Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Michael's Journey Around the World"

The video of musikFabrik's 2008 production of Michael's Journey Around the World has been posted to YouTube, and it's well worth watching. WDR did an admirable job of capturing the overpacked visuals, but the DVD still represents only a fraction of what the audience was seeing.

Admittedly, my focus was on playing my part, but every time we performed this, I was noticing new things in the production. When I got the DVD earlier this year, I saw even more elements that I was completely unaware of from my seat in the orchestra. Like so much of Stockhausen's music, it helps to watch this video multiple times.

By way of introduction, it's probably enough to say that Michael's Journey Around the World is Act II of Thursday from Stockhausen's seven-opera cycle Light. The Michael in question is from the Urantia book, which is a sci-fi retelling of the Bible. Michael is required to incarnate on seven different planets in the universe, and Earth (Urantia) is the final planet, where he fulfills his destiny. While he is incarnated on Earth, he is known as Jesus, and therein his story overlaps with the Gospels.

Stockhausen characterizes the protagonists of Light through multiple means. Sometimes they appear as a mime, other times as a singer, sometimes as an instrumentalist. Sometimes as all three. In this Act, Michael is portrayed only by the trumpet. Instead of the original spinning globe from the La Scala production, the soloist (Marco Blaauw) is hoisted through the first half in a crane, and his travels are depicted through video projections.

Part 1: Michael's arrival on earth. He plays a short melody to describe himself and then begins his journey around the world. There are seven stops in his journey. After his first stop, where he interacts with the alto flute, he crosses the Atlantic and heads to New York. musikFabrik couldn't resist a reference to Stockhausen's misinterpreted comments on 9/11; so, Michael's arrival in NYC is quite memorable:




Part II: Michael's journey continues on stops 3 through 5, and the clarinet jesters make their first appearance. They are mocking whatever they see. They cleverly repurpose whatever music they hear and turn it into a joke. The end of this clip features the most extreme crane work of the entire production. As Marco has to play 5-octave glissandi, the crane has him playing from all manner of angles. At one point, he's almost completely upside down.




Part III: Michael's journey concludes at stop 7. He hears the rising 3rd motif of Eve and shouts "Halt", bringing the rotation of the earth to a stop. The music from here to the end takes on a very static character as time is literally suspended. He plays to the offstage basset-horn which represents Eve, trying to find her.




Part IV: Michael continues his search for Eve. He meets a bass player and they exchange gestures. Finally, Eve appears onstage and the two perform a sort of mating dance, exchanging gestures just as Michael did with the bass player. This time, however, they grow more and more in sync. The clarinetists return at the end of the clip to mock Michael & Eve.



Part V: The clarinetists are dispatched by a trombone duo in a mock Crucifixion. Michael & Eve appear above the stage, floating up to Heaven. Their musical gestures finally intertwine into one unified statement in the form of an enormously long trill.

Stockhausen's Still Being Premiered

musikFabrik is premiering Erwachen today in Brussels. Erwachen is the 12th hour of KLANG, Stockhausen's unfinished cycle of pieces for each hour of the day. It's one of the chamber pieces that derives its material from Harmonien, the solo piece from the 5th hour of the cycle.

musikFabrik's Take on Stockhausen

I'm just coming off a tour with musikFabrik's new production of Act II from Donnerstag, which is titled 'Michaels Reise um die Erde' (Michael's Journey Around the World). Originally, Markus Stockhausen played in a giant rotating globe for the La Scala production in 1981.

musikFabrik has breathed some much-needed fresh air into the LICHT production history with this inventive new staging. Marco Blaauw plays from a portable crane for the first half of the piece. There is a scrim at the front of the stage and a portable screen onstage which allows for double projections of everything from a vagina to the World Trade Center.

In this clip, the camera has trouble focusing on Marco, but it captures just how extreme the movements of the crane are. This was shot during a rehearsal in Dresden:



Full quality photos of the production can be viewed here. Perhaps the most encouraging part of this new production is how enthusiastic the curators of the Stockhausen estate have been about it. If there ever is a chance of staging LICHT in its entirety, fresh perspectives like musikFabrik's are going to be essential.

Autumn In Warsaw Works Minor Miracles

Like the Lourdes of new music, the Warsaw Autumn festival yielded a few miracles this past week, at least from my perspective. The most notable has to be the as yet wholly unreported return of Markus Stockhausen to performing his father's music.

MusikFabrik was set to perform Michaels Reise from DONNERSTAG, but the trumpet soloist Marco Blaauw injured his lip a week before the Warsaw date. He called Markus and asked him to fill in on the show, and with no arm twisting, Markus agreed! He has not performed his father's music at all since 2001, and Michaels Reise is a hell of a way to get back in the Stockhausen saddle. It's an excruciating trumpet part, and it was an absolute joy to hear Markus playing this music again.



The 2nd miracle, to my eye, was the audience at the Torwar, which as best I can tell is usually used for rock concerts and sporting events. The 800 seats that were put on the floor were all completely filled, and with people of all ages. There were groups of teenagers giggling and having a night out. The concert was the Polish premiere of Cosmic Pulses, and having just presented the US Premiere of the same piece only 10 days earlier, I couldn't help but be astonished all over again at the sheer appetite for music that Europeans have. To say we had 1/10th the turnout in Omaha would be putting it kindly. (NOTE: The Omaha audience did respond to the piece more enthusiastically than the Polish one, however)

Tonight, the orchestral version of Hymnen will be performed on the festival (in an old vodka factory, of all places). With the Berlin performance of Gruppen kicking off the week, one can say Stockhausen is alive and well in Europe.

NOTE: Marco Blaauw and Markus Stockhausen performed in a trumpet quartet for a few years, and Stockhausen wrote Trompetent for them. dung will perform the piece this Saturday at St. Mark's on the Bowery, as part of the Festival of New Trumpet Music.