At NEC, six hours of Stockhausen

February 27, 2009|Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent

At just after 3 p.m. on a Sunday, Vic Rawlings begins to "play a rhythm in the vibration of his body." He's only following directions, those of the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose "Verbindung" ("Connection") gives that instruction. What does it mean? Rawlings interprets it as a low guttural scrape across the tailpiece of an amplified cello.

As four other players join in, the noise progresses to musical sounds and back again. For the next six hours, pianist/director Stephen Drury's Callithumpian Consort, along with its student cadres, [nec] shivaree, survey most of the rest of Stockhausen's "intuitive music." The frameworks for extemporaneous performance are paragons of the far-out, avant-garde 1960s, but their amorphous, sometimes transcendental tone - "play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe," as "Verbindung" directs - have resulted in a repertoire more often talked about than actually heard.

Sunday's concert is a rare chance to take Stockhausen at his word: Even at his most esoteric, he always wrote music meant to be played. "Whenever we hear sound we are changed," he said. "We are no longer the same."

3:55 p.m. Drury joins nine other players for "Nachtmusik" ("Night Music"). A little history: In May of 1968, Stockhausen's second wife left him, and he fell into a deep depression, refusing to eat. Over a week, the hunger strike transformed with the aid of Stockhausen's only reading material, a book about the Bengali guru Sri Aurobindo, into a meditative fast, during which he wrote the 15 pieces collected as "Aus den Sieben Tagen" ("From the Seven Days").

Eschewing notes and rhythms and leaving the instrumentation open, Stockhausen produced short texts, somewhere between poetry and rubric. He had already experimented with improvisatory musical construction, but the romantic idea that it took a moment of crisis to show the new way forward somehow fits - for all his late-career mysticism, Stockhausen was as much in the singular-genius tradition as Beethoven or Wagner. (Appropriately, Sunday's realization of "Nachtmusik" rises to a grand, near-Wagnerian pitch.)

The concert ultimately comprises 21 pieces from "Aus den Sieben Tagen" and its 1968-70 sequel, "Für Kommende Zeiten" ("For Coming Times"). But two of the former's most autobiographical (and notorious) pieces are left out: "Oben und Unten" ("Over and Under"), a theater piece that alludes to Stockhausen's mother, killed by the Nazis; and "Goldstaub" ("Gold Dust"), which requires its players to first fast in isolation for four days - crazy, but also exactly what Stockhausen did to write it. Like much of his music, it combines radical audacity with the matter-of-fact literalness of a diary.