Talk:Klavierstücke (Stockhausen)

message: I was wondering if perhaps a table would work better than straight text, given how we have to give similar details about the pieces (i.e. which scene is adapted, from which opera it is taken, whether the piece is for piano and/or synthesizer, etc.). Maybe a table would be easier to read. --Jashiin (talk) 17:41, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I see your point, particularly for the way the article now stands. However, it was my intention when I started this article (and remains my intention) to expand this "stub" information for each piece, to at least match the level of detail given for the first three cycles of pieces. (Keep in mind that pieces XIII and XIX are the longest and most complex of all the pieces.) That would not prevent putting the present information into a table, either to be supplemented with more detailed information for each piece, or to be dismantled when such material is added.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:03, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, I see. The article in its past state has led me to believe there's little information available on the pieces; if there is enough, a table would only complicate matters in the future, and so I won't be adding it. --Jashiin (talk) 12:36, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

text: The amount of information on the later pieces is in roughly inverse proportion to their age. There is in fact a huge amount of material on XIII, rather less on XII, XIV, and XV, very little on XVI–XVIII, and next to nothing on XIX (mainly because it is still unperformed and unpublished). It is nevertheless true that the present form of this section is extremely hard to read, and could be improved with a little judicious editing. I will try to do something about this, even while working up the material on the earlier pieces.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:29, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

text: Over the past week I have added quite a lot of material, particularly on Klavierstück XI. Things have now progressed to the point where I have felt it is time to make separate subsections for XII–XIX, though only XII has a reasonably full description so far. There is still much to do.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:11, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You're doing a terrific job, and the new layout is ideal. If I never suggested, it is simply because I never thought the article would become so beautifully detailed. I wish I could contribute something (I feel kind of wrong that after starting all this discussion here and expanding the article a little bit, I'm not doing much now), but unfortunately bits and pieces on I-X from Maconie's book is all I have here. --Jashiin (talk) 20:34, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

text: Thanks for the encouraging words. As you can see from the current state of the list of Sources (and more to be transferred from "Further reading", particularly when the section on XIII is filled out), there is a lot of material out there beyond Maconie's summary. The sections on VI and X still need a lot of work, as well.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:50, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Formatting in the text on Licht-related pieces 

message: Maconie 2005 gives interesting details on those, actually describing what the pieces looked like (pp. 141–42). But he references them to Toop's article "On Writing About Stockhausen" in Contact 20 (1979), p. 25; given how the Sources section now lists more articles from Toop on the same topic, and perhaps some other articles as well, I think maybe using Maconie as a source won't do, so I won't add the material to the article—but it would be nice if the descriptions of these first versions eventually made it to the article. --Jashiin (talk) 12:31, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, Toop's articles contain much of the material that Maconie merely repeats, but Maconie contributes some original ideas, as well. Unfortunately, in Other Planets he also re-introduced some mistakes from the first edition of The Music of Stockhausen that he had corrected in the second edition of 1990 (following Toop's 1979 article in Contact, which is a review of Maconie's first edition). I am working on adding material from Toop's various articles, as well as some other important sources that have been disregarded so far (Smalley, Decroupet, Rigoni, Frisius). The "other versions" of pieces V–VII will certainly be included.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:36, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  First versions/sketches of V-VIII 

message: I am missing Miec 2004 which is referenced a couple of times in the article but doesn't appear in the Sources section. --Joachim Pense (talk) 11:27, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: This is embarrassing! The item is in the list of Sources, but I mistakenly typed "Miec" instead of "Kiec"—five different times! I have corrected them now. Thanks for pointing this out, Joachim.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:06, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing Source 

message: each time 2:3 times faster than the time before—what does that mean? --Joachim Pense (talk) 14:33, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It means what it says. I don't have the score to consult but, if the first time through the tempo is measured at quarter-note = 50, then the second time it will be at quarter-note = 75 (3/2 x 50 = 75), and the third time at 112.5. This is the proportion referred to in medieval and renaissance theory as sesquialtera.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:54, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the clarification. As a nit-picking mathematician, when I hear: "this piece is two-thirds faster", I would interpret this as: it is actually slower, by a factor of \tfrac{3}{2}. But now it's clear. --Joachim Pense (talk) 08:08, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Klavierstück XVIII 

message: In a review discussion on the German translation of this page, someone challenged Pitches are the only thing not organised in sevens. Rather, they are in sixes, based on the hexachord A F A♯ G F♯ G♯. He is in doubt of the complete tone material is derived from this series; Henck writes about "similar" series that are used in the piece. (Henck: "Ähnliche Reihen verwendet Stockhausen im ganzen Stück. Auch die Akkorde werden aus ihnen aufgebaut, wenn sich bei ihnen auch die Herkunft aus einer bestimmten Permutation der Reihe kaum nachweisen lässt" - "Stockhausen uses similar series in the whole piece. The accords, too, are built from them - of course origin in a particular permutation cannot be shown for them"). --Joachim Pense (talk) 17:35, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, well, I have added all the premiere/dedicatee information to the English article here (I can add the German original of the dedication quotation for XVI to the German version of the article), but I have not yet gotten on to the part discussing Klavierstück X yet. A quick glance at the sentence in question suggests that the person challenging this claim will need to take this up with Herbert Henck, but I shall have to check the citation to be sure I have quoted him correctly.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:06, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

text: Ah! I now see the problem. It is not a question of whether the pitches are organized in sixes (Henck is absolutely clear about that), but the way the sentence was written suggested that all these six-note sets were in the same ordering (permutation). They are not, though their transposition levels are nevertheless ordered by that one hexachord (at least, as far as Henck explains things). It is difficult in a short sentence to summarize even what Henck says in words, let alone what his examples and the score show. I have adjusted the passage slightly, but I fear it still needs improvement.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:58, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pitch organisation in X 

