360° @ Bar Ulme

This was the destination of choice at the end of the day in Kuerten. The choice being between going back to your lodgings or going to the only option in town!

Church Bells in Kuerten

I Have a New Favorite Stockhausen Piece

(Can I switch them inside of a week?!)

It's one that I'd never taken seriously before, but seeing it in performance was a spectacular experience. It is Inori, for orchestra and two mimes. The orchestral writing is well and truly spectacular, and the mimes are using these Japanese prayer gestures, which are precisely synchronized in the score. Kathinka performed it with Alain Louafi, and it was spellbinding.

The weekend started with the German premiere of Glanz, which is the tenth hour of KLANG. Sad to say that the Asko Ensemble seemed wholly uninspired, and it was a frustrating performance of a fantastic piece.

One of the interesting things to note about KLANG is that the Urantia book is placed front and center. The other night, we were looking at the saxophone part for Edentia, which is a location in the Urantia book. In fact, one of the hours of KLANG is even titled Urantia.

It's been fascinating to see how strong the turnout still is for these concerts. Stockhausen's first wife, Doris, has been to several, and her grandson is studying trumpet and working as a stagehand.

I should say that the reason I'm here is to get the necessary training to project Cosmic Pulses, which is the 13th hour of KLANG. ANALOG arts ensemble will be giving the US premiere of the piece at ARTSaha! 2008. The piece is very important in the KLANG cycle, because all of the tape parts in the later hours are layers from Cosmic Pulses. We will also give the US premiere of Friday's Greeting. (The two pieces couldn't be more different)

Cosmic Pulses is only a year old, and the premiere in May 2007 in Milan was packed. It was given its German premiere at the 2007 courses, and there were so many people here that they were sitting on the floor.

May God grant such turnout in Omaha on September 12!

"But concerning that day or that hour..."

...no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.” - Mark 13:32-37

No one knows, indeed.

Except, of course, for Stockhausen. ;)

In the last two years of his life, his rate of composition increased dramatically. He wrote far more than he ever would in a normal year, and he kept telling those who were close to him that he was 'running out of time'.

When I was in the middle of writing that little survey of Stockhausen's career, I found I kept putting it off because I didn't want to let go of him. I suppose it was my own grieving process, and I was miserable when there were no more decades to write about. When it was all done and I'd hit the 'Publish' button on the last post, I couldn't stop thinking of the final line of A Prayer for Owen Meany.

The parallels between the two are uncanny, in my mind. Owen knows the specific date he will die, and the things that set him apart in life (his abnormally small size; his high-pitched voice; his profound intelligence) all factor into his death, as if he lived by thesis. That is certainly how Stockhausen endeavored to live, as though everything in his life were governed by a tone row or a super-formula.

In the Tibetan tradition, the soul gets easily distracted after death, and it faces a perilous journey towards Heaven (or whatever you want to call it). It is very easy for the soul to lose its way and end up in limbo. The Tibetan Book of the Dead (which is referenced heavily in Samstag) is a series of exercises meant to help prepare the soul for the journey. The prayers in the book are all designed to bolster the spirit as it faces temptations away from nirvana.

It seems clear now that in the last two years, Stockhausen was consciously winding down his time on Earth and truly preparing for his own journey. Realizing that only makes his absence more bittersweet to me, and I've found this final passage from Owen Meany coming to mind again and again as I study here in Kuerten:

There’s a prayer I say most often for Owen. It’s one of the little prayers he said for my mother, the night Hester and I found him in the cemetery—where he’d brought the flashlight, because he knew how my mother had hated the darkness.

“’INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU,’” he’d say over my mother’s grave; and so I say that one for him—I know it was one of his favorites.

I am always saying prayers for Owen Meany.

And I often try to imagine how I might have answered Mary Beth Baird, when she spoke to me—at Owen’s burial. If I could have spoken, if I hadn’t lost my voice – what would I have said to her, how could I have answered her? Poor Mary Beth Baird! I left her standing at the cemetery without an answer.

“Do you remember how we used to lift him up?” she’d asked me. “He was so easy to lift up!” Mary Beth Baird had said to me. “He was so light – he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?” the former Virgin Mother had asked me.

I could have told her that it was only our illusion that Owen Meany weighed “nothing at all.” We were only children – we are only children – I could have told her. What did we ever know about Owen? What did we truly know? We had the impression that everything was a game – we thought we made everything up as we went along. When we were children, we had the impression that almost everything was just for fun – no harm intended, no damage done.

When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth – so effortlessly – we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen’s weightlessness; they were the forces we didn’t have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in—and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands.

O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.