There is a moment near the end of Gesang der Jünglinge — Stockhausen's 1956 tape piece — where a child's voice dissolves so completely into electronic sine tones that you lose the seam entirely, and you realize you've been holding your breath.
The Beginning is not that. It is stranger, more patient, more difficult to place.
What This Record Actually Is
Released on Deutsche Grammophon in 1971, The Beginning collects performances and realizations from Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen — a cycle of fifteen text pieces composed in May 1968 after what the composer described as a period of severe personal crisis. There is no conventional score. Each piece is a short prose poem, an instruction set for intuitive music. "Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe," one reads. "Play a vibration in the rhythm of your breath. In the rhythm of your heartbeat."
What you hear on this record are the musicians of the Stockhausen Ensemble — Aloys Kontarsky at the piano, bassist Eberhard Blum, Harald Bojé on electronium, and Stockhausen himself operating the mixing desk as a compositional instrument in real time — finding their way into and out of stillness. Long silences that aren't empty. Sounds that feel like they're being discovered rather than performed.
It was recorded live in Brussels and Darmstadt in 1969, the tape documents sessions from a European tour where Stockhausen had essentially walked away from notation entirely. He was forty-one years old and had already written Gruppen, Kontakte, Klavierstücke XI. He had nothing left to prove and seemingly everything to risk.
The Sound of This Thing
The engineering is raw in the best sense — no polish, no reverb smoothing, no attempt to make the silences comfortable. You can hear room noise between events. You can hear the physical presence of the performers, the small sounds of instruments at rest.
Kontarsky's piano work here sounds almost nothing like his recordings of Boulez or Ligeti. He's playing in a different state, sustaining single notes past the point of reasonable musical logic until the overtone structure opens up like a window. Bojé's electronium — a small electronic keyboard Stockhausen had the instrument's maker develop specifically for this ensemble — adds these long horizontal planes of sound underneath everything, like weather.
What takes getting used to, and what rewards repeat listening more than almost anything else in the catalog, is the way time works. The piece called Unbegrenzt (Unlimited) occupies most of side two and asks performers to play single sounds "so long until you hear that you should stop." The result is music that genuinely does not care whether you're paying attention.
That is either a problem or the whole point.
I think it's the whole point. After fifteen minutes you stop waiting for the next thing to happen and start hearing differently. The room you're sitting in becomes part of it. The refrigerator. The upstairs neighbor. Stockhausen wasn't being obscure or difficult — he was trying to dissolve the border between listening and living, which is either profoundly naïve or the most serious artistic ambition imaginable.
I go back and forth. Most nights, sitting here after ten, I land on the second.