message: In the discussion of the early version of VI, is the unquoted attribution of a narrow, claustrophobic high register also due to Toop? --Joachim Pense (talk) 12:54, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I have condensed the longer original on page 350 of Toop's article which reads: "Stockhausen's major 2nds occupy a mere two octaves in the upper middle range of the piano (almost all of the piece is written in the treble clef). It is the almost claustrophobic insistence on this narrow range and static harmony, coupled with spasmodic, twitching rhythms, that gives the work its character".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:49, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you! --Joachim Pense (talk) 09:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  VI 

message: User:Hyacinth has added an image and sound file, citing Ton de Leeuw's 2005 book. Because of this documentation and because I have not read Leeuw's justification for this analysis, I am reluctant to remove this material, but it looks like rubbish to me (certainly the claim of a "row" is nonsense). For one thing, the pitch structure of Klavierstück II has been shown by Herman Sabbe (as cited in the article) to be based on unordered chromatic pentachords (divided into conjunct trichords), and includes only ten pitch classes until the very end. The first part of Leeuw's diagram, with ten pitches of the chromatic scale bracketed in threes, corresponds to this but, as labelled, attributes it to Klavierstück I instead of II. The pitch structure of Klavierstück I is generally acknowledged to be built on alternating unordered chromatic hexachords ("tropes", in Hauer's terminology). I see that this information is not included in the article as it presently stands, but this is heavily documented. The second part of Leeuw's diagram (G, A, B, B, D) is the inversion of the pentachord proposed by Dieter Schnebel and Jonathan Harvey, not for Klavierstück II (as the caption here implies), but for Klavierstück III. As discussed in the article, the pitch structure of this piece is controversial (and will become even more so with the publication of currently pending doctoral dissertation, which proposes an entirely different explanation for the pitches), but to present an inversion of the pentachord, ascribed to the wrong piece, is certainly confusing for the reader (as is the mis-attribution of the chromatic pentachords to Klavierstück I). I suspect that there may be a misreading here (possibly by Leeuw or his translator) but, unfortunately, my library does not hold a copy of Leeuw's book.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:51, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: FWIW, I have now added a paragraph describing the pitch structure of Klavierstück I. It is completely at odds with the diagram from Leeuw 2005, as noted above. Is it possible that Leeuw meant to refer to Klavierstück II and III instead of I and II? And what on earth does he mean by "retaining the rudiments of the 12-note series"? What 12-tone series, and how do a chromatic scale and a pentachord retain "rudiments"?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:31, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Conflicting sources is not uncommon, and our job would then be to cover their various views. Simply because 'my' source disagrees with 'yours' doesn't mean that either are "rubbish". Hyacinth (talk) 04:47, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

text: Oh, I agree entirely about conflicting sources. But because I do not have ready access to this book, I'm only asking that you check to be sure The Lion actually says he is speaking of Klavierstücke I and II, rather than II and III, and whether he explains any better than in the quotation how a scale and a pentachord might represent "rudiments" of a 12-tone series, and which 12-tone series it is to which he is referring. But if this says what it appears to say, it certainly is rubbish (the documentation already provided is overwhelming), even if Wikipedia does not allow us to say so in the article.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:01, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe you don't know what agree means, or what entirely means. Hyacinth (talk) 06:07, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

text: Whatever. Now that I have actually seen Leeuw's book, and in the light of your very helpful edits to the example, there appears to be no conflict—merely a vagueness on Leeuw's part about whether he believes his two scale examples to be ordered tone rows (very unlikely), or not. Now that there are separate examples for Klavierstück II and Klavierstück III, I have moved them to the discussion of those particular pieces, where I think they help make the descriptions of the pitch structures clearer.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:57, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Tone row for I–IV??

message: In a recent edit to this article, User:Michael Bednarek noted amongst many other things "request explanation of unicode placeholders". I gather that this must refer to the "clarification needed: Unintelligible symbols" notice placed in the section on Klavierstück XI. Since I was the editor who wrote that section, I would be happy to fix it if I knew how. The characters (which display without any serious problems on my various Macintosh computers, running different versions of Safari and Firefox) are not, so far as I understand the term, Unicode, which I have learned to avoid at all cost on Wikipedia. Rather, they are generated by the template , where argument represents a code phrase calling a particular music-notation element. Perhaps that template is in turn generating Unicode characters, I do not know. In any case, these are meant to be duration values: quaver (eighth note), crotchet (quarter note), and dotted crotchet. If this template is not the preferred way of inserting these symbols, what should be used in its stead? Writing out the value names in full would be clumsy and difficult to read. Should graphic files be created and inserted, as I have seen done occasionally on other articles?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:03, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The template  is indeed used for all the musical symbols in that paragraph except those two characters directly preceding my clarification request, U+1D157 and U+1D165 as shown, or not in my case, at List of Unicode characters#Musical symbols. Following information there, I glean that U+1D157 is very similar to a whole note (), and elsewhere I find that U+1D165 is called "Musical Symbol Combining Stem", which leads me to believe that the intended result is a half note () which also seems to fit into the sequence of "two columns of  + , three columns of  +  + , four columns of  +  +  +" — Is that correct? If so, those two characters can be replaced with  (or  for those on the right side of the ditch). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:15, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Aha! Yes, now I see the offending symbol(s). They are partly covered in the editorial markup by the annotation "", and in the displayed text by the generated message! Indeed, there should be a minim (half note), and this is easily repaired. It might be a little more difficult to continue the sequence with a minim tied to a quaver, so perhaps it is just as well to leave off with "etc." at that point! Thanks for the clarification. I will attend to this immediately.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:28, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode placeholders?