ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III [a] In her article, she listed the two modes of accommodation in the opposite order. I reversed them to better serve the structure of this paper. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. “REMINISCES OF A DEAD WORLD”: NEOCLASSICAL IMPULSES IN STOCKHAUSEN’S GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE ANDREW FAULKENBERRY ✵ ABSTRACT In the years following World War II, integral serialist composers declared their intent to defy all previous musical conventions and eradicate all “rem- inisces of a dead world” from their music. Karlheinz Stockhausen was no exception, asserting his desire “to avoid everything which is familiar, generally known or reminiscent of music already composed.” However, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, de- spite its reputation for technical innovation, bears a strong connection to prior musical traditions. In this regard, Stockhausen resembled the neoclassical school of composers that sought to accommodate antiquated musical materials within a modern con- text. To demonstrate these similarities, I apply to Gesang a model of neoclassicism developed by Martha M. Hyde, a scholar on twentieth-century mu- sic. Hyde identifies two modes by which a neoclassi- cal piece “accommodates antiquity”: metamorphic anachronism and allegory. I argue both are present in Gesang. First, Stockhausen adopts elements of the sacred vocal tradition—including a child’s voice and antiphonal writing—and morphs them into something modern. Second, Stockhausen uses the Biblical story on which Gesang is based as an alle- gory for his own conflicted relationship with the mu- sical past. This analysis reframes Gesang’s signifi- cance and connects Stockhausen’s work to seem- ingly unrelated trends in twentieth-century musical thought. 1 INTRODUCTION Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) is often deemed a musical revolutionary. He claimed that he sought “to compose neither known rhythms nor mel- odies nor harmonic combinations nor figures.”[12] To this end, he was a major proponent of integral seri- alism, a compositional method pioneered in the mid-twentieth century that radically departed from previous musical idioms. Consequently, analyses of his works tend to focus primarily on their pioneering qualities. This is particularly true of his 1956 work Ge- sang der Jünglinge, which is commonly considered a seminal piece in the history of electroacoustic mu- sic. However, such analyses obscure the extent to which Gesang constructively engaged with prior musical traditions. Far from avoiding the past, I ar- gue that in Gesang, Stockhausen sought to integrate antiquated musical and textual materials within his modernist idiom, thus creating a deliberately ambig- uous work that is both modern and ancient. To demonstrate this, I will employ an analytical frame- work developed by Martha M. Hyde to describe neoclassical pieces—works that intentionally refer- ence and comment on past musical practices—and apply it to Gesang. Hyde, a scholar on twentieth-cen- tury music, identifies two modes through which a work might attempt to “accommodate antiquity” and hence be neoclassical: either through “metamorphic anachronism” or allegory.[9] [a] Metamorphic anachro- nism occurs when a composer adopts saliently ana- ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III [b] While Schoenberg was “conservative” relative to Boulez and Stockhausen, his music was controversial in its own right. Schoenberg innovated the twelve-tone serial technique, a direct precursor to integral serialism. However, Schoenberg’s reliance on Classical models drew criticism from the later integral serialists, who felt these forms limited the possibilities afforded by the twelve-tone technique. chronistic materials and morphs them into some- thing modern. Allegory occurs when a composer uses music to dramatize their relationship to the ca- nonical past. I argue that both modes are at play in Gesang. Regarding the first, I will demonstrate how Gesang incorporated and transformed elements of the sacred vocal tradition. Regarding the second, I will offer an interpretation of the piece that treats its narrative as an allegory for the conflict between tra- dition and modernity. In doing so, I aim to challenge the appraisal of Gesang solely in terms of its novelty, instead opting for an interpretation in which the novel and the ancient commingle. 2 BACKGROUND The integral serialists asserted a common motivation: defying the past. Integral serialism es- chewed the conventions—including tonal harmony, symmetrical phrase structure, and strictly metered rhythmic gestures—that dominated the preceding Classical and Romantic periods. Instead, musical de- cisions were governed by a strict series of mathemat- ical proportions. Moreover, serialist composers cap- italized on budding technologies to create unfamil- iar sound worlds. They extended experiments pio- neered by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) in musique concrète, a compositional approach founded in 1948 in which sounds recorded with new magnetic tape technology were manipulated to create novel sonic effects.