Punkte

In a letter dated 4 November 1952 to Alfred Schlee [de] (the editor from Universal Edition in Vienna who, at the premiere of Stockhausen's Spiel at the Donaueschingen Festival in October, had offered to publish his works), Stockhausen initially called his new score Zweites Orchesterspiel / Kontrapunkte / für Saiten- und Blasinstrumente, and in a letter to his friend Karel Goeyvaerts dated 14 January 1953, he calls the orchestral work Nr.

At this point in time, the chamber composition now known as Kontra-Punkte (with a hyphen) was instead called simply Nr 5…, für 10 Instrumente.

After a heated discussion in March with Hermann Scherchen, who Stockhausen hoped would conduct the work at a festival in Cologne, he decided to withdraw the score, and substituted the chamber work for ten instruments, now redesignated "Nr 1", and eventually given the title Kontra-Punkte.

Having rescheduled the premiere for Donaueschingen the following year, Stockhausen resumed work in October 1962 while staying at the house of his Darmstadt pupil Jack Brimberg in Locust Valley on Long Island, New York.

[5] This "renewed" composition was premiered on 20 October 1963 at the Donaueschingen Music Festival, by the Orchestra of the SWF, conducted by Pierre Boulez, and was published by Universal Edition that year in facsimile.

Production stopped in 1973 only to restart in 1974 and, after Stockhausen made still more revisions in 1975, work resumed the next year.

[8] The original version was for a small orchestra of either 27[9] or 30 players:[7] Punkte is divided into 144 overarching sections, characterised by sets of shapes and textures.