Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen is an ever-evolving electronic, concrete collage of national anthems from around the world, interspersed with short-wave broadcast noise, tape manipulation and electronic effects. Swarming, sped-up music sharply pans across the stereo field. Familiar melodies swim to the surface. Existing initially in 1966 as exclusively a tape piece, it then progressed to include 4 soloist musicians and by 1969 a ‘Third Region’ was added, where an orchestra played alongside the tape.
Inherently, the anthems ‘sampled’ by Stockhausen provide a source-bonded experience. Recognising certain ubiquitous melodies like the Russian anthem in spite of their manipulation is part of the experience. I almost imagine it was, in the late 1960s, what aliens would have heard listening to Earth: A chaotic, all-noise-at-once-from-everywhere compilation of international chatter. There’s a ‘satellite’s eye view’ quality, an overhead-ness I feel when listening to this piece. It’s kitchen sink electroacoustic music.
The way Stockhausen describes the piece (1973) is very visceral, revealing his gestural approach to its creation; ‘after traversing nine columns of sound… it then swoops down and becomes recognisable as a human cry before further developing into bird calls – marsh ducks quacking – and human yelling, right up to the deep black recollection of the Marseillaise at one eighth of its speed.’ (p. 59)
As much as Hymnen involves the world’s national anthems, so too does the sound itself have a roaming, constantly moving world of its own in Stockhausen’s phrasing here. He lends a synaesthesia to the relationships between each sampled sound, and the transitions to travel between them. Compositionally, Hymnen exists as a network, a thematic portrait of the complex international, and interpersonal relations across the world.
Stockhausen, K. H. (1973) ‘Stockhausen’s notes on the works’ in B. Hopkins (ed.) Stockhausen: Life and Work. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 59