The Sound of Late-'60s Discord
by CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM, online.wsj.com
March 8th 2011
For decades, the tectonic plates of contemporary classical music and
progressive rock have been closing in on each other, with New York City
straddling the fault line. An ever-growing number of musically ambidextrous
artists and genre-bending ensembles make their home here, performing in clubs
dedicated to hybrid performances.
On Thursday, one such group, Alarm Will Sound, will present "1969" at Carnegie
Hall, a show dedicated to the time when the ground first began to rumble. In
one corner, the Beatles; in the other, the avant-garde of European modernism.
The show, with a script by Andrew Kupfer based on a concept by Alarm Will
Sound's artistic director, Alan Pierson, stages a virtual conclave of John
Lennon, Paul McCartney and key figures from the world of classical music:
electronic-music enfant terrible Karlheinz Stockhausen; Luciano Berio, the
Italian godfather of modernism; and Leonard Bernstein, composer, conductor and
musical omnivore. Since its first performance in 2009, its mix of live music,
spoken text and archival video footage has continued to evolve; this week's New
York premiere features new musical material by composer Stefan Freund.
At the heart of the show are two meetings, one that is documented and one that
never took place. The first was between Messrs. McCartney and Berio, who met at
a Berio lecture in London in 1965. "Paul left that meeting with the idea of
making a piece that used these tape loops," Mr. Pierson said. "[The Beatles']
'Revolution 9' is the piece where you most clearly hear them, with sounds taken
from all sorts of sources, but they're also on 'Tomorrow Never Knows' and 'A
Day in the Life'— songs that have that use of sound as a paintbrush."
The second meeting, as the late Mr. Stockhausen would tell it, was to have
taken place in New York, in 1969, at the home of the pianist and composer Lukas
Foss, where the Beatles and Mr. Stockhausen were to discuss a joint concert or
recording. But that get-together fell victim to a severe snowstorm and the
collaboration never occurred. Mr. Stockhausen's most visible mark on the
Beatles would remain his appearance on the cover of 1967's "Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band." Yet the influence of his seminal "Gesang der
Jünglinge," a work for electronically manipulated voices, is audible in a
number of songs, including "Strawberry Fields Forever."
Alarm Will Sound's "1969" juxtaposes live performances of these songs—including
a chamber-music version of "Revolution 9"—with Mr. Berio's arrangements of
Beatles songs. (His first wife, mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, liked to include
them in her recitals.)
But, said Mr. Pierson, such attempts to bridge the gap between musical worlds
were still fraught with difficulties in the '60s, as there was no common
language in which to work. "Part of what makes the show resonant for us in
Alarm Will Sound is that since then the borders have become more porous," he
said. "Now, a meeting between a major composer from the classical world and a
rock group wouldn't be news."
After Mr. Lennon's murder in 1980, Mr. Stockhausen praised him as "the most
important mediator between popular and serious music of [the] century." On the
classical side, Mr. Lennon's counterpart was Mr. Bernstein, who made attempts
to reach out to pop culture. "Yet even within this one person, that meeting of
worlds is awkward," said Mr. Pierson, adding that Mr. Bernstein's "Mass," with
its mash-up of choral passages, Broadway texts and a rock band, "is in many
ways a failure."
The political events of the late '60s, including marches, race riots and the
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, give the show its
narrative arc. According to Mr. Kupfer, foremost "in the minds of the
principals was the question: What's the role of music and the arts in times of
great political upheaval?"
Their responses, he said, were as much a function of character as of musical
style. "Stockhausen was a mystic on a cosmic scale. Berio was very much an
éminence grise who was very forward with his opinions. And Lennon started out
with the Beatles as sounding fairly naïve on questions of politics, but then
met Yoko and became more politicized. Yoko really pushed John Lennon in new
directions—even to the extent that John became an exemplar of experimental
music."
Original Page:
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