page_title: Trans (Stockhausen)
section_title: Stage action
hierarchical_section_title: Trans (Stockhausen) / Stage action
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Basler Fasnacht 05 Français&#160;: Carnaval de Bâle 2005
context_page_description: Trans is a composition for orchestra and tape by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1971. It is Number 35 in the composer's catalog of works.
  Trans is as much a work of theatre as it is a musical composition. It has a somnolent, irrational look and feel, for the simple reason that it is the representation of a dream. Stockhausen regarded it as an important work for himself, a key work and a whole new beginning—a "transcendental piece".
context_section_description: Trans deliberately confounds the expectations of the conventional audience-orchestra dynamic by introducing ambiguities such as the suppression of normal visual cues, an invisible conductor, and—with the exception of the interpolated cadenzas—no visible performer movements (Maconie 2005, 338). When the curtain rises, the audience sees only the string section, in conventional concert attire, seated in two long rows (the second raised on a riser) behind a scrim lit with red-violet light (Stockhausen 1978b, 526, 544). Stockhausen was very particular about the colour of this light: a violet hue interwoven with a red-to-yellowish hue that he had only ever seen in nature during a night-time flight from Copenhagen to Tokyo over the North Pole (Cott 1973, 56 & 58). The rest of the orchestra is concealed backstage, behind a half-wall. The music played by this visible instrumental group forms the slow, chordal "screen" over the invisible, more active layer played by the winds and percussion, who are concealed in the back half of the stage (Frisius 2008, 248–49). The strings play impassively and rigidly, like puppets or automatons, with totally synchronised bow-movements (Stockhausen 1978b, 526). As in the composer's dream, every twenty seconds or so the sound of an old-fashioned loom shuttle shoots invisibly through the air in the hall from left to right. With each stroke of the shuttle, the strings begin a new note. Stockhausen had seen such looms used in Bali in 1970, and the sound also evoked childhood memories of the railroad switches his uncle had operated (Cott 1973, 55). These shuttle sounds were recorded for the piece by Stockhausen's assistant, in a small village in southern Germany (Cott 1973, 58). Toward the end, a startling moment occurs, when the hitherto rigid players suddenly start to sway around, in imitation of conventionally "expressive" string playing, only as mechanically synchronised as ever (Toop 2008, 196).
  This visual rigidity is interrupted from time to time (in fact at the joins between the six main structural sections) by theatrical cadenzas, seemingly in reaction to the tension of the string players having to sit and play like zombies. First, a percussionist marches slowly onstage with a "Basel drum", like the ones still played in the Basel Fasnacht, and with a single loud stroke on the drum prompts the first violist to break into a berserk cadenza, quelled by the next shuttle-loom stroke. Then a stagehand brings out a music stand for the first cello, who plays an impassioned romantic solo, switched on and off by the light on the music stand. A little later, the concertmaster abruptly stands up and, as if in response to cramp, begins a nervous twitching on a single high note, bringing the entire orchestra to a stop. The string players all lean toward him and glare with reproach, and the rogue violinist, averting his gaze, meekly returns to his routine task (Cott 1973, 62–64). At the beginning of Part V, a solo trumpet appears in midair (actually by climbing a ladder behind the concealing wall) and plays a joyful reveille call, ending with a flatulent fluttertongued note, in the spirit of Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel. The final interpolation, however, is an abrupt cessation of all sound for the better part of a minute, an intimidating "silent cadenza", marked at the centre by a triple shuttle stroke in a dotted-rhythm figure. The music then resumes to conclude the work with a dignified chorale-like coda, reminiscent of the ending of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments (Maconie 2005, 340–41).
  The winds, divided into four groups, are out of sight but play the real musical substance of Trans, dividing and re-combining in an attempt to assert themselves and break through into the listeners’s consciousness (Maconie 2005, 339). The music is heard therefore despite the players who are visible, rather than because of them; the strings are more of a visual and acoustical obstruction to the music than its essence (Toop 2008, 196). Stockhausen sought in this way to pose a metaphysical situation, inas
caption: Basel Fasnacht drums
exif: {}