Carré, Nr. 10

Carré was commissioned by the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) in Hamburg. The essential ideas occurred to Stockhausen in November–December 1958 while on a tour of the United States where, during hours spent each day flying from one location to another, he experienced the slowest temporal rates of change of his life. The work was composed in 1959–60, in collaboration with Stockhausen’s assistant Cornelius Cardew, and was premiered on 28 October 1960 in the Festival Hall of the "Planten un Blomen" Park in Hamburg, as part of the NDR's concert series Das Neue Werk, with the NDR Chor und NDR Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Mauricio Kagel (orchestra I), Stockhausen (orchestra II), Andrzej Markowski (orchestra III), and Michael Gielen (orchestra IV) (Stockhausen 1964, 102–103). The score is dedicated to the former director of Das Neue Werk, Herbert Hübner.