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Offspring of the omnipotent, late avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, now 41, has been voyaging into adventurous territory almost since birth. From the 1970s to the mid1990s Stockhausen Sr placed son and instrument centre stage in numerous works, including his mammoth opera cycle Licht. Father and son ultimately fell out, but not before Karlheinz’s electro-acoustic explorations put their stamp on Markus’s own career.
He remains in electro-acoustic country on this fascinating album. We start with a brilliantly imagined 11-minute piece by Jonathan Harvey, Other Presences, for Stockhausen’s live trumpet and electronica, the sounds bouncing off each other in giddily beautiful transformations inspired by the music of Buddhist ceremonies in Tibet.
The rest of the CD consists of seven studio remixes from selected composers associated with Harvey, who use as their sole source material Stockhausen’s acoustic performance of the trumpet part. One of the composers is Harvey’s daughter Anna; others are former Harvey students, friends, collaborators and kindred spirits.
At one extreme, the electro-acoustic veteran Lawrence Casserley transforms Stockhausen’s electrifying trumpet playing into a muted tapestry of shifting sound layers without beginning, end or definable shape. The more intently you listen, the more you’re sucked in. The style spectrum’s other end is reached by the genre-fusing musician Daniel Biro (founder of the exploratory Sargasso CD label), who whips a staccato trumpet stretch into Miles of Harvey, an intricate, jazzy five-minute cascade shaped as an imaginary encounter between Harvey and Miles Davis (the player-piano king Conlon Nancarrow could be in there too.)
Other remixes, to my ears, were less persuasive, such as Kaffe Matthews’s dislocated Men Being Butterflies, or the jolting sound clashes of John Palmer’s Present Otherness. Listeners’ personal tastes may point them in other directions. Yet every remix earns its place in this collective response to the myriad phrases and jubilant trumpet of Jonathan Harvey’s original.
Aside from Biro’s hurtling scherzo, no remix is as obviously composed and polished as Harvey’s Other Presences. But then the very nature of electro-acoustic music works against a “finished” article in favour of music forever transforming, exploding and drifting toward new worlds. Do give this splendidly engineered CD a try. Your ears may never be the same again.
(Sargasso, TMS £10.99, call 0845 6026328)
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