Twelve Days of Christmas: Stockhausen's Mantra

K. Stockhausen, Mantra, X. Pestova, P. Meyer, J. Panis (released on September 28, 2010) Naxos 8.572398 | 67'33"

In 1969 your moderator was knee-high to a grasshopper, and experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was on a car trip in New England. He heard a melody and wrote it down on an envelope, with the idea that it would be the basis of a musical work, "one single musical figure or formula that would be expanded over a very long period of time," as he put it in 1971. This theme of 13 notes and a series of other musical parameters became the musical kernel of Stockhausen's Mantra, a work for two (augmented) pianos in 13 sections that expand and realize that initial melody. Stockhausen's works list (.PDF file) says that the score calls for two pianists (with wood blocks and antique cymbales, or crotales) plus electronics (2 sine-wave generators, 2 ring modulators, 2-track tape rec., 6 micr., 2 x 2 loudsp., mixing console / sound proj.). The performers also have to shout together at one point. This may seem an odd choice to finish out the Twelve Days of Christmas, but there is something exotic and otherworldly about the piece, as performed in this excellent recent recording, that seemed to fit Three Kings Day.

Stylistically, Stockhausen's earlier works have the greatest appeal to my ear, where there is still rhythmic pulse and harmonic variety, and not too much outright weirdness: put Mantra into the same category as pleasing works like Tierkreis (1974/75) and the vocal piece Stimmung (1968). Dutch sound technician/projectionist Jan Panis, former assistant to Stockhausen, created the first digital arrangements to create the electronic component of this piece, with the composer's approval. The sound effects, created by the piano sound being routed through microphones and digital processing before reaching the ears, include echos, distortions, buzzing, ringing, and manipulation that creates something akin to the percussive sounds of a prepared piano or of the gamelan. The result produced by the adventurous Pestova/Meyer Piano Duo, while not recommended for people who get a rash at dissonant or off-putting music, is hypnotic. A fine introduction to Stockhausen and experimental music for anyone interested in such a thing.

Stockhausen Listens from Orbit

Read my review published today on the Washington Post Web site:

Charles T. Downey, Stockhausen's Zodiac in Baltimore
Washington Post, January 22, 2010

Mobtown Modern, the alt-classical contemporary music series based in Baltimore, gave its latest concert at Metro Gallery on Wednesday night. It featured a politely transgressive adaptation of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Tierkreis" by Hybrid Groove Project, otherwise known as saxophonist Brian Sacawa and composer Erik Spangler, who also curate the series. Stockhausen, the imperious modernist who once claimed to have come from the star Sirius and presumably has been in astral orbit somewhere since his death in 2007, was surely none too pleased.

Behind tables piled high with computers, instruments and musical toys, the performers created an ersatz setting for Stockhausen's 12 melodies of the zodiac, accompanied by dreamlike still and video images contributed by Jon Bevers. Recorded noise, beat tracks and looped melodic snippets recorded on the spot were knitted together as introductions and backdrops for each section, linking the sections and extending them to roughly an hour. The singsong style of many passages was perhaps a tribute to the piece's simple origins, as melodies to be played on specially created music boxes. [Continue reading]

Stockhausen, Tierkreis, S. Roller, M. Riessler, W. Fernow, M. Kiedaisch, M. Svoboda

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tierkreis
Adapted as Zodiacrobatic, by Hybrid Groove Project
Mobtown Modern
Metro Gallery (Baltimore, Md.)

Tierkreis is subtitled "12 Melodies of the Star Signs," and the version for a melody and/or chordal instrument, from 1974/75, was taken from Stockhausen's initial version for music boxes, as part of a stage work. In this version, Brian Sacawa played all kinds of saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone), toy piano, electric guitar (memorably), and some percussion, while Erik Spangler played primarily the melodica, with surprising turns at the theremin, soprano recorder, violin, percussion, and turntables.