[20] Likewise, with the advent of synthe- sizers, composers began to write elektronische Musik, an approach emerging in the 1950s in which composers generate unheard timbres from scratch rather than confining themselves to the timbres of traditional acoustic instruments.[6] Perhaps the most vivid summary of the prevailing ethos was given by prominent serialist Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), who claimed that “all art of the past must be de- stroyed.”[16] Stockhausen shared these ideological im- pulses. He declared his intent “to avoid everything which is familiar, generally known or reminiscent of music already composed.”[12] Such inclinations are also reflected in his analytical writing. In his mul- tivolume Texte (1963–1971), which contained both theoretical writings and analyses of specific pieces, he sought to develop a new analytical language commensurate to the new musical language.[13] Like Boulez, Stockhausen took great pains to craft a nar- rative of historical discontinuity; he sought to break free from, rather than extend, previous convention. In turn, existing literature on Gesang der Jünglinge tends to focus on its groundbreaking qualities. It has been lauded for dissolving the barri- ers between musique concrète (i.e., manipulating extant sounds) and elektronische Musik (i.e., con- structing new sounds ex nihilo), which had previ- ously remained largely separate.[4] Additionally, whereas prior serial compositions were constructed out of “fixed” values, such as discrete pitches, dy- namic levels, and rhythmic values, Gesang’s series was comprised of “non-stationary” shapes that evolved from one state to another over time.[5] Ge- sang also advanced a new “statistical” approach to composition in which smaller musical events are conceived as contributing to large-scale perceptual phenomena called Gestalts.[25] In many ways, Stock- hausen’s musical decisions mirrored his ideological assertions. Such a trailblazing approach directly op- posed that of the neoclassicists, more conservative composers who believed the “art of the past” must be revered rather than destroyed. One composer commonly associated with neoclassicism was Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951).[b] Emphasizing the con- nection between his music and his predecessors’, Schoenberg claimed, “my teachers were primarily Bach and Mozart, and secondarily Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner …”[19] Further, his String Quar- tet No. 3 Op. 30 (1927) was explicitly modelled after Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in A Minor, D 804 (1824).[17] Integral serialist composers were critical of this approach. Boulez, for one, derided Schoen- berg’s propensity to model his works on older ones, believing it led to the “decrepitude” of Schoenberg’s works. Rather than hearing connections to a rich his- ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III tory in Schoenberg’s music, Boulez heard “remi- nisces of a dead world.”[2] Given the integral serialists’ animosity to- ward the neoclassicists’ approach, one would not ex- pect many similarities between their respective works. Yet I contend that Gesang der Jünglinge de- fies this expectation; it integrates prior traditions in ways strikingly analogous to the works of past-rever- ent composers like Schoenberg. I will subsequently demonstrate this by analyzing Gesang within scholar Martha M. Hyde’s model of neoclassicism, which identifies metamorphic anachronism and allegory as common features of neoclassical works. Admittedly, orienting Stockhausen within this framework may seem incongruous, or at the very least unorthodox. Indeed, I intend it to seem incongruous. The fact that Stockhausen and the neoclassicists appear so dis- similar, perhaps even antithetical, makes the revela- tion of their hidden commonalities even more strik- ing. However, I do not mean to claim that there are no relevant differences between Stockhausen and the composers who are commonly considered neo- classical. Rather, I intend to demonstrate that Stock- hausen drew from the past in remarkably similar ways to the neoclassicists, contrary to what his rheto- ric would suggest. Despite his self-proclaimed de- sire to avoid the familiar, Stockhausen too did not entirely eradicate from his music the reminisces of a dead world. 3 DEFINING NEOCLASSICISM Analyzing Stockhausen within a neoclassical lens is difficult given the notorious ambiguity of the term “neoclassicism.” In its narrower definition, neo- classicism is a style most strongly associated with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and characterized by features like “clarity, simplicity, ob- jectivity, purity, refinement, constructive logic, conci- sion, sobriety, and so on.”