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Home > ATLarts > Archives > 2008 > November > 02 > Entry
Stockhausen’s ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and More
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ensemble Sirius, the piano-percussion duo of Michael Fowler and Stuart Gerber, specializes in the music of the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. They gave a sensationally good concert Saturday night at Emory’s Performing Arts Studio, a black-box space that was — three cheers for avant-garde music! — filled to capacity.
Click here to read a preview article about “Heaven’s Gate,” a sort of performance art piece where a big church door is played as a musical instrument.
And also click here to read about how a local violin maker built the door-instrument.
The Sirius boys studied with Stockhausen and thoroughly reflect the composer’s classically psychedelic aesthetic. The opened with five movements from “Tierkreis” (“Zodiac” from 1975) and paid as much attention to the theater of the performance as to the tinkly, eerie, atonal music. At every moment there was much to hear and watch, marked by episodes of unusually beautiful sound. At one point Gerber struck a tiny bell on a string and then whirred it over his head, where the dying Doppler effect was pure sonic pleasure.
“Kontakte,” (“Contacts,” premiered in 1960) is the duo’s calling card. The composer himself helped guide and refine their interpretation of this music; Saturday they played it with fierce confidence. Gerber was stage left at a station of multiple percussion instruments, bells, cymbals, glockenspiels, chimes and a dozen or two others. Fowler was stage right at the piano, surrounded by a dozen bells and chimes and also a laptop (the acoustic sounds are reprocessed with electronics). Steve Everett, a fine composer and Emory prof, handled the “sound projection” station, a role that Stockhausen often performed at his own concerts.
It seemed to operate on multiple planes of interpretation. After a few minutes I got the sense we were witnessing a dark Shakespearean comedy, with Gerber taking the lead and playing the role of a Falstaffian character — over-blown, charming, witty, charismatic, roguish, explosive, playing all-out all the time. Fowler was thus his Prince Hal, following his jolly companion’s lead, less boisterous, always keeping something in reserve. The small bits on the piano became Fowler’s inner monologue, more an observer of all the sonic complexity than its instigator. The duo’s playing is incredibly assured, almost cocky. They made it impossible to not be sucked into the wonderful and frightening world of Stockhausen.
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By Laura Gordy
November 2, 2008 2:23 PM | Link to this
Thank you for your support of this wonderful event. However, you should know that every nuance, note and rhythm of “Kontakte” is exactly notated - there is no improvisation involved.
By Pierre Ruhe
November 2, 2008 11:18 PM | Link to this
Thanks, Laura, you’re exactly right and I corrected the above article to reflect that. I see here in Michael Kurtz’s “Stockhausen: a Biography” a quote from the percussionist who played the 1960 premiere, Christoph Caskel, about the rehearsals: “The realization of the aleatory indications in the score initially made the musicians feel insecure… so by the end of the second rehearsal Stockhausen had already decided on a score that would be fixed in every detail.”