Each melody orbits around pitch center, which rises chromatically through the series from Aquarius to Capricorn, and each melody has a different tempo. If you are curious, Stockhausen's birthday -- August 22, 1928 -- put him on the cusp of Leo and Virgo. As notated, the intended length of the work was only about a half-hour, and in the Hybrid Groove Project version some of them were repeated several times. You can follow the development of the Zodiacrobatic project (as I did, preparing for this review) by going back into Brian Sacawa's Twitter feed.

Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini:


Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra:


Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius:

Helikopter-Streichquartett

Helicopter String Quartet, with the Arditti Quartet, directed by Frank Scheffer (released June 24, 2008) Medici Arts 3077508

The late Karlheinz Stockhausen had this crazy idea, as he so often did, to explode the concept of traditional music. For the third scene of Mittwoch from his opera cycle Licht, premiered in 1995, he put the four members of the Arditti String Quartet into four separate helicopters and had them play a new piece of his music while flying about in the air. The music of the Helikopter-Streichquartett's four parts was then mixed together for the listener to hear as a united whole. In this new DVD, directed by Frank Scheffer, we see Stockhausen speaking about how the work came about, because of his lifelong dreams of flying. This is in spite of the fact that he consciously chose to avoid all traditional forms and arrangements, never accepting commissions for a piano or violin concerto, for example. He admits that the work was his first and probably his last string quartet. We now know that it was.

We also see Stockhausen rehearsing the Arditti Quartet on the piece, and if you still believe that music like Stockhausen's music is just chaos, the composer's painstaking attention to detail in these rehearsals will change your mind. Every note, every inflection, every facet of intonation and rhythmic precision is scrutinized and corrected, just as musicians always do with any kind of music. From the notated parts, four melodies are traced out by Stockhausen with colored lines for the instruments. The particularities of this work tested Stockhausen's controlling instincts: we see him discussing the possibility (and cost) of rehearsing the work at least once in the helicopters, to make sure it works. Just how to make a cellist fit into a helicopter so as to be able to play is a challenge that has to be worked out, and then many electronic issues are involved, to receive the audio signal from the helicopters (including the sound of the rotors, captured by an external microphone on each helicopter) and mix it together.

The score is set to last 18 minutes and 36 seconds (although Stockhausen's Web site now lists the duration as "circa 32 minutes," incorporating changes made after the premiere), coordinated with a start signal in the players' headphones and with each sound carefully mapped (Stockhausen explains much of it with the score in hand). In this absorbing DVD, one has an impression not only of the work but of the nature of Stockhausen's creative manner. He appears brimming with nervous energy and moved by apparently random coincidences, finding significance in the details of his dreams and in numbers, even the registration numbers on the four helicopters. At one point, he speaks about how he hopes he will eventually have a body capable of sensing more than a human body can. Hopefully, he is out there somewhere, making something beyond music in the cosmos.

77'


Excerpt from Helicopter String Quartet (see other related videos)

Stimmung

Available at Amazon: Stockhausen, Stimmung, Theatre of Voices, P. Hillier (September 11, 2007) Buy it in MP3 format

It is hard to imagine adding anything to what Marion Lignana Rosenberg (AKA Vilaine Fille) wrote about this new release in her lovely and pithy review (Time Out New York, September 6). Some pieces composed in the 20th century have simply become classics and merit continued performance and rethinking. Like Luciano Berio's ground-breaking Sinfonia (1967-1969), Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung could only have been composed, as it was, in 1968, and it sums up in many ways the groovy experimental spirit of the Age of Aquarius (I can hear the universe tuning, man). Like the Collegium Vocale Köln, who premiered Stimmung, and Singcircle, who recorded it in the 1980s, Paul Hillier has led the six singers of his group Theatre of Voices in the creation of a new version of the work, the score of which leaves many compositional decisions up to the performers. In an article in The Guardian ('I felt a controlling hand taking over', September 28) Paul Hillier wrote about just how much control Stockhausen wanted to give up.

Other Reviews: Joshua Kosman, Stockhausen (San Francisco Chronicle, September 2) Marion Lignana Rosenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen (Time Out New York, September 6) Greg Sandow, The Magic of Stockhausen's 'Stimmung' (Wall Street Journal, September 20)

The piece involves six unaccompanied, amplified singers, seated in a circle, experimenting with the sonorities of the overtone series (in this case, built over the fundamental note of B-flat), using random syllables, the names of the weekdays, mysterious names of deities, and some English and German text. Is it a coincidence that Sesame Street and the Muppets were pioneered in the same era? With a few subtle changes, portions of Stimmung could easily morph into a Sesame spot ("M-, Mi-, Mitt ... W-, Wo-, Woch ... Mittwoch!"). This release is not for the timid or reactionary, but it is a beautiful performance of an experimental classic, puzzlingly weird and musically profound, in a pure sense. (On a side note, did no one consider the irony of releasing this album in the United States on September 11, given Stockhausen's infamous comments, admittedly taken out of context, about the September 11 attacks being "the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos"?)

Harmonia Mundi HMU 807408

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Maison Française

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is another Ionarts favorite. Since winning the Olivier Messiaen Competition in 1973 and becoming a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez, Aimard has been a champion of contemporary music. As he showed yet again in a Monday evening recital at La Maison Française, it is not just that he plays contemporary music in all styles but also that he plays it so well, so musically, with such understanding. Aimard's recording of the Ives Concord Sonata, for example, lays bare the structure and sense of one of the most complex pieces of the 20th century. Aimard does more than champion: his playing of contemporary music can proselytize.

This was at least part of the goal of this kaleidoscopic and enigmatic recital, a selection of 40-some short pieces and excerpts of longer pieces, played without intermission. With microphone in hand, Aimard guided us through the five sets he had constructed, in a collage-montage, a "game" to bring together different pieces, that perhaps should not be put together, to create a mosaic or patchwork. With masterful technique and a sure-footed sense of musical shape, Aimard gave life to this Frankenstein monster, which unlike Mary Shelley's horrific creation was more beautiful as a patchwork than any of its single component parts.

The first section, Prélude Elémentaire, dealt with the basics of sound, opening with pieces by Ligeti and Bartók that developed extensively through repetitions of a single note. This blossomed into a pair of pieces, by Schoenberg and Bartók, based on thirds, and finally into pieces by Webern and Boulez in the 12-tone style. A "slow movement" that explored the extremes of expressivity and ambiguity called Sostenuto followed, with highlights including a Scriabin prelude, the Janáček Intermezzo erotico, and especially Marco Stroppa's Ninna-nanna from Miniature Estrose (1991-95), a work based on tremulo figures and Doppler effects. In that setting, the 20th variation of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations almost sounded atonal.

This was the stunning effect of Aimard's juxtaposition of atonal and tonal selections, so that the end of one dovetailed perfectly with the next, often pivoting on the same note or chord. This was most striking in the third section, Intermezzo zodiacal, where Romantic sublimations of country dances like the Ländler, mostly by Schubert, alternated with movements from Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zodiac. (Was it a coincidence that this suite of pairings ended with the Virgo movements, which happens to be Aimard's astrological sign?) No matter how far toward the fluffy Romantic stereotype the selection went, even Liadov's A Musical Snuffbox and an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, the pattern made Stockhausen seem only a step away.

Other Reviews: Cecelia Porter, An Amalgam Of Composers, One Insightful Whole (Washington Post, May 9) Anthony Tommasini, At Carnegie Hall, the pianist Aimard creates unorthodox connections (New York Times, May 15)

The evening closed with a scherzo-type movement called Capriccio and a tribute to musical farewells, Cloches d'adieu. In the former, Beethoven bagatelles battled with flighty works by Stockhausen, Scarlatti, and John Cage. In a tribute to the experimental leanings of a previous age, Aimard included the mysterious Sphinxes movement from Schumann's Carnaval, by pressing down the keys corresponding to the notated pitches in the composer's formula, without allowing the strings to make any sound. (John Cage probably would have approved of the extended cell phone ring that interrupted much of this section of the concert, as always with concert-destroying sounds set to the most ridiculous melody one could imagine.)

