This concert of the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage, and Luciano Berio was not for the faint-hearted, weak-stomached, weak-kneed, feeble-minded, frail-spirited, close-minded, or those with Attention Deficit Disorder, for this concert-goer had to be an empty vessel available to experience 20th Century music that still qualifies as Avant-Garde/Experimental/Music of the Future, and then leave perhaps not savoring the music but still ruminating about what had just happened. 

Upon entering the always breathtaking and inviting Disney Concert Hall, there was an odd green lighting. There were umbrellas sporadically but strategically hanging from the ceiling which were lit with green, and an odd green spotlight on the center of the stage pooling out and fading into the wood.  It gave a very odd sensation of being underwater. The words “Green Umbrella Series” were in the program and décor, and its color all made sense.  But the objects on stage were still up for conjecture.  An ash can, various household objects, lots of forms of papers –- newspapers and phone books…  Uh-oh.  Being clueless combined with contemporary music could be a very bad thing…or a very good thing.  For me, it was a very good thing. 

My only personal knowledge of Stockhausen came decades ago, when a husband of mine was preparing to play one of the Klavierstucke of Stockhausen for his audition for the Master’s Program at the Juilliard School.  This piece on his proposed program caused a bit of a contretemps between two of the jurists.  One jurist said if it were played he would leave, and the other jurist said if it weren’t played he would leave.  It was played and the pianist was awarded a Master’s degree several years later in spite of this.  All I knew was that I got to listen to him practice and, as I vaguely recall, the piece consisted of the same note being played repeatedly in a number of manners over a hundred times. I knew this evening would be different since the Stockhausen was entitled “Kontra-Punkte” and involved ten instruments.  Maybe I should have done the math.

As I sat waiting for the concert to begin, the immediate experience shifted from the visual to the olfactory.  There was an ethereal aroma of something familiar, yet it wasn’t Ben-Gay as would be expected, considering myself and the general audience.  Suddenly, I fondly identified it.  It was “drinks and dinner” before the show being carefully masked by breath mints or serious cough drops.  But nothing can conceal the fragrance of a gin martini and copious amounts of garlic topped off with Tums.  It lent a casual ambience to the approaching concert.

The lights dimmed, a single chair was brought to center stage, and a clown with a trombone and folded up music stand bumbled on stage.  I wonder how that looked to those who had those martinis…  To me, it looked like a kind of Harpo Marx being channeled in the form of an “opening act” from Vaudeville minus the harp.  Did I say “uh-oh”?

Of course, setting up required various exaggerated machinations that seemed to charm the audience.  It prompted me to refer to the program.  I knew it was “Sequenza V for Trombone” by Berio, but I needed to know why.  It was, as the program notes explained, because “Berio blurs the lines between performer and instrument.  He anthropomorphizes the trombone so that the player literally gives it voice by simultaneously vocalizing and blowing and producing a split personality, as if we were watching a ventriloquist’s routine.”  It worked.  I stopped judgmentally expecting the “expected” and went from moment to moment.  By the finish, both the trombonist and the trombone received applause that wasn’t just obligatory, but appreciative of such an oddly involving experience.

Cage was next with his “prepared” piano which I was prepared for.  I knew all about it but had never seen it in a live performance.  It was placed in the center of the stage and looked like the usual concert grand…but it wasn’t and I knew it.  It had been created out of necessity by Cage in the ’40s when he was working as a dance accompanist in Seattle and was asked to create a score for solo dance based on an African theme.  Good idea, but no space for percussion, so Cage invented his own by using only a piano and a variety of objects strategically placed in the piano to create the sounds he desired.  It worked!  Bolts, screws, rubber, and plastic are inserted to alter the strings that produce 45 of 88 notes with only a few of them in the bass.

“Sonatas and Interludes” (excerpts) was an unending treat of surprises.  Not discordant as one might imagine, but a thesaurus of sounds.  Based on the Hindu aesthetic theory about “inducing emotions in an audience, centered on a scheme of eight emotional states,” I don’t know if I achieved any of that, or even came close to Nirvana for that matter, but I had a good time with what was being performed.  One piece in particular provided such complicated rhythms played in the middle of the keyboard that it actually percolated like the old Folger’s coffee ad and sounded nothing like a piano but rather like a marimba.  Another was in the upper range of the keyboard and was so ethereal that the audience was visibly transported to a private place of their own; I was transported to Prokofiev’s piano music Vision Fugitive, which I hadn’t thought about in years.  I was starting to feel not so clueless, but just to feel.  I was ready for Stockhausen and whatever “Kontra-Punkte” had to offer. 

I knew that “Kontra-Punkte” (1953) starts with very small bits played by each of the ten instruments. Gradually, these little bits come together and, at the end, the music concentrates on the piano.  I wasn’t ready for each instrumentalist to individually drift intermittently off the stage after participating.  Not ever having seen the score, I let my imagination make up all sorts of possibilities of who would leave the stage next and why.  Perhaps it was random and the conductor would give a hidden signal to the next one to leave.  Maybe they chose numbers back stage.  Maybe, just maybe, it was planned!  Each musician contributed to a part of the whole, with the exit of each player creating a kind of erosion of this whole.  When it was eventually just the piano and the conductor and the two of them creating the last “counter-point,” there was a sort of melancholy in this final experience.  Perhaps it’s this sort of communion that has had Stockhausen’s music not only listened to by fans of classical music, but contributed to it also becoming part of popular youth culture. His picture was included on the front cover of The Beatles’ record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the record company Deutsche Grammophon sold more copies of his music than of any other modern composer, except Stravinsky. 

Ligeti’s “Aventures and Nouvelle Aventures” were last on the program.  All the “found” objects on the stage had to be in this, and the program also listed a soprano, mezzo-soprano, and baritone; this had to be some sort of a mini-opera.  It was.  I remembered to breathe deeply and be an “empty vessel.”

This was a Mini-opera of the Absurd in the same manner as the Theatre of the Absurd.  There was a made-up language, there were raw emotions abstractly presented in a kaleidoscope of methods that, for me, all seemed to begin with “G,” although that wasn’t the key the piece was written in.  There were growls, grunts, guffaws, giggles, grimaces, gesticulations, groans, gratings, and grindings ad infinitum that all created a story that we each were allowed to discern privately.

That was the sense of the whole evening.  For a public event, it was very private.  I didn’t walk away humming; instead, I walked away being haunted by the events of the concert.  When these composers were writing, did they hear what I just heard?  We all listened intently in the concert, but I wonder what we all heard. I’m still ruminating.