[11] Such characteristics, though vague, are generally understood to refer to elements of Classical and Baroque styles, as con- trasted with the emotional indulgence of the Roman- tic era. By this definition, a neoclassical work would be one that seeks to reinstate the order of Classical style. However, this categorization of neoclassic- cism as a style creates as much confusion as it dis- pels. Because different composers elaborated upon the work of the Classical “masters” in radically differ- ent ways, the composers who eventually became as- sociated with neoclassicism do not represent any unified style. For instance, both Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s neoclassical works are deeply influ- enced by elements from the Classical era, yet they bear little stylistic resemblance to one another. It was this vagueness that led many to repudiate the term’s usefulness, as when composer-theorist Milton Bab- bitt (1916–2011) called it a “catch phrase… to be talked about by those who could not and should not talk about the music.”[24] Hyde attempts to recoup some of the term’s value by defining it not as a style, but more broadly as an ideological orientation. She claims that “to be neoclassical” is to “striv[e] to be modern as well as ancient.”[9] That is, a piece is neoclassical if it saliently attempts to accommodate antiquity within a modern context. This conception of neoclassicism concerns itself less with the Classical in its capital-c sense (i.e., referring narrowly to the Classical era), and more with the colloquial (lowercase-c) definition of a “clas- sic” work: “a past work that remains or becomes rel- evant and available as a model, or can be made so through various techniques of accommodation.”[9] It is in this broader sense that I will employ the term. There are two possible objections to this conception of neoclassicism. The first is that by pri- oritizing ideology over style, Hyde’s model departs too radically from the common understanding of ne- oclassicism and is thus more of a re-definition than a definition. However, Hyde’s model is built induc- tively from four musical examples commonly associ- ated with the term. Far from erasing the common sense of the term, Hyde elaborates upon it, observ- ing the characteristics that unify the term’s diverse usage. The second potential objection is that Hyde’s conception is too broad to meaningfully de- scribe any unified concept. Scott Messing notes that early twentieth-century European composers almost unilaterally felt “obliged to relate themselves to the history created by their forebears.”[11] As a result, he writes, “almost every major figure composing during ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III [c] Daniel 3:5 (NIV). [d] Daniel 3:6 (NIV). the first three decades of [the twentieth] century was tied, loosely or umbilically, to this term.”[11] By impli- cating Stockhausen in this trend, I run the risk of complicating matters even further. But, finding that a term is broadly applicable does not necessarily im- ply it is too broadly defined. Hyde names a specific ideological value and further articulates specific methods by which composers tended to attain it (al- legory and metamorphic anachronism). Such ele- ments are by no means universal, nor are they super- ficial: they have deep implications for the intent and impact of a work. Thus, if we are surprised by the broad applicability of her model, it is not because she defines the model too loosely. Rather, it is be- cause the aesthetic values the model describes are more widespread than we originally supposed. 4 MODE I: METAMORPHIC ANACHRONISM The first mode of accommodating antiquity is “metamorphic anachronism.” Though Hyde frames it as a single phenomenon, it is useful to view it as a composite of two processes. On one hand, anachronism entails adopting an incongruously anti- quated style or idea; on the other hand, metamor- phosis entails subjecting a basic material to some form of transformation. These two processes should be understood as distinct, because either could con- ceivably occur without the other. For instance, if a twentieth-century piece were written in strict imita- tion of Mozart, it would be anachronistic but not met- amorphic. Conversely, Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète piece Etude aux chimens de fer (1948) is metamorphic in that it transformed its constituent materials, but it is not anachronistic since those con- stituent materials (recorded sounds of trains) were not antiquated.[14] Hyde’s model of neoclassicism requires the confluence of both processes. That is, a piece exhib- its metamorphic anachronism only if it first adopts an anachronistic idea and then applies some metamor- phic process by which the anachronism becomes “modern.” For instance, Schoenberg’s third string quartet is rightfully considered neoclassical because it adopts stylistic and formal elements of Schubert’s A minor string quartet (anachronism) and transforms these elements through application of his twelve- tone technique (metamorphosis). To establish that metamorphic anachronism is also present in Ge- sang, it must be independently shown both that the piece is anachronistic and that it is metamorphic. ANACHRONISM Anachronism entails juxtaposing elements from dis- parate eras. In the case of Gesang, Stockhausen jux- taposes a modernist musical aesthetic against a Bib- lical story from the Book of Daniel, Chapter 3. In this story, the king Nebuchadnezzar constructs a giant idol out of gold and decrees that people of all na- tions and languages must worship it whenever they hear “the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music.”