In this reading, Stockhausen explains his thought process as well as his tips for Momente, a composition he started in 1961, and for our own moment forming ideas. To begin with, relating to music, when sounds occupy a particular region, or maintain an average speed, etc.-a moment is happening. A moment is made up of constant characters, and when they change, a new moment begins. If they change slowly, the new moment occurs as the old one continues. There are 3 groups of moments that sum up a work: 1. M-moments, where melody predominates, with an emphasis on heterophony (articulating sound-events around a line) 2. K-moments, sound quality characterized by everything that functions as components of a complex sound. 3. D: duration, principals of measured duration of different lengths gives rise to silence and polyphony. What's interesting is that once something is cut, the pieces can be separated & superimposed which produces polyphony. Having illustrated the groups as much as possible, one can now build up a great deal of different generations of inter-relating moments, and can control how much they have in common.
There are also I-moments to be combined with the groups which are very vague, static, directionless moments. You can imagine how the combos can be created from the various elements. The strongest moment is the one which takes and gives the least. The weakest is the one you can hardly recognize for itself. The internal structure of a moment also applies to the material selected and the notion reflects the internal relationships.
The part I found most engaging was when Stockhausen mentioned that he gives his male choir members a list of seven nonsense syllables and every member chooses a specified number to vocalize during a given number of seconds while the solo soprano sings, whenever they feel like it. This ushers to a controlled randomness of distribution of those syllables in time and order. So the outcome is random for both the conductor and the audience.
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