Bells that bid adieu included Schoenberg's farewell to his teacher, Mahler; Kurtág's tribute to the musicologist Lászlo Dobszáy; and Tristan Murail's farewell to his teacher, Messiaen, based in turn on Messiaen's anguished piece on the death of his mother. The violet-orange dissonance in the Messiaen excerpt meshed so perfectly with the extended harmony in an excerpt of Ravel's Gibet from Gaspard de la nuit, that the listener was forcably reminded just how close the sound worlds of those two composers really are. So as not to leave us with the grim sounds of the clanging death knell and the slithering chords of the gallows, Aimard closed with an excerpt from the Great Gate of Kiev movement from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Although it struck me that Debussy's prelude La cathédrale engloutie would have served aptly as an encore on the theme of tintinnabulation, Aimard was not tempted to add another word to his powerful discourse.

The 2008 season at La Maison Française, while not yet fully announced, will include a performance by Les Folies Françoises and a solo recital by Alexandre Tharaud, both postponed from this year's season. This month's remaining concert is a recital by violist Roger Tapping and pianist Judith Gordon (May 24, 7:30 pm).

Stockhausen and the Number 6

Other Articles: Charles T. Downey, Stockhausen Rising in Milan (Ionarts, May 10, 2005) Barry Didcock, The Man Who Fell to Earth - Karlheinz Stockhausen, Madman or Genius? (The Glasgow Sunday Herald, March 27, 2005) Charles T. Downey, Fiat Lux, Stockhausen Dixit (Ionarts, October 16, 2004) Robert Hilfery, "The Greatest Work of Art in the Entire Cosmos" (Andante.com, September 2001)

Pierre Gervasoni has published a long interview with modern composer Karlheinz Stockhausen ("J'ai créé une tradition de la précision d'exécution", August 9) in Le Monde. The discussion took place at Stockhausen's home in Cologne, which he designed and helped build (my translation):

Do your house's dimensions have any symbolic meaning?

No, not all. Well, it is true that the architecture is based on the hexagon, like the hives of bees, and that the number 6 has played an important role in my compositions. When you consider, for example, that six is the sum of 1+2+3, you get a structure much more solid than one based on four, for example.

How many children do you have?

Six. But that was not a conscious choice! Anyway, getting back to the house, each room is a subdivision of a hexagone. Also, all the windows were built with a 60°ree; angle, which makes a truly extraordinary reflection of light. In the evening, in the kitchen or in my office, the trees of the surrounding forest and the plants in the garden are reflected on the windows in such a way that you can't tell where the house stops and nature begins. [...]

Since your scores are so precise, can you imagine that performers could execute them correctly today without your help?

This is pure hypothesis because, for us musicians, there has always been a tradition. If performers were to decide to perform one of my works, they would be completely stupid not to speak with the people who have already played it with me and not to contact me in order to work from the recordings I have made, for years, on 16-track tape, which allow you to hear each part separately and sometimes even to have a click-track with it to help you perform the tempos exactly. I have created a tradition in precise execution that makes for a very good school. [...]

The perception of your words has sometimes required some explanation. This was the case regarding your response, sharp, it must be said, to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That was a mean ploy by a man, a radio journalist in Hamburg, who wanted to take revenge on the festival that had invited me. He cut off the beginning of the sentence, where I was saying that Lucifer had manifested himself in New York and thus made me come off, with his personal remarks, like a supporter of Bin Laden! The evening that the show was broadcast, the Hamburg cultural representative, worried in the week before local elections, came to tell me that they had to cancel my four concerts. Then the director of a foundation, presider over by former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, shared with me his fear of diplomatic complications with the United States and Israel if they went ahead with my concerts. They had all become crazy! No one even tried to find out exactly what I had said.

