to structure a piece so KS has a free hand to decide what the structure is going to be which means it cannot be assessed in relation to any preexisting works - the work stands or falls on whether you think this is an interesting idea to listen to someone playing with for half an hour.
I would suggest listening to the piece a few times without making any attempt to understand it, just to get a feel for how it works as an exercise in exploring this idea of gesture+vestiges.
Having said that
KlavierstĂĽck X is entirely novel at the macro and micro levels, it turns out to be somewhat conventional at an intermediary level: it is in a quasi-sonata form, in that there are four large parts: broadly fulfilling the roles of exposition, development, recapitulation and coda. Of course, the recapitulation is not at all a simplistic repeat of the exposition.
The first part - the exposition - is a big group of ideas followed by six isolated vestiges made up of more less single voice material, followed by six further vestiges characterised by clusters. The rest of the work proceeds similarly as a succession of gestures (formally, groups), each with vestiges.
Check out this YouTube video:
I suggest this one because it shows each page of the score, so you can see where the groups and vestiges are.
The first big group of ideas runs continuously to 3:13. You can hear and see that it is not one long rant, there are many short ideas differentiated by the type of playing used in each - for example, the change of soundworld at 0:31, from the highly decorated, single voice material (actually it's the exposition of the underlying tone row) to massive forearm clusters should be clear. (I'll come back to this.)
Holding notes and letting them reverberate is a big aspect of this piece and these fermata provide easy markers for the listener throughout the work, since every main group (gesture) and vestige is isolated in its sea of reverberation or silence. I think I am right in saying there is no group or vestige that includes a significant fermata, so, in fact, the structure is very simply laid out: every time there is a held note or a silence you know the next thing you hear is a new group or vestige.
At 3:13, the composer asks the pianist to hold four pitches from the material that's just been played and these are sustained to 3:27. The six 'single voice' vestiges are at 3:27, 3:38 (just E, then D sharp, E, with the first E held), 3:41, 3:44 (just one note, G), 3:46 and 4:11.
Then come the six chordal vestiges, at 4:17, 4:27, 4:40, 5:00, 5:48 and 6:00. This last ends at 6:25 and there is then a very long reverberation, broken only at 7:04 by a transitional passage (consisting of one fairly consonant seven part chord followed by a very high A), before the development section starts (in the manner of the opening of the exposition) at 7:31.
The second part has three increasingly long sections, each made up of increasingly short cluster and chord material (groups), each followed by five vestiges (the first long, the rest short, in each case). For the 'recapitulation' (third section) KS, typically, homes in on a previously insignificant idea (repeated notes) and makes a big number of them, followed by the vestiges, once again.
Finally, in the coda, there are three more groups, each with attendant vestiges, the groups becoming ever shorter and effecting "a general mixture and gentle disintegration or liquidation, as Schoenberg would say...".
I've mentioned that there is an underlying set and the thematic material is worked out from it serially. It is hard to hear the set because most of what you hear is material which is structurally decorative. The pitches of the set are shown in the score by larger noteheads (just about visible on the video). The cluster chords have precise start and end points and I would not be at all surprised if the width of the chords was also derived from the set. Nor would I be surprised if the durations of the pauses were also strictly derived from the set (there are plenty of example elsewhere where KS does both these things). A strict analysis of this is beyond me and I don't know of a published one.
Going back to the styles with which the ideas in the first big group are played. Stockhausen identifies 19 ways of playing the keys (he did similarly, later on, in Mantra). These are:
single-voice chromatic or semi chromatic darting fragments, terminating often in some goal note;
2 part chords pp; 3 part chords p; 4 part chords mf; 5 part chord f; 6 part chords ff; 7 part chords fff;
clusters played with the fingers; hands ; forearms;
glissandi: of finger clusters (gloves recommended); hand clusters;
arpeggios up; down;
rapidly repeated notes and chords; one trill;
half pedal; silent depression of forearm clusters in the bass to aid reverberation; silent depression of key immediately after attack ditto.
KS then develops seven "character types" out of this material and these characterise the elements of the groups and the vestiges. So, for example, the first and sixth of the chordal gestures (at 4:17 and 6:00) are made out of forearm clusters, while the inner four use hand and finger clusters (with glissandi). No doubt, you've found the one trill!
Petwhac refers to the sensuousness of
Gruppen. Personally, I find
KlavierstĂĽck X just as sensuous in its own way. The violence, the extreme contrasts, those oh-so-long resonances, the deliberate 'information overload' of the first three minutes - and even the simple utter confidence of the composer - all work together for me. And I just love those cluster chord glissandi (I regret that the recording I've cited underplays them; Frederic Rzewski did a better job).
The recording on the YT video referred to above is by Aloys Kontarsky (still available on Sony?) and was produced by the composer (1965).
How irritating that only the first 'half' of the work has been uploaded by this poster in this form. The same performance (in three chunks not, of course, following the structure of the work) starts here: