An elliptical halo of thin, concentrated light floated in the capacious drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory on a recent morning, above a circular space designed to dissolve your sense of space and time.
At the center was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his electronic music at a console. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, sat nearby, visibly delighted by the scene around him. To his right and left, idiosyncratically shaped video screens faced each other across a round expanse dotted with lights that moved and changed color as Urs Schönebaum, the director, spoke into a headset while riding a scooter.
After a brief pause, Schönebaum cued various elements: Out of darkness and silence emerged eerie sounds that traveled freely through the space from unseen speakers; the videos throbbed with the music, their brightness, with the changing lights, creating an illusion of a void beyond the circle. It became difficult to track the passing minutes. The pleasant spring morning outside might as well have been another world.
Such is the effect of “Inside Light,” the Armory’s theatrical presentation of electronic music from “Licht,” or “Light,” Stockhausen’s monumental, impractical cycle of seven operas written from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Defying simple explanation and traditional form, these works, by turns comical and mystically sublime, deal with cosmic clashes of good and evil, with intimate dramas and global politics, with the nature of music itself.
At the Armory, listeners will hear five electronic pieces that make up just a sliver of the 29-hour cycle, but even that will be substantial. They will be performed over two nights, beginning on Wednesday, or as single-day marathons for those who want to get lost in the sounds of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 and influenced the likes of Kraftwerk and Björk.
In this setting, Pasveer said, people can “really dive into the music, relax and find it in space.”
“Inside Light” is an adaptation of the much-larger production “Aus Licht,” or “From Light,” a three-day, 15-hour abridgment of “Licht” that was staged at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam five years ago. (A video recording will be released by Naxos in spring 2025.)
That production was a transformative experience for everyone involved. And there were a lot of people involved: The performances included hundreds of musicians, most of whom were students who had learned “Licht” with Pasveer as a master’s degree program. One moment, the “Helicopter String Quartet,” involved players collaborating from four helicopters flying above the city.
Pasveer said that she had heard from people whose lives were changed by “Aus Licht,” including, she said, a family that will travel to the Armory from Germany. To Audi, who directed the Amsterdam production and conceived the New York version, those responses were hardly surprising.
“Whether you’re old, young or any age, this is for you,” he said. “It defies trends and fashions and has, like Wagner, an authority about itself because it comes from the deep psyche of the composer and so it connects with the psyche of the listener.”
In Amsterdam, the 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 and explore how the spatially designed score changed depending on where they stood. “The movement of sound was as important to Stockhausen as rhythm and timbre,” Pasveer said. “He had this absolutely beautiful quote, which was, ‘Whenever 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 once-in-a-lifetime memory to carry with me.”
Still, the “Aus Licht” team, which also includes essential video design by Robi Voigt, wanted the project to continue in some form. So Audi programmed only the electronic music for the 2020 edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, where he is the artistic director. That production, though, went the way of everything in the performing arts during that pandemic year.
But the idea stayed with Audi, who wanted to bring “Licht” to the Armory, where he thought the space could offer “the absolute the absolute optimum environment for listening to the music.”
Because of the speaker arrangement, the circular shape of the space was a given, said Schönebaum, who designed a new staging for the Armory. Within the ring of speakers, the audience can sit, stand, lie down or wander on a black carpet surrounded by lights that create an illusion of the walls and ceiling having disappeared into a dark expanse. Stockhausen, Pasveer said, had at one point presented his music in total darkness to eliminate distractions, but “people got paranoid,” so he began to project an image of the moon at his performances.
The result, Pasveer said, is a “big, immersive sound” that reveals Stockhausen’s music for what it is: an uncommonly imaginative expansion of simple ideas. She remembered Stockhausen as open and humorous; Audi described him as a luminous presence whose music is frequently misunderstood. (“Licht” is often less drearily modernist than the works of his Darmstadt School colleagues like Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono.)
“People say it’s either hyperintellectual or it’s kitsch,” Audi said. “It’s neither.”
It’s mathematical, spiritual, physical, personal. Not to mention welcoming, especially, Schönebaum said, to the generations of listeners who grew up with the popular electronic music that Stockhausen inspired.
Welcoming, too, is the ultimate mood of the “Inside Light” pieces, Audi said. “The music has a sort of majesty and anxious dimension, but it doesn’t make you anxious because it has within it the opposite, always,” he added. “It offers uplift in dialogue with the anxiety, which I find very interesting and theatrical. I find myself imagining a story, because your mind can travel with this music.”
Audience members just have to open themselves up to it. “The people who will be here,” Pasveer said, “who get to hear this music with the air and space it needs, those people will be so privileged.”