Stockhausen’s adventures in space and time at the Armory

An elliptical halo of fine, concentrated light floated in the Park Avenue Armory’s vast drill hall one recent morning, above a circular space designed to dissolve your sense of space and time.

In the center was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his electronic music on a console. Pierre Audi, the Artistic Director of the Armory, sat nearby, visibly delighted by the scene around him. To his right and left, oddly shaped video screens faced each other on a round expanse dotted with lights that moved and changed color while Urs Schönebaum, the director, spoke into headphones while riding a scooter.

After a brief pause, Schönebaum identified various elements: from the darkness and silence emerged strange sounds that traveled freely through space from invisible speakers; the videos pulsed with the music, their brightness, with the changing lights, creating the illusion of a void beyond the circle. It was becoming difficult to follow the passing minutes. The pleasant spring morning outside might as well have been another world.

Such is the effect of “Inside Light,” the theatrical presentation of electronic music from “Licht” or “Light,” Stockhausen’s monumental and impractical cycle of seven operas written from the late 1970s to the early 2000s Defying simple explanations and traditional forms, these works, by turns comic and mystically sublime, deal with cosmic clashes of good and evil, intimate dramas and global politics, and the very nature of music.

At the Armory, listeners will hear five electronic tracks that make up only part of the 29-hour cycle, but even that will be substantial. They will be performed over two nights, starting Wednesday, or as daylong marathons for those who want to lose themselves in the sounds of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 and influenced artists like Kraftwerk and Björk.

In this setting, Pasveer said, people can “really dive into the music, relax and find it in the space.”

“Inside Light” is an adaptation of the much larger production “Aus Licht” or “From Light,” a three-day, 15-hour abridgement of “Licht” presented at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam five years ago. (A video recording will be released by Naxos in spring 2025.)

This production was a transformative experience for everyone involved. And there was a lot of people involved: The performances included hundreds of musicians, most of whom were students who had learned “Licht” with Pasveer as part of a master’s program. At one point, the “Helicopter String Quartet” involved players collaborating from four helicopters flying over the city.

Pasveer said she has heard of people whose lives have been changed by “Aus Licht,” including, she said, a family who would travel to the Armory from Germany. For Audi, which led production in Amsterdam and designed the New York version, these responses were hardly surprising.

“Whether you are old, young or any age, this is for you,” he said. “It defies trends and fashions and has, like Wagner, an authority over itself because it comes from the deep psyche of the composer and therefore connects to the psyche of the listener.”

In Amsterdam, electronic music portions of “Licht,” including the eight-channel immensity “Invisible Choirs,” were offered before and after live performances “for dedicated listeners.” Audience members were allowed to wander around and explore how the spatially designed score changed depending on where they were. “The movement of sound was as important to Stockhausen as rhythm and timbre,” Pasveer said. “He had this absolutely beautiful quote, which was, ‘Every time we hear sounds, we are changed.'”

For Schönebaum, the Amsterdam performances were special precisely because they are impossible to replicate, financially and logistically. “It’s fantastic,” he said, “to have this unique souvenir to take with me.”

Still, the “Aus Licht” team, which also includes essential video design by Robi Voigt, wanted the project to continue in some form. Audi has therefore programmed only electronic music for the 2020 edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, of which it is the artistic director. This production, however, has gone the way of everything in the performing arts during this pandemic year.

But the idea stuck with Audi, which wanted to bring “Licht” to the Armory, where it believed the space could provide “the absolute optimal environment for listening to music.”

Because of the speaker arrangement, the circular shape of the space was a no-brainer, said Schönebaum, who designed a new stage for the Armory. Within the ring of speakers, the audience can sit, stand, lie down or walk around on a black carpet surrounded by lights that create the illusion that the walls and ceiling have disappeared into a dark expanse . Stockhausen, Pasveer said, had at one point presented his music in complete darkness to eliminate distractions, but “people became paranoid,” so he began projecting an image of the moon during his performances.

The result, says Pasveer, is a “powerful, immersive sound” that reveals Stockhausen’s music for what it is: an unusually imaginative expansion of simple ideas. She remembered Stockhausen as open and humorous; Audi described him as a luminous presence whose music is often misunderstood. (“Licht” is often less sadly modernist than the works of his Darmstadt School colleagues like Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono.)

“People say it’s either hyperintellectual or kitsch,” Audi said. “It’s neither.”

It’s mathematical, spiritual, physical, personal. Not to mention the reception, in particular, Schönebaum said, of generations of listeners who grew up with popular electronic music inspired by Stockhausen.

Welcoming is also the ultimate ambiance of the “Inside Light” rooms, Audi said. “Music has a kind of majesty and an anxious dimension, but it doesn’t make you anxious because it always has the opposite in it,” he added. “It offers an elevation into a dialogue with anxiety, which I find very interesting and theatrical. I find myself imagining a story, because your mind can travel with this music.

Members of the public just need to open up to it. “The people who will be here,” Pasveer said, “who will be able to hear this music with the air and space that it needs, those people will be so privileged.”