The essential ideas occurred to Stockhausen in November–December 1958 while on a tour of the United States where, during hours spent each day flying from one location to another, he experienced the slowest temporal rates of change of his life.
[1] The score is dedicated to the former director of Das neue Werk, Herbert Hübner [de].
Carré is a serial composition in which (together with the concurrently composed Kontakte) Stockhausen for the first time treated spatial distribution on the same level of structural importance as properties such as pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamics, register, density, and others.
[4] Carré unfolds 101 "moments" with durations varying from 1.5 to 90 seconds, each of which is characterised by one or several notes and chords.
[5] However, Stockhausen originally planned 252 sections in his draft form scheme, where eight basic categories of sound are arrayed, each with four levels:[6] In contrast to the complex interrelationships of these eight sound categories, the underlying pitch structure of Carré is so simple that Stockhausen was able to write it out on a single sheet of music paper.