Cosmic Pulses

Cosmic Pulses, Stockhausen's last work, premiered in Rome in May 2007. This electronic music represents the 13th hour of KLANG (the 24 hours of the day in Stockhausen's cosmogony). The piece is composed of 24 melodic loops, each with a different number of pitches, between 1 and 24, distributed across 24 registers for a total of approximately 7 octaves. Each loop also has a different rotation speed (cycle), ranging from 240 to 1.17 repetitions per minute.

The loops themselves are superimposed, starting with the lowest and ending with the highest, with tempos ranging from slowest to fastest, and ending in the same sequence. It's easy to imagine that all this gives rise to a band whose movement goes from the lowest to the highest register, with ever-increasing speed and density that first increases and then decreases as the layers end.

To make this less obvious, however, slight speed variations and fairly tight glissandi are applied to each loop around the original melodies. Furthermore, the concert version is distributed across 8 audio channels, and each loop describes a different spatial trajectory (24 in total). Trajectories that, obviously, are lost in this stereo version. Here you can find an accurate description..

I just finished a first listen and personally I find the whole thing quite predictable and disappointing. Even the sound seems old-fashioned. I imagine things change a lot in concert with 8 speakers and a good volume, but this only further dissuades me from buying the CD.

It also occurs to me that other Stockhausen pieces were spatially reduced for disc: from the glorious Gesange (originally 5 channels) to Sirius, but in those cases the significance of the material was such that the music didn't suffer too much...

Back