ABSTRACT
One day in the nineteen-fifties, there fell from the head of the then head of the Cologne avant-garde a marble, upon a marble chopping-slab. This bounced and bounced, first slowly tik… tik… tik … tik … then ever faster tikke-tikke-tikke-tikke and faster tikke-tikke-trrrrrr, and behold: rhythm (tikke-tik) had become pitch (trrrrrr), duration frequency! This event appeared comparable with the fall of the apple upon Newton’s head: Stockhausen (for from his head the marble had rolled) proclaimed the ‘space-time continuum of music’, the ‘unity of all the musical parameters’. With that, O Starry Hour of Music, serialism was born.
