Stockhausen 2010

Kreuzspiel

CU Pendulum New Music in conjunction with ATL&S has begun to do an annual contemporary composer series.  Last year was George Crumb, and this year featured Karlheinz Stockhausen.  Paul Miller organized to have Stockhausen's personal engineer, or sound projectionist, Bryan Wolf come from Pforzheim, Germany to run with the event.  Stockhausen was a pioneer of experimental electronic music and has created some amazing compositions for surround sound systems as well as orchestration.

Bryan Wolf

The festival included a number of performances and lectures about Stockhausen's music and life.  The first was held at Grusin Music Hall in the IMIG Music Building and featured a number of Stockhausen composotions (Komet, Gesang der Jünglinge, and Natürliche Dauren 10 and 15).  There was also a Cage composition and performances by CU Composition students.  Unfortunately, I could not attend this performance, but I was heavily involved in the performances in the Black Box at ATL&S.

Paul Miller

Day two/four was a colloquium and demonstration of the surround sound system.  John Peterson gave a presentation about Stockhausen, Serialsim, and Style and Paul Miller presented on the Transition and Morphology in Stockhausen Composition.  Finally Jerome Kohl spoke on some of the cosmic elements Stockhausen incorporated into his music.
The first ATL&S concert featured primarily Stockhausen works (Klavierstück XII, Setz die Segel zur Sonne, and Kontakte) and a performance of Toccatina by Sarah Wood on the violin.  This was an intense performance involving a small ensemble as well as an 8.4 surround system.  Kontakte takes full advantage of this system and runs about 35 minutes long.  It is a powerful piece that can be overwhelming at times.
 

 Flautina - Christina Jennings

The demonstration of the surround system was incredible experience for me.  I love doing complex audio routing, so this was right up my alley.  We set up 8 speakers around the catwalk perimeter and 4 subwoofers on the ground.  Total overkill, but we had planned on 24 and 8... so scaling down was probably better.  Bryan demonstrated the way the system is 'tuned' and some of the techniques that Stockhausen used for recording.  Following the break we played a number of pieces (Elektronische Studie II, Kreuzspiel, Telemusik, and Cosmis Pulses) and a performance (Flautina) by Christina Jennings (a CU flautist on the cutting edge of music technology).

Routing Insanity

The final piece, Cosmic Pulses, is an ear splitting electronic experiment.  It is all pre-recorded, so we were able to test it twice before bringing the audience in.  But, of course, at the last minute, something went wrong with "Spür Sechs" or Speaker 6 and we had to frantically re route the system to perform the piece.  When we pulled it off, there was a roar of joy from the audience and we were able to move on.  Now, while this is a great piece, hearing it three times in two days after dealing with that problem made me want to "rip my brain out through my ears".  Either way, this was an extremely rewarding experience, and I met some very intelligent people that are working in this field.  It was also particularly rewarding because I did a short biography of Stockhausen in 2007.