If you don't remember it, Stockhausen was quoted as saying that the September 11 attacks were "the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos . . . Compared to this, we are nothing as composers." I was not particularly upset by his remarks at the time (read the whole quotation that appeared then, not just this little tag), and his explanation of what happened seems plausible enough.

New Music and the Catholic Church

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a concert of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen in Milan (Stockhausen Rising in Milan, May 10). Pierre Gervasoni wrote an article for Le Monde about the event, which was part of an innovative arts festival at Milan Cathedral:

Who is responsible for bringing Stockhausen to Milan? Pierre Gervasoni describes Don Luigi Garbini, a 37-year-old priest resident at San Marco, as the director of the Laboratory of Contemporary Music in the Service of the Liturgy, which secured money from a Milanese bank to commission the work, along with a Bill T. Jones dance performance (to the Chaconne from Bach's D minor partita, played by violinist Nurit Pacht: see some pictures with this article) and a Shirin Neshat video, for Pause 2005, an interdisciplinary spiritual festival in Milan Cathedral. Pierre Gervasoni interviewed Don Luigi (Trois questions à Don Luigi Garbini, May 8) for Le Monde. As he tells it, the priest read Pope John Paul II's 1999 letter to artists and had the idea to invite a number of composers to consider the question of the liturgy. Since then he has awarded 25 commissions, from composers including Goffredo Petrassi, Henri Pousseur, Franco Donatoni, Luca Francesconi, Yan Maresz, Luis de Pablo, and Ennio Morricone. In fact, Stockhausen was in Milan last year, too, along with a Mark Wallinger video with music by Suzanne Vega and Oscar Wilde readings; Bill Viola's Departing Angel and Emergence (with the music by Stockhausen).

Well, Pierre Gervasoni is back with another article (Don Luigi Garbini, virtuose de Dieu, June 8) for Le Monde, a portrait of Don Luigi, which I think you might find interesting. Here are a few excerpts for you to chew on (my translation):

Will May 5, 2005, become a pivotal date in music history? We could think so, because that Ascension Thursday saw the creation, in Milan Cathedral, of a visionary work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the only representative of the 1950s avant-garde who has never ceased to be innovative. With Ora Prima (First hour), a section of Klang (Sound), a cycle of pieces corresponding to the 24 hours of day, the German composer (b. 1928) not only propelled music into a new era, he also drew in his wake 2,500 listeners, an exceptional number in the world of contemporary music. [...]

There we were, in the middle of a conversation with Fr. Garbini on a bench in the monumental Duomo of Milan, when a local television reporter approached and launched a "Don Luigi?" full of recognition in the direction of this special reporter for Le Monde. We don't want to know which of the two of us is more right for the part, but you will surely understand that a young long-haired man wearing glasses à la John Lennon, a black shirt, and silvery tennis shoes [see his picture] would not immediately be recognized as the musical advisor of the Diocese of Milan.

This adopted Milanese explains that, first of all, he was lucky to be appointed in a parish with an exalted musical past. The church of San Marco, where Verdi's Requieum was premiered in 1874, became an important location for sacred music in which well-known conductors like Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti have given concerts. Even before arriving there, in 1998, Don Luigi found great support in Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini: "It was he who asked me to examine the use of music in the churches of the diocese," says the founder of the Laboratory of Contemporary Music in the Service of the Liturgy (LmcsL). A musician by training, Don Luigi had not at all abandoned his contact with the muse when he entered the seminary.

He was an organist and had close family ties with the composer who founded the Laboratory with him. He also claims that the room where he lives at San Marco is "without doubt the one that Mozart occupied in 1770 for four months when he went to Bologna to study with Padre Martini."

