• Tracks

UK three CD set. Something truly radical happened to the European classical music tradition in the years after the Second World War. At a time when the revolutionary principle of 12-tone composition instigated by Schoenberg was beginning to be regarded among young composers as passé, some had witnessed the horrors of war and for them in particular, the need to make a definitive break with the past and the conventions and conflicts which sprang from it was paramount. No composer had a greater appetite for revolution than Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was embarking on a quest that would occupy him for more than half a century, and which would take in a whole gamut of constantly re-defined objectives - among them "point music", "spatial music" and "multi-formula composition". His early electronic compositions such as the Studies were painstakingly and meticulously constructed using magnetic tape, to be followed over the ensuing decade by the works which ranked among the masterpieces of electronic music, Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) and Kontakte (Contacts). All of these unprecedented early electronic works are included in this box set presentation which also incorporates such visionary creations of intellect and sensitivity as Pierre Boulez' orientally flavored 'Le Marteux Sans Maitre', recorded under the baton of Robert Craft, Xenakis' brilliant explorations of the dramatic and colouristic properties of concrète sound, 'Poème électronique', Edgard Varèse's extraordinary response to a commission from Le Corbusier for music for the pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World Fair, and Ligeti's "conversation without words", 'Artikulation', alongside the audacious Cartridge Music, for "amplified small sounds" constructed by John Cage, using phonograph cartridges inserted with feathers, lengths of wire, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, small twigs, wire coils and nails to make audible otherwise indiscernible sounds. The pioneering work of these composers proved an inspiration for future generations of artists looking to free themselves from the dead weight of convention.