Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Stockhausen and Abba at home

I realised this afternoon that ours is not a normal household. The wife is in Palmerston North for a while. The seven-year-old was on the computer checking out the website for her current reading, the Rainbow Magic series of chapter books about, frankly, a bunch of fairies. The five-year-old was in the small persons’ living room dancing and singing to the Mamma Mia album I made her from my Abba’s Greatest Hits: she knows all the words to every song. And I was in the grown-ups’ living room reading the Waikato Times and listening to Stockhausen’s Zyklus, a piece for solo percussion.

Maybe all this explains why the wife is in Palmerston North for a while.

Anyway, here is percussionist Nick Tolle performing Zyklus:



But this version below, sound only, is better recorded. I don’t know who the performer is – it’s not any of the versions I own. The music is from 1958 so it pre-dates the Beatles. (That’s Stockhausen in the top row of the cover of Sgt Pepper’s, between Lenny Bruce and W.C. Fields.)

3 comments:

  1. I can understand the Abba, but not the Stockhausen. Your wife appears a sensible woman.

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  2. Does playing Stockhausen in proximity to to small children constitute aural assault by a parent?

    I say - ask Sue Bradford.

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  3. They don't mind it at all. They mind Xenakis - "Daddy, is that music?". But they really like Stockhausen's "Tierkreis", his piece for music boxes. Well, anyone would.

    OK, almost anyone would.

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