ABSTRACT
Even in its revised, final form, Part One retains the fluid, improvisational character of the original song, dashed off in a flush of inspiration. Pascal Decroupet has outlined the pitch and duration construction, woven from concurrent pairs of sets, like the talea and color in the tenor of a medieval isorhythmic motet. The counting units alternate quaver and semiquaver, until a dotted quaver is introduced with the third row of the penultimate aggregation. This longer value dramatically broadens the rhythm, preparing for the swift, brusque groups and decisive downward motion at the end to a chord where all three instruments are at or near the lowest extreme of their range. The apparently free deployment of characteristic shapes, as well as the choices of permutations of other parameters, is sometimes put in the service of surprisingly conventional text-painting, compared with what Stockhausen was doing at the same time in Gesang der Jünglinge.
