Schlagtrio (Percussive Trio) is a chamber-music work for piano and twotimpanists (each playing three timpani) composed byKarlheinz Stockhausen in 1952. It is Nr. ⅓ in his catalogue of works.
TheSchlagtrio was originally written in Paris in 1952 as aSchlagquartett (Percussive Quartet), for piano and three timpanists, each playing a pair of drums. It was premiered that year in Hamburg, but only in a radio recording. The first public performance was given in Munich on 23 March 1953, inKarl Amadeus Hartmann'smusica viva concert series,[1] after which Stockhausen decided that he had made impractical demands for subtle attack differentiations in both the percussion and piano parts. He withdrew the score after those two performances until 1973, when he decided to renotate it.[2] This revision was carried out during a holiday break in 1974, at N'Gor, a beach resort near Dakar in Senegal.[3] The attacks and pitches remained unaltered, but the six timpani were redistributed, three each for just two players, and the note values were doubled in order to facilitate reading.[2]
The six timpani are tuned to awhole-tone scale, aquarter tone lower than the piano. Each drum corresponds to one octave in the piano.[4] This oppositional scoring differentiates the piece from its immediate predecessors,Kreuzspiel,Spiel, andFormel. The former two use percussion as a noise element in contrast to pitch, whileFormel integrates percussion timbres into the pitch structures of the other instruments.[5] The course of the work describes a process in which the clear sounds of the piano and the more shadowy notes of the timpani gradually come together, make contact and overlap, and then withdraw once again.[6] This is accomplished in a succession of twenty-three phases. The central, twelfth phase is the only one in which all twelve pitches in the piano and all six stroke types in the timpani are present.[7]
Stockhausen:Complete Early Percussion Works.Steven Schick, percussion;James Avery, piano; Red Fish, Blue Fish (Ross Karre, Justin DeHart, Matthew Jenkins, Fabio Oliveira, Jonathan Hepfer, Gregory Stuart). CD recording, digital: 2 sound discs, stereo. Mode 274–275. New York: Mode Records, 2014.
Brandt, Brian, and Michael Hynes (prod.). 2014.Stockhausen: Complete Early Percussion Works. Steven Schick, James Avery, Red Fish Blue Fish. DVD recording, region 0, NTSC, Dolby 5.1 surround/DTS 5.1 surround, aspect ratio 16:9, color. Mode 274. New York: Mode Records.
Frisius, Rudolf. 2008.Karlheinz Stockhausen II: Die Werke 1950–1977; Gespräch mit Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Es geht aufwärts". Mainz, London, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Toronto: Schott Musik International.ISBN978-3-7957-0249-6.
Maconie, Robin. 2005.Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Oxford: Scarecrow Press.ISBN0-8108-5356-6.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1964.Schlagquartett (1952), In hisTexte zur Musik 2, edited byDieter Schnebel, 13–18. DuMont Dokumente. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1978. "Schlagtrio für Klavier und 2 x 3 Pauken (1952)". In hisTexte zur Musik 4, edited byChristoph von Blumröder, 55. DuMont Dokumente. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.ISBN3-7701-0493-5.
