










































  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- 



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[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  



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[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∎  
 
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  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. 

 
 


