MATRIXSYNTH: Stockhausen, Telemusik, and the Gagaku Circuit

Thursday, June 04, 2026

Stockhausen, Telemusik, and the Gagaku Circuit


video upload by La Synthèse Humaine

"New Uses for Old Circuits is a series looking at linear and nonlinear processes in the modular system.

In 1966 Karlheinz Stockhausen went to Japan. Fascinated by the Noh theatre, Sumo, and tea ceremony traditions he found there, he made use of the facilities of NHK public broadcasting to make Telemusik. The piece centers around Stockhausen's so-called 'Gagaku Circuit' - a double ring modulation process which attempts to take two separate sounds and intermodulate them.

More about Telemusik: https://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com...


0:00 Stockhausen In Japan
3:58 Gagaku Circuit and Intermodulation
6:40 Musical Esperanto
7:48 A Quick Channel Update
8:38 Ocora Records
9:11 Double Ring Modulation
13:17 Building the Gagaku Circuit
17:26 Nomades Du Niger
19:27 Introducing the Intermodulation
21:30 Gagakuing Gagaku
22:51 Gagaku and Voice
24:59 Musique Kabiye and Voice
25:55 Musique Kabiye and Contraluz

Check out my Patreon here: / lasynthesehumaine"

Stockhausen's 1972 Lecture:

Lecture 6 - TELEMUSIK (1972) Karlheinz Stockhausen

video upload by Tomás Olano

"Duration: 58'27"

Given at Essex University on May 7th 1972.

http://tomasolano.com

The substance of the work consists of recordings of a variety of traditional ethnic musics from around the world, together with electronically generated sounds. More than twenty of these recorded fragments are intermodulated on tape with electronic sounds and with each other to produce 'odd hybrid-types'—modulating, for example, 'the chant of monks in a Japanese temple with Shipibo music from the Amazon, and then further impos[ing] a rhythm of Hungarian music on the melody of the monks. In this way, symbiotic things can be generated, which have never before been heard'."

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