Gesang der Jünglinge

Song of the Youths in the fiery furnace, usually officially described as Song of the Youths, is a key early work of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The work was important for the development of electronic music. It originated in 1955 in the Studio for Electronic Music at the West German Radio in Cologne. It was realized together with Gottfried Michael Koenig and premiered on May 30, 1956 in Cologne. The vocals sung by the then twelve -year-old Josef Protschka.

The work is often referred to as an early " masterpiece of electronic music." Especially important is the synthesis of electronic / synthetic sounds with the human voice, so with sung / natural sounds. It is thus often seen as the first successful linkage of the avant-garde at the time in Germany purely electronically generated music and those realized in France Musique concrète. For sound generation are sine and pulse generators and used with tape technology reworked boys' voices.

The plant processes a biblical theme of the Book of Daniel. The degree of intelligibility of the text edit vocal passages is used as a compositional parameter. It is an early example of the moment fit.

Stockhausen had his piece at a time for five channels designed as radio and records still single-channel (mono) were designed. As technically most advanced studio tape machine was a four-track device. Stockhausen wanted to let this run in parallel with a Einspurmaschine, coordination proved to be impossible; therefore he mixed add the fifth track on the fourth track. Since the band of fifth track had gone meanwhile lost and could only be reconstructed at the end of the 20th century from the fourth track (see Decroupet / Beast 1998), Song of the Youths must be reception historically regarded as four-channel piece. During the performance of five groups of speakers to the audience are distributed in space. The fact that the fifth group should radiate from the ceiling, as a ' voice of God ', is a blank legend. The space motions of sounds form an essential, written-out plant level. Stockhausen has created special mono and stereo versions of the work for radio and records.