Stockhausen had been interested for several years in writing something for the Kontarsky

piano duo*, and by early 1969 he had become determined to do so. On a flight from the
Northeastern United States to Los Angeles in September 1969 or shortly before, he had
sketched "a kind of theater piece for two pianos" titled Vision, and in March 1970 began to
work out a score, but broke off after just three pages. During an automobile trip from
Madison, Connecticut to Boston, a melody came to Stockhausen, along with the idea of
expanding such a musical figure over a very long period of time—fifty or sixty minutes. He
jotted the melody down on an envelope at that time, but it only occurred to him after having
abandoned Vision that this might become the basis for his new two-piano composition.
Stockhausen later recalled that this was early in September 1969, but the sketch is in fact
dated 26 February. Later in the year, on 22 September 1969 at the Couvent d'Alziprato in
southern France, he had composed an intuitive music text composition,Intervall, for two
pianists playing "four-hands" (on one piano), but it did not appeal to the Kontarsky brothers
—especially to Alfons, who lacked the experience his brother Aloys had gained from
performing text-pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen, as a member of Stockhausen's
ensemble. Intervall, eventually premiered by Roger Woodward and Jerzy Romaniuk, later
became part of Stockhausen's second cycle of intuitive-music compositions, Für
kommende Zeiten.

Stockhausen mentioned his wish to write something for the Kontarsky brothers to Heinrich
Strobel, director of the Music Division of the SWF Baden-Baden and Artistic Director of the
Donaueschinger Musiktage für Zeitgenossische Tonkunst and, toward the end of 1969, Strobel
commissioned a work for two pianos for the 1970 Donaueschingen Festival (Blumröder
1976, 94). After abandoning Vision, Stockhausen took up the melody he had jotted down
the previous September and on its basis made a form plan and laid out the new work's
skeleton between 1 May and 20 June 1970 in Osaka, Japan. He then completed the score
in an unbroken stretch of work at his home in Kürten from 10 July to 18 August 1970.
Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky gave the premiere of Mantra in Domaueschingen on 18
October 1970, and made the first recording of the work from 10 to 13 June 1971 at the
Tonstudio Kreillerstraße 22 in Munich, for Deutsche Grammophon (Stockhausen 1978,
154). The score first appeared in print only in 1975, as one of the first publications of the
composer's newly founded Stockhausen-Verlag .
Structure

Stockhausen at the sound desk for Mantra, Seraye Moshir, Shiraz, 2 September 1972

The piece is the first determinate work (that is, the score is completely written down,
though there are some passages involving a modest degree of improvisation) that
Stockhausen composed after a long phase of indeterminate compositions.

This work involves the expansion and contraction of a counterpointed pair of melodies,
which the composer calls a "formula". In this particular work (the first of a long succession
of compositions to use formula technique), Stockhausen chose the term "mantra" in order
"to avoid the words theme, row or subject, as in a fugue", and "Mantra" also became the
title of the entire work. In Mantra, the two-strand formula is stated near the outset of the
piece by piano I. According to the composer, the mantra "has thirteen notes, and each
cymbal sound occurring once in the piece indicates the large sections—you hear the
cymbal whenever a new central sound announces the next section of the work". Although
"the cymbals have the same pitches as the mantra and can thus mark the 13 form cycles
of the two pianists … they are not identical", and "there are also some sections in which a
larger number of cymbal strokes occurs”). Though this mantra recurs constantly, the
structure of the composition is not a theme and variations as found in classical composers
such as Beethoven and Bach, because the material is never varied, only expanded and
contracted (both in duration and in pitch) to different degrees; not a single note is ever
added, it is never "accompanied" or embellished . The comparatively strict
predetermination of the form plan is occasionally broken and altered through the use of
insertions, additions, and small deviations and exceptions. Near the end of the
composition there is an extremely fast section that is a compression of the entire work into
the smallest temporal space; in this section, all of the expansions and transpositions of the
mantra formula are summarized as fast as possible and in four layers.

