 Robin Maconie, on the contrary, regards any apparent political message as superficial, with less significance for younger audiences than for listeners who remember the student uprisings, Viet Nam, and other issues of mass protest from the time when "Hymnen" was composed, holding that the musical meaning of Stockhausen's chosen material is not what those sounds might represent, but what they are acoustically .Johannes Fritsch calls "Hymnen" a "masterpiece", comparable to Beethoven's "Missa solemnis", Mahler's Eighth Symphony, and Schönberg's "Moses und Aron" .Maconie concurs, while pointing out that the conventional symphony's reliance on instruments and tempos (as points of reference), and on themes and key changes (as variables) are replaced in "Hymnen" with the anthems and with "ways of hearing", respectively.