August 17, 2006: What have you been Listening to, Karlheinz?

I am not sure how I first became interested in Karlheinz Stockhausen's Licht project (outdoing Wagner with a cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week). I think it must have been some time around 1989 or 1990, definitely before I moved to Singapore. When I was a student, if one had any interest at all in avant-garde music, one could not ignore Stockhausen, although some of his oeuvre (not just the music but his comments on his own music) was so outrageous that he was sometimes perceived as his own parody (although Peter Ustinov used to be pretty good at imitating his texts). I think that, at the end of the day, his initial ambitions far exceeded what he could do with the instruments at his disposal, such as when he felt that all he needed to make electronic music was an enormous bank of sine-wave generators. (Didn't Fourier demonstrate that that was all you needed in theory?)

It seemed that, at some point, Stockhausen just succumbed to his frustrations and retreated from the world (apparently to an ancient German castle). He became very particular about who would perform his music under what circumstances, and created his own publication organization for his scores and recordings. It was through the Stockhausen Edition mailing list that I first heard about Licht, and I got curious.

I have not kept up with following the full cycle, but I now have Montag, Dienstag, Donnerstag, and Samstag. I have yet to see any of them performed. I certainly would like to see at least one of these operas, even if I have wondered whether the staging would come off as a remix of Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach. What has amused me more, however, is how I have come to listen to my recordings of the music.

Basically, there are three characters, each of whom has a particular instrument (rather than a Wagnerian Leitmotif). We start on Monday with Eva, whose instrument is the basset horn. Then on Tuesday we encounter the other two characters, the archangels Michael (trumpet) and Lucifer (trombone). For the most part none of these characters are represented by single instruments but by collections of them. (A few other characters appear to emerge, such as Kathinka, the Black Cat, whose instrument is the flute.)

What I began to feel as I listened more and more to my recordings was that the music was reflecting some rather interesting listing on Stockhausen's part. This listening had almost nothing to do with his avant-garde past as a composer; it seemed to be a reflection of the sort of jazz that was going on back in that day. The more I listened to Eva, the more I realized I was hearing Eric Dolphy (or, perhaps, I was hearing the way Stockhausen had been hearing Eric Dolphy). I am not sure whom I was hearing in Lucifer, but I would say that there are more than occasional flashes of Jimmy Knepper. Michael keeps reminding me of Freddie Hubbard. This one is particularly interesting because, when the trumpet is solo, it appears to be played by Markus Stockhausen (pictured above), who seems to be as involved in the performance of jazz as he is in performing for his father.

That's another thing: Stockhausen's scores have always been interesting objects in themselves. (I still have a closeout copy I got of his eleventh piano piece hanging on my wall, since I doubt that I shall ever be good enough to play it!) The reproductions of pages from Licht do not appear to be any exception to this rule. Nevertheless, when I read the descriptions and look at the photographs, I come away with the distinct impression that Licht is much more about the act of performance, than it is about the notes on the page. If this is so, then the entire project is much more in the spirit of jazz than it is of the experience of the opera house or concert hall. I would not be surprised if there is some closet in Karlheinz' castle that houses one incredible collection of jazz recordings and that, at the end of the day, the guy may have missed his real calling. After all, a single jazz performance that stretches out over seven days would be quite a feat, probably more so than a cycle of operas that takes twice as long as Wagner's!