Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 07 December 2007
UPDATE: The New York Times published Paul Griffiths' obituary of Stockhausen in Saturday's edition.
One of the great composers of our
times, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, passed away on 5 December.
Although he worked in a variety of forms, including theatre and opera (and many of his works were profoundly theatrical even in their concert settings), Stockhausen's Klavierstücke always had the greatest resonance for me. The insistence of the individual note, repeated seemingly with an endless violence through the relentless discipline of the solo performer, imbued this work with light in the midst of darkness, life in the midst of death.
Stockhausen also influenced, in this insistence, my own work. He sought, in the chaos of sound, a significance (not a meaning, which would be asking too much, but an avenue to recognition). In the theatre, one might say that the words offered by the talking body itself may provide a similar significance: a new light, a new life, in the most elemental components of the desire to express, previously unrecognisable until it is grasped knowingly (a performative, metaphysical, bodied and sexual desire). Two brief quotes from the composer:
On the Klavierstücke themselves: "Through this process, he becomes aware that this music trains a new kind of human being, who he has not yet become and who has not yet existed on this planet: a human being who can not only experience music which is similar to heartbeats and breathing and walking and running and hammering and sawing and swimming and bicycle riding and dancing and sexing, but who can participate in the spatial and temporal differences, leaps, curves, changes of direction in involuntary melodies, rhythms, dynamics which, up to now, would have been considered 'superhuman.'"
On the acceptance of his work: "Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc., was that they rejected it."
Ellen Corver's recording of the first Klavierstück is available here. The obituary from the Stockhausen foundation can be found here. Ivan Hewitt's appreciation is also available. From Hewitt's essay:
[The] accusation levelled at Stockhausen's music as a whole [is that] that the vast ideas it contains often sound chaotic or merely ugly. He was accused ... of having no ear (an accusation also levelled against that other mystical rationalist of music, Iannis Xenakis). It is certainly true that Stockhausen's music never has the exquisitely gorgeous sonorities of Boulez, or the hypersensitive shadings and nuances of Ligeti. What he has in abundance is the ability to focus a long and apparently rambling argument in a sudden, blazingly dramatic gesture. Stockhausen's music contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy's L'après-midi d'un Faune or the upward swoop that ends Schoenberg's Erwartung. ... That Stockhausen could achieve such a result with such primitive means (as they now seem), in the face of scepticism from his professional elders, and constant hostility and incomprehension from audiences, is a tribute to his strength of character and his unwavering visionary purpose. ...
Is it true, as the more extreme of these young historicists claim, that Stockhausen is nothing but a symptom of an aberration in the history of music? ... [Taken] as a whole, Stockhausen's achievement must be the most fertile in ideas, if not of perfectly achieved works, of any composer of the 20th century. Those ideas are strenuous, boldly speculative, and high-minded in a way that doesn't really suit our more cautious age; but when the time to explore and dream comes again, Stockhausen's music will be waiting for it.
Posted at 6.50 pm in /Music
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Friday, 07 December 2007
A highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 8 December: There's always something of interest going on at PS122; on Friday and Saturday night there's C.L.U.E. (it stands for Color Location Ultimate Experience), a new dance performance with accompanying movement-based video from the robbinschilds group. They're calling it an "exploration of the intersection between movement and architecture, both natural and manmade." It's selling out fast; performances on Friday and Saturday nights at 8.30 and 10.30pm. Ticket information here.
Sunday, 9 December: It's opening weekend for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma production of No Dice, the season's second offering from Soho Rep, this time at 66 White Street in Tribeca. The new show is described as a "four-hour epic of the everyday," based on hundreds of hours of recorded "real-life" conversations -- and, before curtain time, there's sandwiches and soda. Tickets available here.
Monday, 10 December: Theatres are dark and you'll get some holiday shopping done, no doubt. While you're trawling the virtual aisles of amazon.com, get yourself a present and order a copy of A Style and Its Origins by Howard Barker and Eduardo Houth, which is after a delay finally listed as "in stock" in the US. I wrote about the book earlier this year here. So long as you're at it, take some of your Christmas bonus (assuming you get such a thing) and purchase Richard Foreman's latest book of plays, Bad Boy Nietzsche! And Other Plays, just out this month from TCG.
Tuesday, 11 December: Previews continue tonight prior to a 16 December opening for the Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. Daniel Sullivan directs Ian McShane, Eve Best, Raúl Esparza and Michael McKean.
Wednesday, 12 December: I told you there was always something to see at PS122. Tonight it's the opening of 500 Clown Frankenstein, the holiday show, this year based not on A Christmas Carol but on that other masterpiece of 19th-century English literature by Mary Shelley. It's one night that's unlikely to be silent. More information on the 500 Clown company here; tickets here.
Thursday, 13 December: David Gordon's Uncivil Wars, an adaptation of Brecht's The Roundheads and the Pointheads (1932/34), opens at The Kitchen. The production features the Michael Feingold translation and the original songs by Hanns Eisler; the cast includes the inimitable Estelle Parsons. Says the Kitchen Web site: "Uncivil Wars is a new dance-theater work developed with material borrowed from Brecht's treatises on playwriting and from his play The Roundheads and the Pointheads, as well as Eisler's thoughts on composing for the theater. Gordon explores implications of readdressing historical works in the context of our present moment and considers racial, religious, linguistic and geographical divisions resulting in war." The production (which will not be open for review) runs through 22 December. Tickets now available through TicketWeb.
Friday, 14 December: The Debate Society (Oliver Butler, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen) presents a workshop showing of its latest pieces, "a short play about abandoned buildings and a longer play about crushed cars," at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery (between Houston and Prince Streets). I very much enjoyed their production in the Ontological Incubator series, The Eaten Heart, last summer; this should be worth a peek as well. Tickets and information here.
Posted at 8.35 am in /Openings
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