I’ll take the boom-smash: Stimmung and Cosmic Pulses at the Barbican
Stimmung and Cosmic Pulses
Singcircle
Barbican Hall
Stalls Q59, £30
20 November 2017
Barbican page
I believe Richard and Matthew when they politely tried not to tell me that I had missed the point with Stockhausen’s Stimmung. Somehow, I had never seen this icon of 20th-century music, nor even listened to it. On this late first exposure, it was easy to see why it’s so admired. First off is the sensation of throat singing, of hearing voices explore the harmonic series in eerie, whistling sounds that seem like they can’t be acoustic. This is a high starting point of the work’s exploration of the variety of voice: of the continuity between speech and singing; of words divorced from meaning as they are exploded into their component consonants and vowels and slowly reassembled; of the innate rhythm of diphthongs and consonants pairs.
And yet my appreciation was cold. I attribute this to my inability to shift the value criteria drilled into me by years’ exposure to the English choral tradition. The singers of Singcircle are obviously very talented musicians (I mean, throat singing) but they’re not very good at starting at the same time or of knowing what note they want to sing before they sing it or of staying in pitch once they’ve started, whether or not they are required to by the music. This lack of precision interferes with the action of the music and distracted me from more than grudgingly acknowledging the many areas in which Singcircle is obviously superb. Richard and Matthew quietly deplored by fussiness, and they were probably right to do so.
No such problems with Stockhausen’s recorded-only Cosmic Pulses, which is just great. The Barbican had put on an accompanying laser show designed by Robert Henke, which is fine though at odds with my experience of the music (a piano-cum-symphony orchestra in extended and angry underwater destruction – for which the cutely dancing colourful hula hoops were no match). But even I can’t complain about lasers, especially as with eyes closed they allowed a please and more commensurate psychic display of colours on the backs of my eyelids.
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