Mikrophonie (Stockhausen)
That is, the microphone is used investigatively, to make perceptible "objects usually beneath our notice, but also for a kind of precise whimsy, ... like one of the micronauts in the film The Fantastic Voyage".
(OED entry "microscopy", citing the London Review of Books, 26 March 1992) I searched for ways to compose—flexibly—also the process of microphone recording.
Another pair of players use hand-held microphones to amplify subtle details and noises, inflecting the sound through quick (and precisely scored) motions.
The last two performers, seated in the audience, apply resonant bandpass filters to the microphone outputs and distribute the resulting sounds to a quadraphonic speaker system.
(preface to the score of Mikrophonie I, p. 9) After an initial attempt to notate the actions and implements proved impractically complicated, Stockhausen decided to categorize the sounds according to their perceived qualities: "groaning", "trumpeting", "whirring", "hooting", "roaring", "grating", "chattering", "wailing", "sawing", "ringing", "choking", "cawing", "clacking", "snorting", "chirping", "hissing", "grunting", "crunching", "clinking", "tromboning", "scraping", etc., in a scale of 36 steps from the darkest and lowest to the brightest and highest sounds.
[5] Through this emphasis on subjectively perceived qualities, "For the first time a perceptual equivalent to totally organized structure has been discovered, and it is particularly significant that this has been done with very simple means.
Stockhausen's original idea had been to combine a choir with the tamtam from Mikrophonie I but the sounds proved too contrary, and so he settled on the Hammond organ instead.
The result is a fusion of the suggestive and the concrete, of words and music, of vocalists and Hammond organ—a meditation on and reconfiguration of Heißenbüttel's text which does not destroy it but rather recreates it, so that free association may cause the listener's response to "vary between phantasmagorical visions and mathematical procedures".
[14] The world première of Mikrophonie II took place on 11 June 1965 in a Musik der Zeit [de] concert at the Große Sendesaal of WDR in Cologne.
