Fresco -wall sounds for meditation- (1969): Karlheinz Stockhausen
Concept and dramaturgy: Monika Pasiecznik and Pablo Druker
Orchestra created of local musicians: professionals, amateurs, students and established ensembles
Music direction: Pablo Druker
About the piece
FRESCO is a work composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1969, performed for the first (and so far only) time as part of the MUSIK FÜR BEETHOVENHALLE project in Bonn. The composition is scored for four spatially arranged orchestral groups with a variable cast of performers. FRESCO is subtitled Wandklänge zur Meditation (Wall sounds for meditation) and lasts five hours and fourty minutes. During this time, the audience is free to move between the musicians.
About the project
FRESCO is the only work by Stockhausen that has not been recorded before, nor has it ever been performed again. It has fallen into oblivion, even though at the time of its creation it could have been considered extremely visionary. Today, it is once again gaining relevance, as it allows to confront with some very interesting questions about the concert and its relation to music and listening. Our goal is to perform FRESCO after more than 50 years since its premiere by actualizing the historical idea to the present and to create the first audiovisual documentation of this performance.
A concert is a kind of frame in which music – in a form of composers’ works and performers’ interpretations – is presented. This frame very quickly turns into an anti-frame – invisible, transparent and seemingly neutral to what it encompasses. In fact, the concert predefines the way music is listened to and understood, enforces certain bodily behaviours and organizes the relationship between listeners and musicians. The frame is thick and organically fused with the image – the music. Therefore, invisible. Performing FRESCO means for us listening out for this frame and meditating it. It is not a piece of music in a common sense of the word, but precisely a frame in itself. Stockhausen called FRESCO wall sounds, and it can be understood as an amplification of the concert as a frame of music. Thus, FRESCO can resound as it is or be filled with other music in a form of parallel concert, for which FRESCO would become the frame. In the project, all elements of the concert will be questioned. The indefinite performance space, the extreme duration of the piece and its nature as a frame for other music, and finally the participatory dimension of the performance (we assume the participation of many different musicians, local ensembles, students, amateurs) offer a unique opportunity to design the situation from scratch and avoid entanglement with the concert.
About the performance
On Saturday 19th of October 2024 the first ever full performance of the work took place in Brno Philharmonic at the Exposition of New Music, 55 years after its premiere in Bonn.
Karhleinz Stockhausen - Fresco
Wall-sounds for Medltation for 4
Orchestra Groups (1969)
Exposition of New Music
Brno Philharmonic
BCO – Brno Contemporary Orchestra
Young Brno Symphony Orchestra (Mladí
brněnští symfonikové)
Members of Filharmonie Brno
Pablo Druker, artistic director
Monika Pasiecznik, curator
Pablo Druker, Radim Hanousek, Pavel
Šnajdr, Gabriela Tardonová and Pavel
Zlámal, conductors
Coming next
Sun 3th of August 2025: seminars at
Stockhausen Concerts and Courses
Kürten 2025, Germany.
We have become accustomed to the form of the orchestral concert being repeated every time we go to a concert: the starting time, a definite programme, the seating arrangement, the choice of seats (or non-choice depending on one’s money and connections), the length, the interval (with public bar and smoker’s foyer), the entry of the orchestra, of the conductor etc. Everything seems to be laid down, regardless of what music one puts into this form. It seems to me that all this isn’t at all self- evident where NEW music is concerned.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, score of FRESCO, introduction to the piece,
Universal Edition, Wien 1969.
