D’eau et de pierre is the threshold work into Grisey’s mature music, the first work idiomatically recognisable as being in Grisey’s mature style featuring a gradually changing static ensemble texture. This chapter explores the influences on the work, showing how it tied in with the so-called meditative music of the era, in particular that of Jean-Claude Éloy and La Monte Young, each of whom was exploring long durations and static harmonic surfaces. It details Grisey’s attendance at the 1972 Darmstadt Summer Courses, where, alongside lectures and seminars by Chowning, Rădulescu, Xenakis, and Ligeti, he took part in Stockhausen’s seminars on Mantra and Stimmung. A performance of the latter by the Collegium Vocale Köln made a strong impression on him, performed by the Collegium Vocale Köln, made a strong impression on him. D’eau et de pierre was completed after this, and its form drew on Stockhausen’s concept of the degree of change of a given statistical sound.

Between 1958 and 1960, three prominent figures of the European post-war musical avant-garde premiered major works for spatially distributed orchestral groups: Pierre Boulez’s Doubles, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré, and Henri Pousseur’s Rimes pour multiples sources sonores. This period coincides with the introduction of stereo long-playing records that led to the mass distribution of stereo sound technology, buoyed by an aggressive marketing campaign. To what extent were listeners’ experiences of spatialized works like Doubles, Gruppen and Rimes informed by their new familiarity with stereo sound? How did composers respond to listeners’ expectations about, and understanding of, stereo in their spatialized works? This chapter evaluates the extent to which an allusion to the technology of stereophony was inscribed into these works, an inscription that might include both ways audiences were inclined to hear stereophonic effects in these works and composers might have reacted in their works to these expectations.

While the ‘post-serial’ has been a resilient critical category over more than half a century, its status remains problematised by ongoing debates around the nature and limits of the serial itself. In particular, as insight grows into European serial practice after World War II, so does the case for understanding serialism as a more capacious concept than hitherto, embracing not only technique but also aesthetic and – a category regarded as taboo by certain of its practitioners – style. The generalisations that serialism underwent in the 1950s led less to a rigidly deterministic model of ‘total’ serialism than to a proliferation of the concept in many directions. Its seemingly endless possibilities of permutation led it (surprisingly to some) towards the statistical and the aleatory, while its notion of the ‘parameter’ went at times beyond the conventional categories of pitch and rhythm to embrace the manipulation of text, action and gesture. If relatively few composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, fewer still can entirely avoid the explicit reflections on material and process that it stimulated.

The chapter approaches Kraftwerk‘s oeuvre from a conceptual perspective and treats the band as performance artists. After discussing the artistic major influences, the first three albums from 1970 to 1973, later disowned by the core team of Ralf Hütter and Florin Schneider, are considered aginst the conceptual notion of ‘industrielle Volksmusik‘ (i.e. electronic pop music). Next, Kraftwerk‘s concept albums from 1974 to 1981 are analysed using key themes and lead aesthetics such as retro-futurism, man-machine, and post-humanism. The chapter then examines the impact of digitilisation on the artistic production of the band and discusses the reversal of the primary mode of operaton from the recording of new studio albums towards the curation of the core work in the period between 1983 and 2003. To conclude, the chapter looks at the evolution of their stage craft up to the current fully immersive and ritualistic audio-visual performances. I evaluate to which extent Kraftwerk can be seen as a paradigmatic example of a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, fulfilling Richard Wagner‘s promise of a true Zukunftsmusik (future music).