Culture Vulture: INSIDE LIGHT at Park Avenue Armory
For me, as a music aficionado, the very name “Stockhausen” has always stood for experimental, difficult-to-enjoy 20th century music, even though I’ve heard heard very little of his actual music. I hold Karlheinz Stockhausen in a lineage that extends from Stravinsky and Varese into the realms of electronic music of the 1960s. I’ve tried to repair my ignorance whenever I get a chance, and the presentation at Park Avenue Armory of “Inside Light” provided one of those opportunities.
The five hour-plus program stitched together several chunks of his opera cycle LICHT – DIE SIEBEN TAGE DER WOCHE (Light – The seven days of the week), which has been called “the longest coherent work of music in history.” The complete opus revolves around a loosely Biblical narrative involving Eve (The Mother), Michael (a laughing boy whose name conjures the archangel), and Lucifer (representing The Father).
The presentation at the Armory wasn’t exactly a concert. All the music was prerecorded and played through an intricate system of eight loudspeakers scattered around the Drill Hall. The audience was seated in a carpeted circular area on backjacks or chairs. This area was defined above by a cool blue ring of light.
At either end of this circle, irregularly shaped screens flashed minimalist computer graphics with a different motif for each section. The most dynamic element of the physical production came from the lighting design, a network of overhead spots that came and went, forming patterns in the hazy air and illuminating patches of the floor.
I experienced the event as a kind of psychedelic sound bath. The program had two parts, each about two and a half hours long. Andy and I attended the marathon on June 8, seeing the two parts continuously, with an hour dinner break in between. The centerpiece of Part I – Unsichtbare Chöre (Invisible Choir), from the Thursday section of Licht -- focused on Stockhausen’s choral writing, which was strange and rich and spooky to hear bouncing around the space.
The first part ended with Mittwochs-Gruss, a 54-minute electronic piece that delighted me with its trippy head games. (We can’t have been the only audience members who enhanced the experience with cannabis edibles.) After an unexpectedly delicious pre-ordered chicken-and-quinoa salad for dinner, we came back for Part II, which was slower, more static, less interesting to me.
As usual, Park Avenue Armory supplied an oversized program with extensive notes explaining – in considerable technical detail – the overview of Licht and how these various pieces functioned in the composer’s conception. “LICHT can perhaps best be understood as a prism. Stockhausen wrote music to refract ineffable beings and concepts onto opera stages and into scenarios that could speak to his audiences,” writes Stockhausen scholar Joseph Drew in the opening essay.
“The magnum opus within LICHT has to be MICHAELION, a scene so corpulent that it staggers performers and listeners alike,” Drew explains. “Stockhausen could craft extremely intricate counterpoint, but he also enjoyed the cruder counterpoint that results from simply stacking pieces on top of each other. MICHAELION is just such a layer cake, with multiple pieces occurring at once. It is the finale of MITTWOCH (Wednesday), the opera that contemplates the cooperation of Lucifer, Michael, and Eve.” He goes on to say, with a straight face as it were, “Like so many of the scenes excerpted in this program, MICHAELION is too complex a spectacle for a brief description to do it justice. It involves a campaign for the galactic Presidency, and the winning candidate is a camel who successfully stumps for office by defecating planets. That is just a fraction of its dramatic content.” I would love to have seen that depicted onstage, but the images conjured by the program note had to suffice.
Each section of the work got its own detailed introduction in the program notes. The 34-minute “Montags-Gruss/Monday Greeting (for multiple basset-horn and electronic keyboard instruments)” is described as “a musical ceremony in honour of the Mother, a celebration of the birth and rebirth of mankind. The MONDAY music is therefore also connected with the element water: ocean – rain – hail – ice – steam – distilled water – soaked earth – green grass – water scriptures in glass – clouds.” This piece had its premiere in 1988 at La Scala, Milan’s legendary opera house.
Of “MittwochsGruss/Wednesday Greeting,” the trippy section that ended Part I, the composer wrote, “During this work, a completely independent sound fantasy developed which has an alien, mysterious, cosmic atmosphere…A 4-track tape performance in a dark auditorium (with a small projected full moon) and undisturbed listening in the dark with eyes closed is prerequisite for profoundly experiencing the music, which is very seldom reminiscent of this world and which awakens the universe of the fantasy.” This section reminded me of Andrew Schneider’s after (Under the Radar at the Public Theater, 2018), which experimented with state-of-the-art sound technology, moving sounds through space, with long stretches performed in total darkness.
When Freitags-Gruss and Abschied are performed together, as they were at the Armory, Stockhausen titled them Weltraum (Outer Space) and requested that it “be performed in the dark with a small light moon or with a starry firmament,” which the light show I suppose was meant to suggest.
Like so many of the unusual, exciting, not to say wackadoodle events that the Armory programs, this one invited the audience to move around freely, not to treat it as a solemn church-like event. Joseph Drew’s introductory essay concludes, “INSIDE LIGHT is an invitation to play with Stockhausen’s music. Like the boy Michael, the audience gets to reorient itself and choose its vantage point. These four very different excerpts from LICHT showcase some of Stockhausen’s range as a composer. His deftness with ambient music is not widely known. The amount of drones in LICHT is surprising to some, but he was working on a project that spanned four decades of his life. What the Armory gives us in this production is a priceless opportunity to examine his masterpieces in close detail, and most importantly, the space.”
Kathinka Pasveer (above), a longtime Stockhausen collaborator, and Reinhard Klose designed and operated the sound from a console at the back of the auditorium. Urs Schönebaum designed the spatial installation and lighting, Robi Voigt the video. Zachary Woolfe wrote a thoughtful review in the New York Times, and George Grella did the same for the Financial Times.