Aus den sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) is a collection of 15 text compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in May of 1968, in reaction to a personal crisis, and characterized as "intuitive music". Often regarded as meditation exercises, all but two of them nonetheless describe in words specific musical events: "I don't want some spiritistic sitting--I want music! I don't mean something mystical, but rather everything completely direct, from concrete experience" (Stockhausen, quoted in Ritzel 1970:15). Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928) is a German composer, one of the most important and controversial composers of the 20th century. ...

The most detailed text is the central one, a theatre piece titled "Oben und Unten" (Above and Below), which gives instructions for three actors and a group of instrumentalists. Twelve of the other pieces describe musical processes or states, in three different general types, and the remaining two, "Ankunft" (Arrival) and "Litanei" (Litany) are more in the nature of manifestos (Kohl 1978; Bergstrøm-Nielsen 1997). In 1997, Stockhausen made a performing version of the latter piece, under the title Litanei 97, for a speaking choir.

Between 1968 and 1971, Stockhausen composed a companion set of text pieces, titled Für kommende Zeiten (For Times to Come).

References

• Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Carl. 1997. "Festlegen, Umreißen, Andeuten, Hervorrufen: Analytisches zu den Textkompositionen von Karlheinz Stockhausen." MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für Neue Musik no. 72 (November): 13-16.
• Boberg, Johan. 2002. "Through the Eye of the Golden Needle: Personal Experiences of Stockhausen’s GOLDSTAUB." Translated from Nutida Musik/Tritonus 2002:4. [1]
• Kohl, Jerome. 1978. “Intuitive Music and Serial Determinism: An Analysis of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen.” In Theory Only 3, no. 2 (March): 7–19.[2]
• Kurtz, Michael. 1988. "Aus den Sieben Tagen: Points de vue biographique et historique sur les compositions-textes de mai 1968." In : Karlheinz Stockhausen (programme booklet). Paris: Contrechamps/Festival d'Automne à Paris. [3]
• Nakaji, Masatsune. 1994. “Karlheinz Stockhausens Intuitive Musik: c'est Le Dispositif Chaosmique de Transformation”. Genesis (The Bulletin of Kyoto University of Art and Design) vol. 1. HTML versions 1995 (in French or Japanese) [4]
• Ritzel, Fred. 1970. Musik für ein Haus. Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 12. Mainz: Schott.
• Wilms, Holger. 2000. "Wie kommt der Kosmos in den Konzertsaal? Karlheinz Stockhausen im Gespräch." A Tempo 6 (June). [5]