Harald Vogel

Restored organ pipes up at St. Paul Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Arts & Entertainment.

1969

What would happen if John Lennon met Karlheinz Stockhausen on Feb.9, 1969? New music ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, portrayed the hypothetical meeting between the two luminaries (the two may have scheduled a meeting, but a snowstorm in NYC prevented Lennon from making it to Lukas Foss' apartment) through a musical and sound scape portrait of the seminal year in American political history. The work, 1969, is "conceived" by Alan Pierson and incorporates transcriptions for Alarm Will Sound's instrumental make-up by its resident members. It received its second performance at the New Hazlett Theatre in Pittsburgh tonight.

Both figures were portrayed breathtakingly well by John Walker (Lennon) and Christopher Evan Welch (K. Stockhausen). Walker captured many of Lennon's nuances in the work's opening vignette, "A Day in the Life". Luciano Berio and Leonard Bernstein were also represented, bridging the gap between Lennon's "left-field [sic?] rock and roll" and Stockhausen's "left-field avant garde." Extended musical excerpts from Bernstein's Mass and Berio's O King and Sinfonia filled out the musical tapestry of the work as a whole.

Ultimately, 1969 provides much of the political and historical context for the works composed and premiered in this year. Giving 1969 more social and political impact, the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. are heavily referenced in the work, as well as the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (Richard Nixon won the Presidential election). The work presented by Alarm Will Sound provides a great conduit into the larger works that 1969 references. It is rife with inside jokes between Lennon and Stockhausen - especially funny is their exchange about HOW tape music is created (potentiometers versus beer bottles).

At its artistic level, 1969 is a great achievement. It also comes off as a musical history lesson - not the stuffy edition found in many music history classes, but a lively, visually stimulating and narratively driven summary of the musical "revolutions" occurring at the end of the decade. These musical revolutions are crystallized in the coming together of (seemingly) disparate musical philosophies: Popular rock, avant garde composition, and traditional concert halls reshaping their own relationship with the past and future of concert music.

In the end, Stockhausen is portrayed as a loon (though his music is presented with utmost sincerity), Lennon as a feel-good dreamer, and Berio and Bernstein as the aesthetic middle men. The problem that each composer deals with in their own way is brought to the surface - how does music affect the outcome of humanity (not just the lives of the audience) and how does the creation of new music mean anything in a turbulent cultural time.