EGN NEWS DESK
An elliptical halo of skinny, concentrated gentle floated within the capacious drill corridor of the Park Avenue Armory on a latest morning, above a round house designed to dissolve your sense of house and time.
At the middle was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his digital music at a console. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s inventive director, sat close by, visibly delighted by the scene round him. To his proper and left, idiosyncratically formed video screens confronted one another throughout a spherical expanse dotted with lights that moved and adjusted coloration as Urs Schönebaum, the director, spoke right into a headset whereas using a scooter.
After a quick pause, Schönebaum cued numerous parts: Out of darkness and silence emerged eerie sounds that traveled freely by the house from unseen audio system; the movies throbbed with the music, their brightness, with the altering lights, creating an phantasm of a void past the circle. It turned tough to trace the passing minutes. The nice spring morning exterior may as properly have been one other world.
Such is the impact of “Inside Light,” the Armory’s theatrical presentation of digital music from “Licht,” or “Light,” Stockhausen’s monumental, impractical cycle of seven operas written from the late Nineteen Seventies to the early 2000s. Defying easy clarification and conventional kind, these works, by turns comical and mystically elegant, take care of cosmic clashes of excellent and evil, with intimate dramas and world politics, with the character of music itself.
At the Armory, listeners will hear 5 digital items that make up only a sliver of the 29-hour cycle, however even that might be substantial. They might be carried out over two nights, starting on Wednesday, or as single-day marathons for many who need to get misplaced within the sounds of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 and influenced the likes of Kraftwerk and Björk.
In this setting, Pasveer mentioned, individuals can “actually dive into the music, loosen up and discover it in house.”
“Inside Light” is an adaptation of the much-larger manufacturing “Aus Licht,” or “From Light,” a three-day, 15-hour abridgment of “Licht” that was staged on the Holland Festival in Amsterdam 5 years in the past. (A video recording might be launched by Naxos in spring 2025.)
That manufacturing was a transformative expertise for everybody concerned. And there have been so much of individuals concerned: The performances included a whole lot of musicians, most of whom have been college students who had realized “Licht” with Pasveer as a grasp’s diploma program. One second, the “Helicopter String Quartet,” concerned gamers collaborating from 4 helicopters flying above the town.
Pasveer mentioned that she had heard from individuals whose lives have been modified by “Aus Licht,” together with, she mentioned, a household that may journey to the Armory from Germany. To Audi, who directed the Amsterdam manufacturing and conceived the New York model, these responses have been hardly shocking.
“Whether you’re previous, younger or any age, that is for you,” he mentioned. “It defies tendencies and fashions and has, like Wagner, an authority about itself as a result of it comes from the deep psyche of the composer and so it connects with the psyche of the listener.”
In Amsterdam, the digital music parts of “Licht,” together with the eight-channel immensity “Invisible Choirs,” have been supplied earlier than and after stay performances “for devoted listeners.” Audience members have been allowed to wander and discover how the spatially designed rating modified relying on the place they stood. “The motion of sound was as essential to Stockhausen as rhythm and timbre,” Pasveer mentioned. “He had this totally stunning quote, which was, ‘Whenever we hear sounds, we’re modified.’”
For Schönebaum, the Amsterdam performances have been particular exactly as a result of they’re unimaginable to copy, financially and logistically. “It’s implausible,” he mentioned, “to have this once-in-a-lifetime reminiscence to hold with me.”
Still, the “Aus Licht” crew, which additionally contains important video design by Robi Voigt, wished the undertaking to proceed in some kind. So Audi programmed solely the digital music for the 2020 version of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, the place he’s the inventive director. That manufacturing, although, went the way in which of all the pieces within the performing arts throughout that pandemic 12 months.
But the thought stayed with Audi, who wished to deliver “Licht” to the Armory, the place he thought the house might provide “absolutely the optimum surroundings for listening to the music.”
Because of the speaker association, the round form of the house was a given, mentioned Schönebaum, who designed a brand new staging for the Armory. Within the ring of audio system, the viewers can sit, stand, lie down or wander on a black carpet surrounded by lights that create an phantasm of the partitions and ceiling having disappeared right into a darkish expanse. Stockhausen, Pasveer mentioned, had at one level introduced his music in whole darkness to remove distractions, however “individuals bought paranoid,” so he started to undertaking a picture of the moon at his performances.
The outcome, Pasveer mentioned, is a “large, immersive sound” that reveals Stockhausen’s music for what it’s: an uncommonly imaginative growth of easy concepts. She remembered Stockhausen as open and humorous; Audi described him as a luminous presence whose music is incessantly misunderstood. (“Licht” is commonly much less drearily modernist than the works of his Darmstadt School colleagues like Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono.)
“People say it’s both hyperintellectual or it’s kitsch,” Audi mentioned. “It’s neither.”
It’s mathematical, religious, bodily, private. Not to say welcoming, particularly, Schönebaum mentioned, to the generations of listeners who grew up with the favored digital music that Stockhausen impressed.
Welcoming, too, is the final word temper of the “Inside Light” items, Audi mentioned. “The music has a kind of majesty and anxious dimension, however it doesn’t make you anxious as a result of it has inside it the other, at all times,” he added. “It presents uplift in dialogue with the anxiousness, which I discover very fascinating and theatrical. I discover myself imagining a narrative, as a result of your thoughts can journey with this music.”
Audience members simply should open themselves as much as it. “The individuals who might be right here,” Pasveer mentioned, “who get to listen to this music with the air and house it wants, these individuals might be so privileged.”
