Holland Festival Proms - MANTRA

It is 1969 and Karlheinz Stockhausen is staying in Madison, Connecticut. He is there at the invitation of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, having been commissioned by them to expand the Third Region of his tape composition Hymnen with a new part written for

orchestra. One day on the drive to Boston, so the story goes, a melody suddenly pops into his head. He hurriedly scribbles the notes down on an envelope. Thirteen of them, beginning and ending on an ‘a’. And in between them all twelve chromatic pitches, neatly arranged into four phrases. 

Years later, during a reading at Imperial College London, Stockhausen described how the notes also conjured up a visual image: ‘I saw the melody before me, stretched out over an enormous span of time. The same melody circulated around each separate note, but on a smaller scale. Every note a sun with thirteen planets around which a smaller version floated, like a musical solar system.’ His vision would become Mantra (1970), a composition for two pianists, each playing a set of crotales (antique cymbals) and a wood block alongside their instrument. Ring modulators provide electrical manipulations of the piano sounds. The timbre is constantly altered and distorted using the speakers: bell-like resonances and buzzing consonances that at times remind the listener of a gamelan ensemble.

Mantra consists of thirteen ‘regions’, one for each of the notes in the melody. After an introductory series of chords and repeating crotales strikes the mantra emerges in its basic form. Specific techniques give each of the sections that follow their own character: staccato repetition of notes, tremolos, chord-like passages or decorative figurations on the melody, which spread out like spiralling clouds into the musical space. An ingenious procedure of ‘expansion’ of the melody brings in further variety. According to a system of twelve self-designed scales with ever increasing intervals, Stockhausen steadily stretches out the mantra: where at the beginning the melody fits within a single octave (twelve keys), by the end it takes in the full breadth of the piano (eighty-eight keys). 

MANTRA is best described as a steadily extending sound universe, the cosmic dance of an elemental melody with its various expansions and contractions. But, typically for Stockhausen, the composition goes beyond its form: it is a ritual in sound, a meditation on the mystical relationship between unity and multiplicity, uniformity and variety. With its dazzling structure, in which everything relates to everything else, MANTRA also proved to be a milestone in Stockhausen’s oeuvre. After various experimentations with open forms and improvised elements, the composer entered new musical terrain with the melodic formula technique of Mantra, terrain he would explore further during the 1970s with pieces such as Inori, Sirius, Tierkreis and later in his gigantic opera cycle LICHT.

The premiere of Mantra took place during the Donaueschingen Festival of 1970. The performance was entrusted to the legendary Kontarsky brothers, who enjoyed a great reputation as a piano duo in the contemporary music world. With this concert Arthur and Lucas Jussen are following in their footsteps and giving their first performance of a substantial modern work. The brothers were mentored in their preparation of the piece by Ellen Corver, who collaborated many times with Stockhausen, and who gave the Dutch premiere of MANTRA along with Sepp Grotenhuis during the 1995 Holland Festival with the composer himself behind the mixing deck.