Quick, Karl, the Potentiometer!

The conductor's arm chopped down --not to give the downbeat but to start his stop watch. Twenty-three minutes of tuneless blatting erupted from the trombonist, first of a dozen instrumentalists to play in sequence. Although the instruments were plugged into a bank of ten loudspeakers (with four technicians at the potentiometers, or volume controls), the audience strolled around the stage to pick up sounds from every angle. One player improvised his own percussion by borrowing a woman's slipper and rapping it on the platform. After four hours. Conductor Karlheinz Stockhausen finished Ensemble and, with many of his musicians still playing, led them off to a hotel for dinner.

Defining Limits. The evening contained only two recognizable musical moments. At one point, the hornist inexplicably quoted a swatch of Tchaikov sky's Symphony No. 5, and the possibly unhinged trombonist retired to an adjoining terrace to toot 76 Trombones.

But the audience was more interested in the unrecognizable, for this was last week's climactic concert of "Vacation Courses in New Music" at Darmstadt, West Germany, which aim to define the outer limits of the far out.

The Darmstadt courses opened in 1946 as refreshers for Hitler-frustrated German musicians who wanted to brush up on their Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. In succeeding years, Darmstadt focused on the development of serial techniques in Schoenberg and Webern, and gave exposure to the works of such post-serial experimenters as Edgar Varese and Olivier Messiaen. Soon younger composers--notably Hans Werner Henze and Pierre Boulez--began unveiling compositions of their own at the festival's semiprivate "workshop" concerts.

Darmstadt became one of Germany's two top crucibles of avant-garde music; the other is Donaueschingen, whose annual fest is shorter and less pedagogic, but whose commissions for new works carry enormous prestige.

Storing Shockers. Darmstadt's latest currents are electronic, with fiercely earnest Electronic Composer Stockhausen (TIME, Feb. 10) as chief knob spinner.

The twelve composers who contributed to Ensemble (and who sat next to the players of their segments, urging them on) were all Stockhausen disciples who went to Darmstadt specifically to work with him. This year's workshop concerts were also dominated by Stockhausen creations, especially Microphonie I, in which rubber suction cups, an electric massager, ice-cube tongs and wineglasses were scraped against a huge gong, while the resulting sounds were processed by two microphones, two electronic filters and a potentiometer.

In a lecture to the festival's 180 participants, Stockhausen made it clear that he had more musical shockers in store for future Darmstadt sessions. "For centuries we have dealt with intervals of pitch," he said, "but what about similar intervals, or proportions, of rhythm, volume, timbre and other musical elements? We talk about an octave, which means the higher note has twice the vibrations of the lower, but what about an octave in volume, one level being double the other? Or a fourth of rhythm, or a major seventh of timbre?"

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