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This weekend the SFSOUND organization returned to the ODC theater in San Francisco with its annual SF Tape Music Festival. And tonight's concert was devoted to a complete, and very rare, audition of Karlheinz Stockhausen's HYMNEN -- one of the true classic masterpieces of tape music from 1967.
Hearing HYMNEN in multichannel sound with great speakers in near-total darkness was spectacular. Extreme kudos go to Matt Ingalls, Cliff Caruthers, and the SFSound team for putting this event together!
For me, hearing HYMNEN again after nearly 30 years was like discovering an old friend. This was a very important work for many of us in the late 60's. It showed what could be done in with tape music, almost to the extreme.
HYMNEN is a complex work. And a lot has been written about it since it first appeared. (One good source on the web is this guide by Albrecht Moritz.) It's nearly 2 hours long, in four sections or regions. Dream or nightmare, it contains both electronic and concrete sounds, some from shortwave broadcasts, many national anthems, whole and dissected, voices, distorted noises, and pure tones.
When it arrived on a two-record set from DGG nearly 40 years ago, no one quite knew what to make of it. Looking back now it's very clear that this piece was a major breakthrough in electronic music. It set the bar high for everything that came later.
Considering that this was all done with tape and special analog devices for mixing and transforming sound, without the help of computers or the digital techniques we have today, only serves to enhance the achievement.
Aside from the technical aspects, HYMNEN also has a "spiritual" aspect, common with much that came out of the late '60's, and Stockhausen's reading of the Urantia Book, deep consciousness, and world peace. It all gets mixed up in there somehow.
It's a powerful journey, worth taking every now and then .. a refresher course in what could have been. And, quite a masterpiece.
