Trans (Stockhausen)
[2] When he was asked by the head of the Studio for Electronic Music, Otto Tomek [de], to compose a piece for the Donaueschingen Festival the next October, Stockhausen first arranged to make some experiments for staging, lighting, and performing action in the hall there.
He blamed this condition not least on the protected, tenured status brought about by the collective bargaining politics of the unions, and proposed for the top musicians in each orchestra a two-month annual training course to update their skills.
[8] Trans deliberately confounds the expectations of the conventional audience-orchestra dynamic by introducing ambiguities such as the suppression of normal visual cues, an invisible conductor, and—with the exception of the interpolated cadenzas—no visible performer movements.
[9] When the curtain rises, the audience sees only the string section, in conventional concert attire, seated in two long rows (the second raised on a riser) behind a scrim lit with red-violet light.
[14] Toward the end, a startling moment occurs, when the hitherto rigid players suddenly start to sway around, in imitation of conventionally "expressive" string playing, only as mechanically synchronised as ever.
[16] At the beginning of part V, a solo trumpet appears in midair (actually by climbing a ladder behind the concealing wall) and plays a joyful reveille call, ending with a flatulent fluttertongued note, in the spirit of Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel.
The final interpolation, however, is an abrupt cessation of all sound for the better part of a minute, an intimidating "silent cadenza", marked at the centre by a triple shuttle stroke in a dotted-rhythm figure.
[19] Over the course of the work the dramatic balance significantly changes from the initial situation of conflict (which the composer characterized as "tragic") toward an increasingly "comic" dialogue between the concealed and the revealed.
In the end, however, he decided against it, and settled instead on a simple pitch sequence of thirty-six notes without formal or rhythmic implications, which is "treated with inspired flexibility", first a twelve-tone row in a sharply falling contour, and then a gradually rising, winding chromatic line.
The first layer is played back invisibly on tape in the theatre, and consists of the loudly amplified sound of a loom shuttle crossing the room, left-to-right and right-to-left, at first occurring at nearly periodic intervals of about 20 seconds.
[8][25] Because the winds and percussion are concealed from view (apart from the brief appearances of the solo trumpet and the military drummer), Stockhausen wondered whether people could tell the difference if those parts were just played back on tape.
[15] Today, the outraged protests in the recording of the world premiere, predictably most vehement during the extremely long, intimidating silence toward the end (punctuated in the middle by a triple shuttle-loom stroke), open a window to the past, as if the listener now is experiencing the work in reality from "the other side".
[34] A review of the 1971 Paris performance found the "strange haze of violent [sic] light", the hidden winds, the crack of the shuttle, and generally surrealist character to have an intense imaginative life.
[31] The staging has been described as an "intensely physical", multilayered experience that draws the listener through a perceptual gateway into "a mysterious auditory hinterland", suggesting Hamlet-like resignation less than the haunting pessimism of Francis Bacon.
For example, when Trans was played in November 2008 at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London (twice on the same programme), one journalist dismissed it as "inane play-acting", "the kind of piece Ligeti might have brought off with scathing wit" but in Stockhausen's hands merely an example of "trying on the emperor's new clothes".