[c] He threatens that those who refuse “will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.”[d] When three Jews—Shadrach, Me- shach, and Abednego—refuse to worship the false idol, Nebuchadnezzar orders them thrown into the fire. But instead of perishing, the three young men are protected by an angel and emerge from the flames unharmed. They sing a song praising God; excerpts of this song comprise Gesang’s text. Such a subject matter was a stark departure from previous serial experiments in elektronische Musik and musique concrète. Prior avant-garde pieces had borne abstract titles, such as Stock- hausen’s Konkrete Etüde (1952) and Studien I & II (1953–1954), Boulez’s Études I & II (1951–1952), or French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Timbres-durées (1952). With such titles, composers deliberately dis- tanced themselves from any historical references. In stark contrast, Gesang’s use of Biblical verse impli- cated a rich history of religiously inspired artwork. To employ a subject as traditional as Biblical verse, then, would seemingly contradict the serialists' purported desire to distance themselves from past tradi- tions. Yet in Stockhausen’s original vision for the piece, the anachronism was even more striking. He initially intended the piece as an explicitly liturgical ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III work to be premiered in the Cologne Cathedral. However, the Cathedral, sensing the incongruity, re- jected his proposal on the grounds that loudspeak- ers would be inappropriate in a cathedral.[21] Only af- ter being forced to revise his concept did Stock- hausen decide upon the story of the youths in the furnace. The voice that carries this text also bears the mark of the ancient. The human voice—used in Chris- tian liturgical settings since at least 700 A.D.—has a well-established link to antiquity.[10] The boy soprano specifically recalls the sound of the now-archaic cas- trati, boys who were castrated by the Church before puberty to preserve their pure vocal tone.[4] Further, the use of several loudspeakers that surround the congregation recreates the spatial acoustics of a ca- thedral. Indeed, Stockhausen originally intended the speakers to be suspended above the congregation, as if coming from Heaven itself.[8] Similarly, by some- times isolating a single vocal track and other times layering many vocal tracks atop one another, Stock- hausen mimics antiphony between a cantor and a chorus of singers.[4] And, as Russell Wallace Chait notes, Gesang’s fluctuation between clearly audible text and obscured text alludes to the ancient debate over intelligibility of text in church music, dating back to the Council of Trent.[4] Gesang’s sonic characteris- tics thus establish a firm link to the Christian sacred vocal tradition. METAMORPHOSIS These anachronistic materials—both the sound of the boy’s voice and the text it conveys—were then “ac- commodated” within modernity by subjecting them to metamorphic processes. Gesang was influenced by musique concrète, which is metamorphic by its very nature. Pierre Henry (1927–2017), one of the genre’s pioneers, thought of musique concrète as an approach in which sound is used like a physical ma- terial, able to be “render[ed]… plastic like sculp- ture.”[1] Accordingly, concrète composition entailed literally transforming a physical material (magnetic tape) by cutting it, reversing it, changing its playback speed, and so on. As a result, the recorded sound was also morphed, so that the new sound might bear some resemblance to the original but would acquire unique sonic properties distinct from those of its source. In Gesang, the source material subjected to such manipulation is the recorded boy soprano. The tape, then, served as a physical proxy for the boy’s voice; as Stockhausen spliced the tape, he transfig- ured the voice. Since the boy soprano’s voice itself was a proxy for sacred vocal music at large, Stock- hausen’s tape manipulations represented a meta- morphosis of the sacred vocal tradition. In fact, it is unlikely such a rigorous piece could have been realized at all if not for tape’s capac- ity to transform the boy’s voice, for Stockhausen’s compositions were demandingly precise. Pitches were expressed not as chromatic notes, but as fre- quencies, while durations were expressed not in beats, but in centimeters.