Anyone expecting music like Gustav Holst’s The Planets or John Williams’ Star Wars was wrong. Rather, this strange music points ahead to the electronic “Cosmic Pulses”, which Karlheinz Stockhausen composed in 2006 two years before his death from 24 superimposed layers of time and melody.
Charles Ives sketched his “Universe Symphony” between 1915 and 1928. But the New York composer and successful insurance salesman left the work unfinished until his death in 1954. In the final concert of Eight Bridges, a version arranged by composer and bassoonist Johnny Reinhard in 1996 received its European premiere.
Dull, brooding chords conducted by Tung-Chieh Chuang
The Bochum Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of their new chief conductor, Tung-Chieh Chuang, begins with dull, brooding chords that reveal no harmonic direction or melodic shape whatsoever. In the next moment, however, this “primordial soup” dries up. Instead, calm beats of bass drum, cymbal and gong sound. A total of twelve drummers are gradually added, each with their own layers of duration, color and rhythm.
All pulsations combine into one continuous ticking, as if hearing the great celestial mechanics of the planets, suns and galaxies going through their respective orbits. In front of the percussionists, the orchestra is initially sentenced to silence for almost twenty minutes. But what does this period of time mean in view of the approximately 14 billion year old universe?
The celestial mechanics become audible
Ives’ reconstructed work cannot be measured by earthly standards. The orchestral means have just as little to do with common symphonic music. What the twelve percussionists fan out over time is finally realized by the orchestra in the tonal space, with all the instruments playing different pitches and superimposed in dense clusters, as if myriads of stars formed the Milky Way. In this way everything appears as part of a larger whole.
While the cosmic flow and circling drives on sometimes closer, sometimes more subliminally, individual groups of instruments also emerge with more distinctive characters, for whose overall coordination the use of Magdalena Klein as second conductor is required at times.
Organ, electric guitar and eight flutes
In addition to organ and piano, there is also an electric guitar, which, however, remains almost inaudible and which Ives certainly could not have thought of in 1928. Also unusual are the eight flutes, which are placed at the very front left of the stage, where the first violins usually sit.
With Ives and Reinhard, the antique harmonies of the spheres do not follow the Pythagorean overtone series with pure octaves, fifths, fourths, thirds, but rather completely different proportions. Precisely in this musical difference lies the allegory of the work, which is as enigmatic as it is immediately understandable: Earthly concepts of space and time appear as chaos, which in reality is a highly complex set of wheels and rules that holds the world together at its core.
We humans just lack the right measure to be able to measure the origin and functioning of the universe. The concert should have already taken place at Eight Bridges 2020 with the motto “Cosmos”. It’s a good thing that the now enthusiastically applauded performance of “Music Amnesia Memory” was not forgotten.
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