Album: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, New Directions in Music (él)

These early pieces by Boulez and Stockhausen may have palled slightly with age, but still impart a powerful evocation of the excitement of the postwar avant-garde.

Stockhausen's "Étude Concrète" (1953) is a bricolage of tiny smudges of sound, exploratory yet less confident than his "Nr. 5 Zeitmasse" (1956), an inquisitive crosstalk of five woodwinds. Boulez's "Le Marteau Sans Maître (The Hammer Without a Master)" (1955) is a more complex collation of woodwind, strangulated guitar and imperious alto vocal. Finally, David Tudor's take on Stockhausen's "Klavierstück XI" (1956) offers spikes of piano notes in various tempi, some tumbling hurriedly, others spaced widely.

DOWNLOAD THIS Nr. 5 Zeitmasse; Le Marteau Sans Maître; Klavierstück XI