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ON 1 MAY 1967 I had just arrived in Cologne from Berkeley, California, to take up my new position as Stockhausen's personal assistant. We had met in his composition seminar at the UC Davis campus. It was a heady, doubly significant time for me: I had decided to swap a graduate degree in music for an apprenticeship with the master and I was returning to Germany, from where my family had emigrated in 1952. Already we were on the train to Basel, to rehearse his piece Solo with Heinz Holliger, the Swiss oboist and composer. As we sped upstream along the banks of the Rhine, my mind racing through a maze of earliest memories, he disclosed in outline form his still fresh ideas for a new piece.
It was to be called Prozession. The ideas were, as usual, succinct and comprehensive: four instrumentalists would play a sequence of events, gradually transforming them parametrically according to a sequence of signs indicating an increase, a decrease, or no change in one or a combination of the parameters duration, loudness, register, and number of discernible elements within the event. The players were to refer to several of his own compositions as the source of all initial events. A few other instructions such as that each player should play at least one duration longer than one minute, and that some events must be clearly periodic in structure-both of which I supported enthusiastically-rounded out the picture.
Prozession was intended for the imminent May tour of nine concerts by the Stockhausen Ensemble to Scandinavia and London, for which we would also be performing his Mikrophonie I, Telemusik, Klavierstiicke IX, X, and XI, and several electronic and electro-acoustic pieces by the young Cologne composers Michael von Biel (Fassung for four-channel tape) and Johannes Fritsch (Fabula Rasa for four-channel tape and Partita for amplified viola, played by Fritsch employing a fantastic range of sounds and extended playing techniques, tape delay, and filters; five players in all).
Stockhausen had intended to have his piece Solo, for instrument and multi-channel tape delay, performed by Harald Boje on this tour, but the equipment for the tape delay was proving difficult to perfect and the small electronic keyboard instrument Boje had chosen to perform withthe "Elektronium," built...