What interests me, in particular, is that Don Luigi represents what may have become of the Vatican if the reformist camp of cardinals had been able to win a majority in the recent conclave. Don Luigi's boss, the man who ordained him a priest, is the Archbishop Emeritus of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini, who was one of leading "left-wing" cardinals widely considered papabile. If he had been elected instead of Benedict XVI, would Stockhausen have composed a setting of Tu es Petrus for the new pope's coronation? Would we have had a Missa Electronica from Henri Pousseur? A Magnificat Concrète by Pierre Henry? The possibilities are endless.

I am not as troubled as Alex Ross by the musical tastes of the new pope, because I think Gregorian chant and the polyphonic heritage of the Catholic Church are historical treasures that have been allowed to fall largely into obscurity and disuse. Catholics travel from around the world to see the great examples of Catholic art history in Rome, but what do they sing and hear when they go there, or anywhere else for that matter? As we remarked time after time on our recording trip to Rome, people sing the same derivative folk music crap in St. Peter's, San Paolo, the Lateran, wherever, without any sense of shame. Palestrina is the musical counterpart of Michelangelo, so why would you be content with something like Pescador de Hombres (.PDF file): in whatever language you sing it (and we heard it sung in many of them over the course of several days in Rome), it's still jejune. Yes, I know, it was one of the former pope's favorite tunes, but I really find it unspeakably vulgar, at least in the context of the marvelous edifice of St. Peter's, built and decorated by artists like Michelangelo, Bramante, Maderna, and Bernini.

As it turns out, the other side would have probably had its own interest, too, if Don Luigi had gone to Rome with Cardinal Martini, to advise on the future of liturgical music. Thank God, neither side appears to favor Pescador de Hombres.

Stockhausen Rising in Milan

I admit that, just for a moment, when I read the headline about Stockhausen in Milan—Pierre Gervasoni, L'ascension musicale de Stockhausen à Milan (Le Monde, May 8)—I seriously thought to myself, "Stockhausen is going to replace Muti at La Scala?!" Once I had recovered from the shock and actually read the article, I was relieved to learn that it was just about Stockhausen's premiere of a new work in the Cathedral of Milan. The work is only the latest in the tradition of strange musical statements for the feast of the Ascension (my translation):

Tourists who signed up for the tour of Milan's cathedral on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 4, were in for a surprise. The façade, built in the flamboyant gothic style, was hidden by immense gray screens, behind which restoration teams are at work. And, on the inside, the view of the building is impeded by a gigantic white curtain that closes off the central nave, from roof to floor, at the crossing. One might think that Christo was in the midst of wrapping the Duomo. In fact, it was Karlheinz Stockhausen, the contemporary composer most skilled at shocking crowds, who was preparing the premiere of his new work, Erste Stunde (First hour), planned for Ascension Thursday [May 4] at 9 pm.

Seated behind a mixing board right in the middle of the nave, orange fleece on his shoulders and pencil in hand, the composer was struggling through the stresses of the dress rehearsal. In contact by microphone with the performers, an organist and two singers who are located in the choir, he interrupts the performance every 30 seconds. At his side, Kathinka Pasveer, eminent flutist of the Stockhausen inner circle, is serving as first counselor to the master and offers some suggestions about balance. Farther away, with a videocamera in hand, Suzanne Stephens, clarinettist and the composer's second wife, preserves these historic moments for posterity.

Apparently, the acoustics of Milan Cathedral, and its 18 seconds of reverberation, were a problem. There was a video screen 35 meters (115 feet) high and 18 meters (59 feet) wide blocking the nave, showing a projected image of the organist's hands, with which Stockhausen tried to coordinate the other performers. Stockhausen explained to the author that the overall work calls for 24 different tempi in 24 coordinated registers.

"The strongest and most complex timbres go with the slowest tempi; the most transparent and lightest with the quickest." And the combination of two different tempi for the two hands of the organist, which was enough to scare away three renowned performers, but not young Alessandro La Ciacera, the cathedral's junior organist. "He has a practicality that allows him to overcome these difficulties," notes the composer, who himself has had to adapt, with the help of the microphone, to the handicap of a very resonant space. "Never in my life have I written the staccatos so carefully, separating them from one another so as to play with the reverberation after the attack."

