Static on a Hot Tin Roof

Midway through the piece, a woman loudly sneezed. The audience neither shushed nor frowned. Instead, they turned politely and inspected the big loudspeakers on the wood-paneled walls to try to determine if the sneeze was a part of the score. The scene was the West German Radio's Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. The occasion: an international convention of 800 musicologists, gathered to sample the latest wares of Europe's hippest center for avant-garde music.

What the visitors heard last week was music pushed a step beyond the otherworldly compositions of French musique concrete, which utilizes natural sounds taped and glued together in weirdly unnatural order. The resident composers at the Cologne studio tend to abandon natural sound in favor of sounds artificially manufactured on tape. Represented at the demonstration were Hungarian Composer Gyorgy Ligeti, 34, whose Articulation consisted of a series of blips and plops dramatically relieved by an occasional electronic belch, and Composer Gottfried Michael Koenig, 32, whose Essay punctuated its eerie, sustained sonorities with harplike electronic roulades. But the high point of the afternoon was a 12 1/2-minute work by 30-year-old Karlheinz Stockhausen, a pioneer in electronic music and star of Cologne's experimental studio. Title: Song of Young Boys in the Furnace.

20 Speakers. The piece, on which Composer Stockhausen spent a year and a half, utilized the sound of the human voice along with pure electronic sounds. Fragmented into vowels and consonants and later reassembled, the voice sounded "Praise the Lord" over weird sonorities. Later, a panel tackled the question on everybody's mind: Is this still music? Yes, said the panelists (including Stockhausen), despite letters from puzzled listeners asking whether their radios had been affected by "interplanetary static" or whether they had been listening to "part of the opera Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Electronist Stockhausen started out as a comparatively conventional rebel in the Anton von Webern atonal vein but soon felt he had "dried up" and started looking for new effects. At Cologne he can get just about any effect he wants with the aid of an array of recorders and filters plus generators that may rumble, screech, thunder, and produce other items of planned flatulence. By varying the signals sent to the 20 loudspeakers spotted about the auditorium, Stockhausen can make his sounds swoosh along a wall, tinkle in a corner or explode over the head of the audience. He first roughs out his ideas on paper in a series of symbols, then goes to the studio to see what sounds will fit his imagined score, finally records on tape, splices, and re-records.

Three Conductors. The complexities of electronic composition are such that Stockhausen, although he works twelve hours a day, has completed only seven electronic compositions. He has also experimented with instrumental music, including his Piano Piece No. 11, which permits the pianist to play fragments in whatever order his eye falls on them but specifies that when he has played one fragment three times, the piece must end. Another Stockhausen experiment: Groups, a 20-minute work which calls for three orchestras playing simultaneously under three separate conductors. His work in progress: a piece for electronic and conventional instruments, which will allow the instrumentalists to play fast or slow, loud or soft according to their humor.

Composer Stockhausen thinks that electronic music has scarcely begun to explore its potentialities. Says he earnestly: "I want to be able to bring sounds from every surface area of the room. Why not loudspeakers on swings overhead or a completely globular room with loudspeakers blanketing the walls and the listeners on a platform suspending in the center?"

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