[22] As Pierre Schaeffer later remarked, this musical style made traditional nota- tion “anachronistic through a rigor so absolute that the approximations of traditional scores paled be- fore such precision.”[18] What was truly “anachronis- tic,” however, was not the notation per se, but that Stockhausen would ask a singer (for whom such tra- ditional notation would typically be necessary) to ex- ecute such precise music, rather than a synthesizer. At least in part, the limitations of traditional notation reflect the limitations of performers themselves. Thus Josef Protschka, the boy whose voice appears on Gesang, could only approximate Stockhausen’s vision by mimicking synthesized sine-tones played through headphones.[12] The remainder of Stock- hausen’s vision had to be accomplished through tape manipulation. Thus, the demands of serial tech- nique required the boy’s voice be transfigured into something more “plastic” than human physiology would typically allow. The addition of synthesized tones further morphed the voice into something altogether for- eign, perhaps even inhuman. Stockhausen conflated the sound of the voice and the synthesizer, so that it is unclear where one begins and the other ends. He achieved this effect by creating synthesized ana- logues of vocal phonemes. Sine-tones (pure elec- tronic tones) were combined so as to imitate the overtone structure of various vowel sounds; filtered white noise imitated fricative and sibilant consonants (e.g., f, th, s, sh); and electronic “impulses” (percuss- ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III sive sounds with a natural decay) imitated plosive consonants (e.g., p, b, t, d).[5] Further, Stockhausen’s serial design did not treat these vocal and synthe- sized phonemes separately. Instead, he integrated them on a single continuum of sounds, so that they would seamlessly blend with one another.[5] Such blending is at times made explicit, as when the final consonant of the word Eis is transformed into a syn- thesized hiss or when the final consonant of Mond is followed by an explosion of electronic sounds re- sembling plosive consonants.[23] Stockhausen blurs the distinction between electronic and acoustic, morphing the voice into something that is both fa- miliar and new. 5 MODE II: ALLEGORY If metamorphic anachronism concerns how antiquated materials are employed in modern con- texts, then allegory concerns why: for what rhetorical purpose are these antiquated materials employed? J. Peter Burkholder suggests that many twentieth- century composers used musical materials and structures as allegories for their relationship with the canonical past.[3] For instance, he argues Schoen- berg’s preference for continuous variation rather than direct repetition stemmed from a desire to de- velop upon, but not to repeat, his forebears. Con- versely, John Cage—a composer as far from a neo- classicist as is conceivable—embraced randomness and unpredictability in his music, thus negating any deliberate relationship with the past. Through their music, composers attempted to define their relation- ship to their forebears. The same is true of Stockhausen. In fact, Ge- sang contains even greater allegorical potential since it portrays a literal narrative. The story of the three youths lends itself particularly well to allegori- cal reading in that it deals with the archetypical themes of persecution and perseverance, which can be mapped onto many different situations. The boys broadly represent purity, innocence, and steadfast- ness. King Nebuchadnezzar and the furnace repre- sent destructive forces that threaten such purity. The ubiquity of these themes makes the story amenable to allegorical readings. However, its flexibility also raises the possi- bility of several contradictory interpretations. In- deed, the allegorical subtext of Gesang is seemingly paradoxical. On one hand, Stockhausen asserts that modernity—specifically, integral serialism—is being “persecuted” by past-obsessed critics. On the other, it is antiquity that is “persecuted” by modernity which threatens to consume it in a flurry of electronic flames. The contradiction between these allegories demonstrates Stockhausen’s complex relationship with modernity and antiquity. PERSECUTION OF MODERNITY In a 1998 interview, Stockhausen claimed he person- ally identified with the youths in the flames. Regard- ing the composition of Gesang, he said: “…I myself felt like a young man in the furnace at that time. Everything I did was aggressively turned down and damned by the music journalists and musicologists of the time. There was a professor Blume, chairman of the German Musicolog- ical Society, who in a large text wrote that Stockhausen was laying the ax to the roots of music and was destroying all of occidental music. Therefore, I felt so like the young men in the furnace, and I could only pray that St. Michael would come and pull me out of the flames.”