Trans this evening in London (twice!). This has been a central work for me since I first heard the recording, ahem, thirty years ago probably. Seeing it performed, however, which it hardly ever is, brings into being another dimension entirely, which I hadn't experienced in this particular way before. The ranks of string players, bathed in purplish light behind a gauze and either moving their bows in slow coordination or remaining completely motionless, made a more infernal or maybe purgatorial impression than I'd expected, like disembodied shades some of whom are occasionally allowed to recall their life on earth. It hardly seems appropriate to comment on the quality of the performance but it was done with a concentration and poise that might have been a lot harder to come by with a professional orchestra. The fusion of the deathly and the surreal in this piece is quite unique.

Agreed on all counts. It's very difficult, with the best will in the world, to see what the point of Harmonien is supposed to be. When Stockhausen was performing what I presume were similar operations on the "superformula" of Licht in the solo pieces from that cycle, it was usually possible to recognise them (if not always to recognise what was supposed to be interesting about them), but the more traditionally serial pitches of the Klang pieces are relatively unmemorable and the whole, in this case anyway, comes across as somewhat arbitrary. Which is a shame.


Or even heard it on a record...!

Julian Anderson, who was sitting two seats to my left, seemed to find the whole thing rather amusing and didn't return for the second performance. 

I hereby take the  back!

What I think is extremely interesting about the reddish gauze (I thought it was supposed to be purple, but it looked more red to me) is that, by removing the perception of visual depth from the orchestra we see behind it, it puts the audience more in the position of a cinema audience than a normal concert audience. In a way this could be said to be a case of Stockhausen subjugating his audience, attempting to pre-determine their response with quasi-mystical music emanating from an obscured point of origin (this would be the 'phantasmagoria' of which Adorno accused Wagner - sounds whose source is made unknown). But in fact I think the sum total of the experience of Trans is of a Gesamtkunstwerk whose constituent elements are deliberately and provocatively dissonant with each other.

The electronic 'loom' sound, for example, which activates the changes of harmony/activity in the string parts, fits into the general sense of dreamlikeness only in the manner of one of those non-dream sounds which find their way into a dream but which finally wake you up, and which on waking you discover to have corresponded to some (possibly unpleasant or unwelcome) noise in the real world. In Stockhausen's piece, therefore, the experience is simultaneously one of something dreamlike imposed on the listener's consciousness, and at the same time of the unreality and alienation of this experience. It's arguably at least as much a critique of phantasmagoria as an exploitation of it.

Last night, the entire orchestra was seated behind the translucent screen I've described, the string players sitting in three horizontal rows like sentinels. (Again, the obviously missing dimension of individual subjective consciousness in many of the players' actions in this piece could be seen as a critique of that lack as much as a symptom of it.) At times this seemed futuristic/sci-fi, as if we were observing a musical ritual on another planet; at times the look of these strangely frozen/slow-motion figures reminded me more of soldiers moving around in a trench, with the eerie red light shrouding them like some kind of gas. This would of course relate to what is probably the least other-worldly element in the piece, the fanfare delivered by a trumpeter who climbs to a raised platform at the back of the stage: elements like this seem like memories of something all too real from our own world, and mediate strangely between our own historical consciousness and the weird, alien ritual of the rest of the piece.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else could see where the wind players and, more crucially, the conductor actually were, because I couldn't see them on stage at all. Presumably the string players don't need to see the conductor (taking their cues from the 'loom' noises), and he stands with the wind players somewhere so far back that you can't see him in the fog of red/purplish light?

In terms of the sound of the piece, which is rich and meaningful in every dimension in a way that I just can't hear in Harmonien, there is a passage of just a few bars in the middle of the piece - directly after the 'acted' cello solo, IIRC - which seems (along with some of, say, Inori) to have given Claude Vivier the harmonic, timbral and gestural vocabulary for his entire output, or at least his later works. I was aware of that before, but what struck me for the first time last night was how much of an influence Trans must have been on a number of other composers: someone else last night mentioned Andriessen, which is certainly possible, but I was particularly thinking of Birtwistle, who was already interested in other-worldly rituals before the early 70s but as far as I can think wasn't doing the kind of layering of material (what he refers to as Cantus vs. Continuum) before this point, and who I suspect may have been very struck by the layering of slow, static strings with more active wind in Trans.

The passage in question consists of low-lying unison [edit: rhythmic unison] wind melodies oscillating around a minor third, in sort of 'Scotch snap' rhythms, accompanied by (IIRC) a bass drum. Listen to that next to Lonely Child or Bouchara, and I think you'll hear what I mean.

[Just seen your edit - yes, that's it.]

Thanks for the wind info. How many of those groups of four players are there, then? I thought there were only about 12 or so wind players in total, but it was hard to tell.

What did you think of having two performances? I wondered whether I would be able to find the experience so intense when repeated on the same evening (something I hadn't realised was about to happen until I saw people waiting around for the second half after what I had taken to be the end of a rather short concert); in the event, I found it emphasised the sense of intransigent unreality about the piece, while lessening the impression of a powerfully temporalised dramatic experience (which in the end seemed to matter less than the iconic power of the individual events).

Should I go to Mantra at 5 o'clock, I wonder? I believe Ellen Corver is a wonderful performer of Stockhausen's music but I doubt it'll be my only chance to hear that piece live and I can't really afford to go to everything this week. I'm more tempted to go at 7.30 for Glanz, even though I've heard universally negative reports of the piece which precedes it this evening, Orchester-finalisten.

Oh, so not groups of four then.

I shall go to Orchester-finalisten. Let it not be said that I don't make my own mind up about pieces.

Sorry, I wasn't having a go! I think groups of four would be logical anyway.

When you're a week short of your 69th birthday and I'm a few days short of 49 I'll look forward to being picked up on my failure to remember the precise instrumentation of some Barrett classic.

It's a 10.15pm gig for goodness' sake. Is that not past the watershed?