An immersion into the psyche of Stockhausen at the Park Avenue Armory

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour magnum opus, the opera cycle Licht, is yet to be performed in its entirety. A new rendition, Inside Light, which premiered in 2019 in a production by Dutch National Opera and the Holland Festival and which has just received its North American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, doesn’t bring us much closer, but it does add to the enigma while creating its own spectacle.

Inside Light is presented in halves, with two evenings presenting the entire six-and-a-half hours (with intervals and a dinner break). In an act of obsessive-compulsive fortitude, I attended one of these marathons, stretching from 16:00 to 22:30. About 500 people were gathered, most of them in legless lounge chairs, facing a screen displaying something like green solar flares. Sharp green spotlights from above come on slowly, as if selecting individual attendees (or “friendly experiencers”, to borrow a term from Anthony Braxton). The soundtrack to this slightly unsettling scene was wavering electronic tones, extended in polyphony. It could be the inside of the spaceship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A charming retro-futurism permeates the large room.

Licht received a partial premiere in 1981, just four years after Spielberg's classic movie about visitors from outer space. Inside Light uses only incidental music from the opera (of which the notorious Helikopter-Streichquartett is also a part). The storyline – constructed from Biblical texts, the days of the week and Stockhausen's own mythos – was not a part of the new presentation, although characters’ voices were sometimes heard.

With attendees sitting in roughly concentric circles lit at the center, there was a visual parallel to Stockhausen’s Stimmung. But where Stimmung seems like a private ritual, Inside Light envelops the audience. There were no visible performers. Stockhausen’s long-term collaborator Kathinka Pasveer sat at a mixing desk near the back of the room. The setting was more institutional than ritual, like an airport or a bardo. The term ‘meditative’ is obvious, trite even, in describing prolonged or ruminative sound pieces, but it’s likely rarely been more applicable.

During the dinner break, I asked myself what I would think if I did not know this was a Stockhausen piece. I might have thought it was overdone and self-indulgent. Knowing it was Stockhausen, I still thought it was. Does Stockhausen get a pass? Were we engaging in sonic cosplay? Is it all cultural tourist time travel? We can't come close to the originally intended experience and there's no reason to pretend. All we can really do is experience it, or not, in the here and now. This is something to be experienced more than thought about, but I was there to write about it, which ideally would involve some thinking. How close is this coming to the 1981 performance? How close should it come? Should we demand that it be performed on period synthesizers? 

The long second half changed everything. There was a genuine sense of drama and suspense in the music. There were voicings in the electronics that didn’t sound dated. There were vocal interjections that sounded about 90% human. The animation convincingly masked the shape of the screen and became a floating cloud, undulating in sharp blue geometries. After three hours, it had become truly disorienting, not through exhaustion but by design.

Inside Light was immersive, subversive, challenging. The senses, the psyche, the patience were all confronted by the imagination of Stockhausen. It was actually an enjoyable, long night... as long as one didn’t think too much.