Performing Arts

It was the 1960s again for an hour Sunday night.

Six robe-clad figures sat on a circle of pillows in a dim crypt, swaying and chanting arcane sounds. Occasionally the name of a deity – Osiris, Artemis, Wotan – would surface from the oohs and aahs, wah-wahs and luh-luhs. Strands of erotic German poetry wafted on rising and falling slides of pitch.

We lacked only fumes of patchouli and pot smoke.

This was, however, a legal affair: a concert presented by Dallas' modern-music group Voices of Change, at the Undermain Theatre in Deep Ellum. And the sound effects, all produced by amplified live singers, were artifacts of a work called Stimmung, by the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

In a performance organized by University of North Texas composition professor Joseph Klein, the singers were sopranos Heidi Dietrich Klein and Tracey Deen, alto Katrina Burggraf-Kledas, tenors Kevin Sutton and Ryan Lungwitz, and bass Tim Johnson. Dr. Klein gave a fast-talking introduction to the work and managed the amplification.

Stockhausen, who died last December at age 79, was one of the agents provocateurs of post-World War II music. Stimmung, composed in 1968, was something of a signpost of the avant-garde.

The vocal sounds are, you might say, life imitating art, or at least the artifice of electronic music, in which Stockhausen was a pioneer. But the piece is also an example of aleatory music: the performers are given 51 musical gestures, plus the "magic names" (as Stockhausen called them) and poetry, to combine as the spirit moves.

Either hypnotic or maddening, depending on your mindset, the piece lasted one hour. (Other performances have run closer to 70 minutes.) Although it's supposed to remain rooted in the note B-flat and its overtones, understandably it did drift here and there.

Personally, I was glad to experience a work more often cited in music-history books than actually performed. But for this listener, its hour-long duration occasioned every stage of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As Voltaire reportedly said of a late-in-life trip to a house of ill-repute, "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert."