Musik für ein Haus

Musik für ein Haus is a group-composition project devised by for the 1968 Darmstädter Ferienkurse. Fourteen composers and twelve instrumentalists participated, with the resulting performance lasting four hours. It was not regarded by Stockhausen as a composition belonging solely to himself, and therefore was not assigned a number in his catalog of works.

Since the late 1950s Stockhausen had been considering a piece to be called Kammermusik (Chamber Music), which would have involved the construction on a stage of a number of chambers (like a multiple stage set), in each of which musicians could be isolated from the others with the sounds of their performances being combined from outside. At the same time, there would be opportunities for individual musicians to move from one chamber to another, in order to produce constantly changing configurations. Stockhausen never realised this idea, but for the 1968 Darmstädter Ferienkurse Stockhausen organised a composition seminar as a successor to the previous year's (Wörner 1973, 170).

Between the original planning, which began as early as November 1967, and the start of the courses in August 1968, Stockhausen experienced a personal crisis that changed the shape of the project. Following the premiere of Kurzwellen in Bremen on 5 May 1968, Stockhausen received a letter from his second wife, Mary Bauermeister, informing him that she would not be returning from America and declaring that their marriage was at an end. The resulting depressive episode prompted Stockhausen to a hunger strike, during which he read Satprem's book on Sri Aurobindo. The result was a new form of composition for Stockhausen, the fifteen texts of Aus den sieben Tagen (Kurtz 1992, 160–61). He called this intuitive music, and resolved to use these verbally described processes as the basis of the Darmstadt composition studio, which lasted for the seventeen days preceding the Ferienkurse. As part of his efforts to sharpen the participants' awareness for this new kind of composing, Stockhausen scheduled some seminar sessions late at night or early in the morning, which included listening to recordings of Japanese Gagaku and temple music, as well as field trips to services at a Jewish synagogue in Frankfurt and a Russian Orthodox church, and a specially arranged Catholic mass at a Capuchin monastery (Misch and Bandur 2001, 403; Ritzel 1970, 12, 26–27).

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