Klavierstück IX

Stockhausen declared that the Klavierstücke (pieces for piano, or rather, for keyboard) are his sketches. Some, however, are sketches of great scope, such as this Klavierstück IX (final version 1961), with its chord repeated over a hundred times (148 if I'm not mistaken), with different atmospheres and resonances.

Dedicated to Aloys Kontarsky, who performed it for the first time in Cologne in May 1962 in the definitive version of 1961, Klavierstück IX is directly connected to Klavierstück X both because the final section features groups of small notes that will be the distinctive feature of the other, and because despite their different sonic outcomes, both obey the principle, fundamental to Stockhausen, of juxtaposition—understood as dynamic coexistence— of the categories of order and disorder. In particular, the IX is built around the alternation of a chord presented immediately and repeated over a hundred times throughout the piece with rarefied areas of improvisational flavor. As for the aforementioned groups of notes in the final section, it should be noted that these refer to the values of the Fibonacci series of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), from which the metronomic ratios also derive. From this perspective, there is no doubt that Klavierstück IX represents, among the fourteen works composed between 1952 and 1985, the one that best embodies the German composer's fundamental idea of "creating works in which the planes of form and material are totally pervaded by a unifying series of proportions and their combinatorial derivations."
[Note taken from Novurgia]

Here it is performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard

And here it is performed by Pollini in Paris (Cité de la musique) on June 25, 2002

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