Dreams

if you like contemporary music this Issue has an excerpt from LICHT, a massive opera by Karlheinz Stockhausen who passed not long ago, this excerpt is a string quartet, but not sitting on a stage, Stockhausen had a dream of flying musicians also the sound/timbre of airplanes always intrigued him; the piece is where 4 brave musicians(2 Violins, Viola and CEllo) each go inside a Helikopter. The interesting music, lots of tremoli is played from the air hovering inside each helikopter one per musician in sinusoidal waves,very beautiful; what they play is transmitted to the ground where all of it is mixed with the Helikopter noises,(an integral contrapuntal thread of the piece) and very expensive electronic music; it all blends marvelously together. The music excerpt from LICHT one opera for each day of the week is fairly self-contained,and there have been other pieces "franchised" out to be played as solos away from the cosmological dimensions of the opera;Stockhausen's genius I suppose is that his music can be lifted most of the time out of context;so you really never want to search to see the context of totality; this quartet is from (Mittwoch aus Licht), 'Wednesday', "Middling", "Mid-Week", each opera is about something, a sensibility, a state of something, violence elsewhere timeless,never seen,war,(Dienstag) reflections,numererical things (Samstag) some more animated, some adhering to a higher symbolic order, some hiding, preserving its ideology, other proclaiming it or denouncing it, "Mittwoch" reduces its players to microbes, more animated, musicians are simply "cells", voices of the universe, like Messiaen's "birds", a direct reflection of something that is not entirely human, but flying around in Helikopters makes the players somewhat brave, Wotan-like exploring a situation never encountered by musicians;in the opera players are reduced to nth particles, timbral fragments, never seen, you really never see the quartet,they are above you unless;you see the DVD; (here the Arditti String Quartet has been brave enough to render this work in Holland,1995 excellent film on this,search youtube)In this Issue you also get the full set of instructions, the score cast interestingly in different colours for each part, red,blue, orange, green. . .