What is the religious symbolism behind Stockhausen's piece being premiered on Ascension? According to the composer, "Asking a performer to break the barrier of time by playing simultaneously in different tempi is like submitting a man to physical disruption allowing him to go in spirit form towards another world."

Who is responsible for bringing Stockhausen to Milan? Pierre Gervasoni describes Don Luigi Garbini, a 37-year-old priest resident at the cathedral, as the director of the Laboratory of Contemporary Music in the Service of the Liturgy, which secured money from a Milanese bank to commission the work, along with a Bill T. Jones dance performance (to the Chaconne from Bach's D minor partita, played by violinist Nurit Pacht: see some pictures with this article) and a Shirin Neshat video, for Pause 2005, an interdisciplinary spiritual festival in Milan Cathedral. Pierre Gervasoni interviewed Don Luigi (Trois questions à Don Luigi Garbini, May 8) for Le Monde. As he tells it, the priest read Pope John Paul II's 1999 letter to artists and had the idea to invite a number of composers to consider the question of the liturgy. Since then he has awarded 25 commissions, from composers including Goffredo Petrassi, Henri Pousseur, Franco Donatoni, Luca Francesconi, Yan Maresz, Luis de Pablo, and Ennio Morricone. In fact, Stockhausen was in Milan last year, too, along with a Mark Wallinger video with music by Suzanne Vega and Oscar Wilde readings; Bill Viola's Departing Angel and Emergence (with the music by Stockhausen).

Pierre Gervasoni reviewed the work (Un édifice rayonnant pour dire la toute-puissance du son, Le Monde, May 8). Stockhausen draws crowds in Europe: by an hour before the concert, the lines to enter the cathedral crossed the piazza, and the audience was estimated at around 2,500 people (my translation):

Plunged into darkness, the cathedral returned to the calm necessary for listening to music. Erste Stunde began with motifs drawn upward, probably symbolic of the Ascension. But Stockhausen is not a composer to linger long in the obvious. His new work, the first he has written for organ, is filled with paths open to the unheard of and with unexpected accents. Young organist Alessandro La Ciacera, who gave a Herculean performance, played like an architect arranging sonic levels with attention to detail but also like a theater director. With the help of little percussive sounds, he broke up the linearity of the main texture of flux. The clacking of a bamboo curtain made a number of listeners jump. The ringing of Japanese bowls reframed the piece in a ritual dimension. The lines of the singers, a siren-like soprano and a falsetto-voiced tenor like an angel [Barbara Zanichelli and Paolo Borgonovo], presented the important words of the German text: Klang (sound) and Gott (God) or Latin taken from the Catholic liturgy, as the keystones of a gothic edifice.

The piece is listed on Stockhausen's Web site as Prima Ora (Erste Stunde, or First Hour), from Klang (Sound), the 24 Hours of the Day for organ (or synthesizer), soprano, tenor. Admission to the premiere was free. Who said that Europe's Catholic churches were empty?

Fiat Lux, Stockhausen Dixit

James Wagner has a post on Karlheinz Stockhausen's long-awaited cycle of seven operas, Licht. The last opera, Licht-Bilder (Sonntag) will be premiered today at the Donaueschingen Music Festival, in Germany. The opera calls for bassett horn, flute ("mit Ringmodulator"), tenor, trumpet ("mit Ringmodulator"), synthesizer, Klangregisseur, and light images. The Donnerstag (Thursday) opera will be performed there on October 24.

Das Europäische Zentrum der Künste Hellerau (The European Center for the Arts Hellerau), in Dresden, will stage the first complete performance of all 29 hours of the Licht cycle in 2008, for the composer's 80th birthday (as reported by BBC News).