[15] Stockhausen felt persecuted by reactionaries as the youths were persecuted by Nebuchadnezzar, forced to bow to an idol in which he did not believe (i.e., the tastes of journalists and musicologists). While it may seem hyperbolic to compare musical criticism to the religious persecution the youths faced, Stock- hausen’s aesthetic values were so deeply intertwined with his faith that an attack on one would constitute an attack on the other. He claimed: “…the proportions in my music have always been related to everything I learn from the nature of the stars and galaxies and, on the other hand, from the atoms and molecules, and the cells. Everything in my music is an extension of what I ex- perience as Creation—how Creation is composed.”[15] Stockhausen believed the strict mathematical pro- portions governing serial music mirrored the or- derly, mathematically-precise processes governing the cosmos. To him, serialism was the inevitable re- sult of striving toward a more perfect, God-lier mu- sic. Thus, the severe aesthetic criticism levelled at Stockhausen was, in effect, a form of religious perse- cution. ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III PERSECUTION OF ANTIQUITY Although Stockhausen saw serialism as an expres- sion of faith, serialism also posed the risk of obscur- ing, or even altogether destroying, the message of faith conveyed by Gesang’s text. While in a more tra- ditional vocal setting the vocalist is made the focal point and the music is subservient to the text, inte- gral serialism is predicated on “the calculated parity of parts” within an ensemble, vocalist included.[12] In fact, privileging the comprehensibility of the text might “jam the precise inner workings of serial schemes.” [12] So, to conform to serial ideals, the text had to be subsumed within the serial scheme, not served by it. Stockhausen confirmed this conception of the relationship between music and speech in his 1958 article Musik und Sprache, in which he advo- cated for a progressive “transition from speech to music” in serial vocal music.[12] For a piece based on Biblical text, this has troubling allegorical implications, especially since the voice delivering said text had such strong ties to church tradition. Strict adherence to serialist princi- ples, in which the vocalist is wholly subsumed by the series, would amount to the youths’ metaphorical destruction. In this light, modernism is the furnace into which the boys are thrown. In fact, Gesang’s wild bursts of electronic impulses strongly resemble bursts of flames. Some critics were inclined to hear the piece in these terms. In a piece entitled “Wider die Natur!” (“Against Nature!”), one went so far as to say that Stockhausen was condemning the youths, a “gift of the divine,” to a “hellish” electronic sound world.[12] Thus, we are faced with two conflicting alle- gories: one in which antiquity persecutes modernity and one in which the opposite is true. AN INCOMPLETE STRUGGLE While these allegorical interpretations might seem irreconcilable, the apparent contradiction demon- strates Stockhausen’s desire to simultaneously ac- commodate the old and the new. As a result, in Ge- sang, neither persecutor prevails. The old, of course, was not able to eradicate the new; if Stockhausen was thrown into the furnace by his critics, he clearly survived the flames. The remarkable success Gesang has enjoyed since its premiere proves as much. Nor was the new able to eradicate the old. Though his serial methods sometimes partially obscured the Biblical text, Stockhausen did not render the text (and its attendant meanings) altogether incompre- hensible. By incorporating the text at varying de- grees of comprehensibility, he guaranteed that, at least sometimes, the message of the text would be heard clearly.[5] Moreover, the phrase that is articu- lated most clearly, Preiset den Herrn (Praise ye the Lord), is also the most crucial to the text’s meaning. Neither the ancient nor the modern successfully de- stroys the other; they coexist in an uneasy tension. The sense of open-ended conflict is re- flected in the piece’s inconclusive ending. Stock- hausen originally intended to compose seven sec- tions (labelled A-G), but due to time constraints, he was able only to complete the first six.[5,15] While it may seem unfair to attribute meaning to composi- tional decisions made for such a prosaic reason, I contend they have symbolic significance. By elimi- nating section G, Stockhausen partially compro- mised his modernist ideal of mathematical perfec- tion; the attention to detail demanded by his serial designs proved too time-consuming to be feasible. Since the serial design was itself incomplete, any de- struction of antiquity it might entail would also nec- essarily be incomplete. Further, because the end of section F pro- ceeds without transition into the closing gesture, which was originally intended to come later, the piece’s ending sounds abrupt and uncertain.