DE 
EN In April, the pilot session of a new workshop format took place at the Pablo Neruda Library. The workshop was facilitated by Omer Eilam on behalf of Lev Berlin. It was designed for music aficionados, both amateur and professional, and aimed to open a door to experimental music for a non-academic audience.
by Omer Eilam
The Art of Listening seeks to develop a form of experiential listening, in which we direct our full attention to the act of listening itself. This inaugural session was dedicated to the piece Gesang der Jünglinge by Karlheinz Stockhausen and also served as an introduction to the approach.
As avant-garde electronic music still feels foreign and challenging to many, we began in more familiar territory. We listened to a short piano piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau and recorded our impressions through words and colors. It was illuminating to see how some responses were shared (“I hear the sound of a piano”, “I hear a melody”, etc.), while others -especially the paintings- were highly individualized. In this way, we became aware of the dual nature of musical experience, which contains both objective and subjective dimensions.
We then ventured into more unfamiliar territory: we listened to the first two structures of Gesang der Jünglinge and repeated the same experiment. We asked ourselves: How is this music different? and How are we different when listening to it?
It was especially enlightening to observe the contrasts between the paintings inspired by the two pieces (see the images below). Through open discussion, participants were able to catch a glimpse of others’ experiences and gradually develop concepts that helped them access the music. We listened to the musical excerpt a second time, and already many were able to form various points of entry based on this shared experience.
In the second part of the workshop, I provided an overview of the historical, methodological, and poetic aspects of the piece. We discussed the early days of electronic music and how unfamiliar it must have sounded to those who attended its premiere in 1956. I explained Stockhausen’s intention to unify vocal and electronic sounds in every imaginable form:
“They [the sounds] should be as fast, as long, as loud, as soft, as dense and interwoven, with as small and large pitch intervals, and in as differentiated variations of timbre as the imagination might require, freed from the physical limitations of any one singer.”
Karlheinz Stockhausen
We also looked at the biblical text that inspired the piece. It tells of three young men who were condemned to be burned alive by King Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to bow before his image—but were miraculously unharmed when they began singing praises to God.
Together, we examined fragments of the score and tried to understand the painstaking process through which Stockhausen recorded thousands of sounds and layered them next to and over one another to create swarms of sine waves and noise. Finally, we listened to the piece in its entirety, using the concepts we had developed as beacons of light to help us navigate its dark waters.
Throughout this process, we gradually discovered not only the language of electronic music but also a new way of listening.
“It should not be forgotten that the two-year realisation work from 1954 to 1956 was a unique time of jubilantly praising God, and that I myself was a ‘youth in the fiery furnace’.”
Karlheinz Stockhausen