Thirteen-note tone row and its inversion. Everything in the work is based on this row
and, in addition, it is used to define the large-scale structure of the piece by providing a
series of tonics by means of the ring modulation. The prime form of the row is used in
piano I's oscillator, the inversion in piano II's oscillator, with one note from each row form
in each of the work's thirteen sections.

The "mantra" (melody formula) is made of an upper and lower voice; it is divided
temporally into 4 segments with rests of 3, 2, 1, and 4 crotchets' duration following the
segments. The 13 notes of the mantra's upper voice form a 12-tone row where the 13th
note returns to the first note A. The lower voice consists of an intervallic inversion of the
upper voice with transposed segments: the first segment of the lower voice corresponds to
the inversion of second segment of the upper voice and vice versa; similarly, the third and
fourth segments in the inverted voice are also exchanged (Blumröder 1976, 96–97). The
pitches are shown in the example to the right, and the complete formula can be seen at
Nordin.

Each of the 13 notes of the mantra has an attached characteristic, or "pitch form" ; the 13
notes of the upper voice have in order the following characteristics:

1.periodic repetition at the beginning (on A in the original transposition)

2.accent at the end of a duration on B
3.G♯ without any characteristic
4.a turn around the beginning of the note E
5.slow tremolo between F and D
6.an accented chord at the end of the F–D oscillation
7.a sharp accent (with a single repetition) at the beginning of a duration on G
8.a descending chromatic scale connecting the G to the following E♭
9.staccato (very short duration) on D♭
10.irregular repetition ("Morse code") of the note C
11.an inverted (upper-note) mordent (trill nucleus) on the beginning of B♭
12.sharp attack with an echo: sfz (fp), on G♭
13.arpeggio connecting the previously articulated pitch (E flat in the other voice, an
augmented eleventh lower) upward to A
In addition to its articulative characteristic, each of the thirteen notes is assigned a
particular dynamic, in approximate inverse proportion to its duration—that is, the softer a
note's dynamic is, the longer is its duration. The very first note is the sole exception to this
rule (Blumröder 1976, 97 and 104)withconstant intensities.

The thirteen cycles of the composition are based on the 13 notes of the mantra and the 13
characteristics detailed above. Each cycle is dominated by its corresponding note and
characteristic. In this way, a single statement of the mantra is spread over the length of the
entire composition, though the durations of the mantra notes are not incorporated into this
overall plan (Conen 1991, 86).

The sounds of each piano are picked up by microphones and fed into an apparatus at the
player's left side. This is called a Modul 69 B and was specially built for Mantra to the
composer's specification by the Law company from Rastatt, near Baden-Baden. It
consists of a microphone amplifier with three microphone inputs, a compressor, a filter, a
ring modulator, a scaled sine-wave generator, and a volume control. By means of this
device, each piano's sounds are ring modulated with a sine tone tuned to the central pitch
corresponding to the note of the mantra formula governing each of the thirteen large
segments of the composition, and the modulated sound is played over loudspeakers
placed behind and above the performers. The first pianist presents the upper thirteen
tones, the second pianist the lower thirteen tones. Because the starting/ending pitch of the
mantra is successively transposed onto these central pitches, they sound completely
"consonant", like ordinary piano tones. The other mantra pitches sound "dissonant" to
varying degrees, and differ also from a normal piano to varying degrees in their timbre.
"Hence one perceives a continual 'respiration' from consonant to dissonant to consonant
modulator sounds, resulting from the precisely tuned relationships between the modulating
sine tones and the modulated piano notes" (Stockhausen 1978, 155–56).

* Aloys (born 14 May 1931) and Alfons(9 October 1932– 5 May 2010[1]
[2])Kontarskywere German duo-pianist brothers who were associated with a number of
important world premieres of contemporary works. They had an international reputation for
performing modern music for two pianists, although they also performed the standard
repertoire and they sometimes played separately. They were occasionally joined by their
younger brother Bernhard in performances of pieces for three pianos. After suffering a
stroke in 1983, Aloys retired from performing.