[5] This suggests that the end of the piece is not where the conflict between old and new truly ends; it is ongo- ing, perhaps even perpetual. The ancient will con- tinue to struggle against annihilation by the modern and the modern will continue to face resistance from an inert past. Gesang demonstrates that such tension can be constructive. In fact, both antiquity and modernity are reaffirmed having been challenged by each other, much like how the Biblical youths’ faith is reaf- firmed after being challenged by the flames. By plac- ing ancient traditions in a modern context, Stockhau- sen revitalized these traditions, demonstrating their continued relevance in the era of electronics. Like- wise, by incorporating familiar Biblical themes, he ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III clarified the religious subtext of his pieces, which had previously been opaque. In Gesang, the tension between old and new led to creation, not destruc- tion. 6 CONCLUSION Stockhausen outwardly presented himself as one who defied convention; he was a “past-de- stroyer.” Yet, his relationship to his musical forebears was more complex than such rhetoric would imply. In Gesang der Jünglinge, rather than destroying an- tiquity, he sought to accommodate it within a mod- ern idiom. The piece is based on Biblical text and its musical elements are deeply informed by the sacred vocal tradition. Through tape manipulation and the addition of the synthesizer, these elements are trans- figured into something that is both familiar and novel. Furthermore, Stockhausen employed the story of the youths allegorically, using it to demon- strate his contradictory identification with both the old and the new. Thus, Gesang is simultaneously modern and ancient; in this broad sense, it is a “ne- oclassical” work. This account of Gesang helps reframe the piece’s significance, both within serial composition and twentieth-century music overall. Early electronic serial compositions, by virtue of their abstractness, remained divorced from the rich network of mean- ings afforded by tradition. Gesang bridged this di- vide; it brought tradition into the realm of the mod- ern, thereby revitalizing both. Paradoxically, Gesang was innovative because it looked backwards. Rather than abandoning the “reminisces of a dead world,” Stockhausen reinvented them to create a world anew∎ 7 REFERENCES [1] Battier, Marc. “What the GRM Brought to Music: From Mu- sique Concrète to Acousmatic Music.” Organised Sound 12, no. 3 (2007): 189–202. [2] Boulez, Pierre. “Schoenberg is Dead.” In Notes of an Appren- ticeship, 268–279. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1968. [3] Burkholder, J. Peter. “Musical Time and Continuity as a Re- flection of the Historical Situation of Modern Composers.” The Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4 (1991): 411-29. [4] Chait, Ross Wallace. “Gesang Dream: Functions of Faith in Stockhausen’s Electric Mass.” Perspectives of New Music 52, no. 3 (2014): 185–196. [5] Decroupet, Pascal and Elena Ungeheuer. “Through the Sen- sory Looking-Glass: The Aesthetic and Serial Foundations of Gesang der Jünglinge.” Translated by Jerome Kohl. Per- spectives of New Music 36, no. 1 (1998): 97–142. [6] Emmerson, Simon, and Denis Smalley. "Electro-acoustic mu- sic." 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[21] Smalley, John. “Gesang der Jünglinge: History and Analysis.” Columbia University Department of Music. 2000. [22] Stockhausen, Karlheinz. Gesang der Jünglinge, El- ektronische Musik: Faksimile-Edition 2001. Kürten: Stock- hausen Verlag, 2001. [23] Stone, Kurt. “Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gesang der Jünglinge (1955/56).” The Musical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1963): 551-54. [24] Taruskin, Richard. “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideol- ogy.” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 3 (1993): 286-302. [25] Ungeheuer, Elena. “Statistical Gestalts – Perceptible Features in Serial Music.” In Music, Gestalt, and Computing – Studies in Cognitive and Systematic Musicology, 103–113. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1997. ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE III Andrew Faulkenberry is a senior undergraduate at Rutgers studying music composition. As a composer, his works have been premiered by groups including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Rutgers Wind En- semble, and Julius Quartet. Andrew is also a recipient of the Presser Foundation Undergraduate Scholar Award. Andrew’s research began during an independent study with Dr. Rebecca Cypess and was subsequently com- pleted independently. It was motivated by a broader interest in twentieth-century musical aesthetics and their underlying ideologies. Particularly, Andrew became fascinated by two contradictory narratives that pervaded twentieth-century musical thought. On one hand, composers were concerned with “forward progress” and sounding “modern”. Yet, on the other, they sought to demonstrate their connection to a fixed canon of “classic” works. Through his research on Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew hopes to demonstrate that these contradictory desires influenced even the most radical composers.