Long ago in the seventies, NDR radio aired a tune by GRAHAM HEARN (he was a member of ensemble Gentle Fire, they were playing on "Sternklang"). This tune was entitled CENTERPIECE (or CENTREPIECE) and consisted from organ sounds and the noises from lead-out grooves and scratches of vinyl records.
As my old tape recording is long gone and apparently the track never appeared on record or CD: Does anybody happen to have this piece, or have an idea where to get it?
Yes, I was blown away to see the name "Darmstadt" on all the footage of the control center, and the recording was just the cherry on top, for all us Stockhausen heads. I'm always skeptical of recordings that are sped up or slowed down to make them audible. How representative is this? It's not really. It's a nice sound, but it's not the one this comet is making.
It reminds me of that scene in The Hunt for Red October where the Cal Tech-educated sonar engineer is playing a recording of a "seismic anomaly" for the rest of the crew. They are unimpressed until he plays it 10x faster, where it takes on an industrial sound. He exclaims, "That's got to be man made!" It's a great cinematic moment, but it hardly seems like concrete evidence of anything.
Graham is my grandfather and this work you mention has now been issued on CD as part of a collection of his work with group Gentle Fire which you can find here (I created an account to post here but need to wait before I can post external links)
I feel that it could be useful to have a discussion-forum on the music of Stockhausen. There are so many people from all over the world, young and old, learned and eager to get into contact with this musical world: musicologists, composers, musicians, music lovers; people who plan concerts - who write books or have to give lectures and so on. So there should be much stuff, many ideas that we can share. And when we have open questions, there may be people who studied just that and could give a hint or a stimulus.
A problem might be the English language, but i feel that is the only possibility that many people who are interested can participate. And we can exercise tolerance to mistakes!
Thomas Ulrich
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