Last Thursday, the Warner Concert Hall was rockin’ out to Michael Gallope on piano and percussion and Ross Karre on percussion with Suzanna Sitomer providing live sound support in Karlhein Stockhausen’s “Kontakte.”
Stockhausen worked on this piece from 1958-1960, coming out of the “technical revolution” of the early ’50s when musicians began exploring electronic production, recording, synthesizing and manipulation of sounds. He describes “Kontakte” as “the first example which combines performance with electronic music.”
“I’m part of this whole evolution of European art music, [where] all of a sudden comes a world where we don’t know, many times, what the sounds mean, how they are made, which means, for all of us, that we lose our gravitation,” Stockhausen said.
Attending the performance of “Kontakte” was very much an ungrounded, untethered experience, one of constant sonic instablity and insecurity.
Despite the weirdness and complexity of the piece, the concert was quite engaging. The anticipation and sensory stimulation (provided visually from the drama of the performer’s percussive motions and the red, blue and yellow lights on stage and sonically from the swarms of sounds) was actually a bit overwhelming at times: it was hard to sit still.
As Gallope says about the piece, “‘Kontakte’ is certainly an example of high modernism in Western music, but I’ve never found it to be an austere, academic piece. It’s really centered on the physical experience, not unlike most pop music. It has a focus on the show and the spectacle while still being fiercely abstract.”
The complexity and unpredictability of its abstraction makes “Kontakte” a very difficult piece to perform, and Karre, Gallope and Sitomer put in a lot of time and work into the preparation for this concert.
“Mike and I started working on the piece this summer while in two different locations,” Karre said. “[Mike] sent the tape and score to me in Aspen where I was able to work the very basics of memorizing the tape part and marking the part. We didn’t start working together until September.”
In addition to the elaborate array of percussion instruments both players have to attend to, the coordination of the live music with the tape is one of the biggest difficulties of learning the piece. While Stockhuasen provides pictorial realizations of the pre-recorded sounds in score, the sounds of the tape have to be memorized by the performers.
“All of the durations are irrational, so complete memorization of the tape part is essential,” Gallope said.
Fortunately for all their hard work, Gallope and Karre were able to perform the piece Thursday and Friday night on the Honors recital, this second time with Ryan Miller providing sound projection. Both nights the energetic performances drew large, receptive crowds.
The interaction between the tape and the live percussion and piano parts is only one of the instances of “contact” that Stockhausen describes in the piece. There is also the contact of different “families of sounds” (wood, metal, skin) and their spatial contact.
Stockhausen thinks about the sounds like “movement(s) of all kinds and all speeds in all directions; the sounds go away very fast, sometimes, and come back in another angle.”
The aural sensations are rich and captivating through the movements, timbres and volumes of the sounds. In every way, the performance of “Kontakte” was a huge and awesome start to this semester’s performances on campus.