Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung

What was important for the creation of Stimmung was the fact that I’d just come back from Mexico where I’d spent a month walking through the ruins, visiting Oaxaca, Merida, and Chichenitza, and becoming a Maya, a Toltec, a Zatopec, an Aztec, or a Spaniard- I became the people. The magic names of the Aztec gods are spoken in Stimmung….And then the space. I sat for hours on the same stone, watching the proportions of certain Mayan temples with their three wings, watching how they were slightly out of phase. I relived ceremonies, which were sometimes very cruel. The religious cruelty isn’t in Stimmung, only the sounds, the whole general feeling of the Mexican plains with their edifices going into the sky- the quietness, on the one side and the sudden changes, on the other.Stockhausen-Conversations with the composer, Edited by Jonathan Cott (London: Robson 1974) p.163

The crack New Vocal Soloists of Stuttgart perform Karlheinz Stockhausen’s exuberant Stimmung for six voices in St.Nicholas Church of Ireland Dundalk to close the Lovely Music Festival. Having explored whole new worlds of noise-music and extreme harmony, Stockhausen in 1968 rediscovered pure consonance in this celebration of togetherness and bliss. Very 1968. Necessary still.