It's now the Barbican's turn to pay its posthumous respects to Karlheinz Stockhausen. If the Southbank Centre's Klang Festival was mostly a celebration of the composer's last works and thus a goldmine of UK and World premieres the Barbican's programme was less concerned with the recent past and more with the controversial macroscopic works that made Stockhausen famous independently of the gargantuan Licht cycle that kept him busy from 1977 to 2003. Thus the evening programme at the Barbican featured two massive pieces, Inori (1973-74) for orchestra, Japanese rin and two mimes, and Hymnen (1966-67), for electronics.
The great thing about both of these two works is that their remarkable size is matched by the phenomenally bold claims that they make in terms of musical meaning. With Inori and Hymnen we are faced with no less than, respectively, the creation of music ex-nihilo, and the aural image of the conflicted plurality of nations, their destruction, and the reconstitution of a utopian World Identity. Not your average Saturday-night material then, although the packed hall seemed to suggest otherwise.
Inori, written only three years before the beginning of Licht, encapsulates many of its themes: the encoding of musical language into the performer's body movements; the ritualism, through the use of mythic imagery (the act of creation in Inori, and the battle of good and evil in Licht); the use of a musical formula as a stem cell for all music. It must also be said that Inori, of all of his pieces, stands as a representative of the didactic propensity in Stockhausen's music; however, it is unlikely that any listener could ever hear the creation of music itself in Inori or in any other piece.
Thus, what conductor David Robertson did by going on stage before the performance to introduce and explain the structure of the piece (the generation of complex polyphony from a simply pulsating pitch via the addition of melody and harmony) was no ad-hoc arrangement. Stockhausen himself composed a piece (called Lecture on Hu) which is nothing but an hour long seminar on Inori to be delivered word by word by a speaker/singer prior to performance. Robertson's ten-minute speech was a succinct and less analytical version of the Lecture on Hu, and it served the same purpose: to influence the audience so that they may 'hear' the programmatic element in Inori.
And, from the very first moment, there is no denying that Inori is endowed with its own peculiarly eerie beauty. You have to take your hat off to Stockhausen, who, out of a shifting pulse, microtonally inflected strings and the rich metallic overtones of the rin, manages to make the opening pitch so rich and full of promise as to bear almost uninterrupted repetition for seventy-odd minutes of music. The archaic element of ritual works very well, as does the instruction that the two mimes should perform on a platform raised above the orchestra. The mimes' gestures, so controlled and stylized throughout the piece, complement very well the stern sacrality of the work, and Kathinka Pasveer (Stockhausen's personal collaborator and flautist) oozed natural grace as the second mime alongside Alain Louafi. The end of the piece, which sees the mimes quietly disappearing through an emphatically lit doorway in the back wall of the stage, was certainly visually halting if not a little over-theatrical.
One only wishes Stockhausen had not pre-empted the audience's expectations by forcing on them such a univocal interpretation of his music. Although the move from pulse to melody and harmony is easily perceivable, the advent of polyphony is more problematic. Perhaps the problem is that a genuinely polyphonic work would have to renounce that easily accessible surface which Inori needs to maintain if it is to be danced to. Likewise, Inori doesn't really come to the culminating big climax one would expect. It certainly has two striking moments of dynamic and registral explosion, yet such moments are so isolated in the work's general static and meditative character, that their function as climaxes are somewhat overshadowed. After all, the oriental inflection of the title (Inori is Japanese for prayer and adoration), as well as the highly stylized dancing and the rin, suggests a clash with the organic process that Stockhausen would like to lecture us on. Inori is a work whose deep sacrality could only have gained from a less prescriptive programme.
It was a relief then, to be able to enjoy the ensuing Hymnen without any compulsory programme. Indeed Stockhausen generally conceived of his electronic pieces as the audience's opportunity for inner journeying the hall is darkened and audience members are much freer to leave and re-enter the concert hall than they would be in an ordinary concert. Hymnen doesn't have a large-scale scheme the way Inori does. In fact, Hymnen is all about dramatic fragmentation. Electronic sounds intermingle with shards of national anthems that are sped up, slowed down, or thrown around the room's loudspeakers.
Yet this brief description couldn't really account for the way Hymnen sounds in a live performance. It is as if the whole room had become a gigantic, berserk radio, picking up random signals from the vast, complex world that exists outside the concert hall. It is this ability to relate to this imaginary 'world outside' by combining synthesised sounds with recorded sounds from conversations, music and radio shows that differentiates Hymnen from Inori. Inori is music about music, a musical ritual that creates music out of itself. Hymnen renounces this puritanical self-referentiality and throws the audience amidst a messy, contradictory world of sounds from all over the place.
National anthems, with their ideological and political overtones (the anthem 'Deutschland, Deutschland όber alles' has a tendency to literally suppress other anthems and sounds around it), the frequent sound of a choir singing, the nasal voice of an impartial croupier overseeing a roulette game, and, later, the wailing of a lone voice calling in the distance at the end are just a few of the shards of auditory material on offer. There is also a deliciously grotesque flavour about the way Stockhausen mercilessly breaks down speech and song into ugly-sounding segments, while making beautiful patterns out of the unlikeliest of materials; perhaps a point in case being the strange polyphony he creates out of different voices reading the names of the hues of red from a book on watercolours. This delirious heterogeneity prevents Hymnen from being labelled in any single way. When it comes to working out what it all means, even Stockhausen's own guess is as good as ours. And that, I confess, is just the way I like it.
Read recent concert reviews, including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, here.