Karlheinz Stockhausen, aus LICHT, Holland Festival, 31 May – 10 June 2019

Abstract

In February 1971, so the story goes, a barefooted figure with a wizard’s staff handed Karlheinz Stockhausen a copy of the Urantia book (The Urantia Book?), a dense, hugely esoteric text describing the spiritual place of mankind in the universe through chapters like ‘SOCIALIZING INFLUENCE OF GHOST FEAR’. Most people would probably have politely thanked the figure and then gotten away as quickly as possible, but this is Stockhausen we’re talking about, so he devoted the rest of his life to transforming Urantia into ‘music, libretto, dance, actions and movements’, as the programme to aus LICHT credits him with. So, here we are almost half a century later, and everyone in New Music knows about LICHT. Probably the only way to talk about it is as an acme of excess – that’s how Tim Rutherford-Johnson puts it in Music After the Fall, and the press kit given to me by the Holland Festival includes a helpful inventory which tallies, among other things, 400 artists, 412 costumes, 85 music stands, 120 microphones, 326 lights, 15 cameras, ‘>50’ nationalities (why did they stop counting?), 450 rehearsals in 5 years, 48 headsets, and, of course, 4 helicopters. [excerpt]