Everybody's Working For The Weekend...

"…art consists also of craft—that is to say, complete technical mastery. As for music, several lives aren’t enough to get near it." – Karlheinz Stockhausen

It's counterintuitive to think of Stockhausen as a facile genius, like Mozart who claimed to write music 'as a sow piddles' or Dylan who once said, "My songs were there before I came along...I just sort of took them down with a pencil." The logorrheic composer, who never failed to back up a new piece with a rationalization and whose liner notes define excess, seems the furthest thing from the type of prodigy who simply writes down what he hears. However, he was more Gregorian than anything else, but instead of one dove dictating to him, he had dozens:

"Often I find myself overwhelmed by thousands of visions, too many for me to make them all come to life...I'll never be able to realize the flood of ideas that assaults me day by day."

His attraction to systems was a byproduct of the information overload, a way to corral the psychotic din:

"I am not interested in serialism as such. It's just a technique which I have found, myself, to express the thoughts I have, or to organize the masses of images and sounds that come into my head."

From Mantra on, he would call his system formula composition. Its roots lie in the early orchestral piece Formel (1951), which bore all the incipient traits of this late style, and it bears much in common with serialism. The theme is often heard in inversions, transpositions and more rarely retrograde form, but in a substantial departure, its Schenkerian skeleton plays an enormous role, particularly in LICHT.

The cycle is centered around three themes for Michael, Eve, and Lucifer. Together, they aggregate into a superformula, which Stockhausen mines for musical material, but they also reduce to a Schenkerian kernel called a nuclear formula , which reveals how much of the final formula is ornamental.

Notice how, unlike Michael and Eve, Lucifer's melody is incomplete, almost deficient. It starts with eleventuplets (recalling the Mantra formula) and ends with 'colored silence'. In case you've ever wondered what's up with all the counting in LICHT, it's because that silence at the end of Lucifer's melody is colored by the instrumentalist counting aloud to the number 13. So much of the clicking and hissing and extended technique of LICHT is derived from this foreground ornamentation.

Stockhausen calls on everything from the intervallic character of these themes to their rhythmic durations to generate the material in his operas. In fact, the length of the entire cycle was calculated in advance by Stockhausen on the basis of his superformula. The composer typically found that the operas would be one-third longer than he had intended, because, as was his wont from the beginning, he broke freely with his plan to accommodate complete musical gestures.

Hearing him explain how he works all this out is a little like Alice encountering the White Rabbit: the intense flurry of activity and concentration attracts our attention while only part of our brain registers the nonsense of it all. Still, we follow him down the rabbit hole. Once, when a student struggled to identify the formula embedded in a passage of LICHT, he took exception to a repeated pitch that fell outside the formula structure. Stockhausen's explanation was simple, "Well, I wanted to repeat that note."

For Stockhausen, this superformula was a liberating force. He often compared it to a Gestalt or a genetic code. He said that he could spend the rest of his life composing with it by 'regarding individual elements, pieces, sections, moments, or scenes as dialects, and formulating them in a style of their own; thus coloring this abstract formula image and making each one into a local music."

He broke Wagner's record for Most Operas in a Cycle in 1996, when Leipzig staged Freitag in four sold-out shows. That same year, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival would host Stockhausen as its centerpiece (Bjork was there, and apparently loved it). Oddly, critics who had seen Freitag staged just weeks before, found the same material sorely lacking at Huddersfield, especially when paired with older masterpieces.

It's hard to cry foul, though, as performing these pieces outside of their larger framework is indeed challenging. One of the chief rewards of Stockhausen's entire canon is that of submitting to his will. The sheer strangeness of LICHT all makes a kind of sense when you let go and follow its internal logic. And make no mistake, Freitag didn't let up on the strange.

That 15-minute 'greeting' from Thursday? It's now over an hour in Friday, and the lobby is lit entirely by candles.

That giant statue in Monday of Eve with her legs spread? Okay, it's hard to top that, but in Friday Stockhausen manages the trick by portraying a swingers' party onstage with various objects engaged in sex acts, like a pencil and a pencil sharpener.

Did the first four operas seem infantile in spots? Well, Stockhausen ups the ante with an entire children's orchestra (white, representing Eve) in a race war with a children's choir (in genuine blackface, representing Lucifer, no less).

This is narrative stripped of context and pared down to essential moments, like Boris Godunov on a diet. Paul Griffiths captured the essence of the Freitag experience in his review for The Times:

Imagine that beings from another planet have picked up a television broadcast of a play from Earth. The signal is badly corrupted: not many of the characters can be made out, almost none of the text, and whole scenes have been lost. Still, the beings decide to put on their own performance of what they can piece together. Their drama, like the original, lasts for three hours, but the only characters are a man in black, a woman in white with flowers, and a king, all moving through elongated versions of the scenes that could be partly deciphered: Ghostly Apparition, First Self-Communing and so on.

This is approximately the impression made by Stockhausen's Freitag."