It could be a séance. And, in some ways, it is — for we are about to summon up the groovy ghosts of the Sixties. Three men and three women silently enter and seat themselves round a table with a lamp in the middle. They bow solemnly to each other, as if commencing a ritual, and start to sing: a single note which, after a few minutes, mushrooms into a major triad, then a seventh, a ninth and onwards.
Underpinned by an electronic drone, the singers’ vowels constantly change. So do the gently pulsing chants. And from time to time someone recites German poetry, or laughs in a neurotic sort of way, or incants the days of the week like a mantra, or exclaims strange but exciting words such as “Hee-oose!” or “Singbonga!”.
But 75 minutes later, they are still on the same chord — B flat major extended upwards through 24 overtones. As the hippie guru Timothy Leary advised 40 years ago, the only appropriate response is to “turn on, tune in and drop out”. Or perhaps drop off.
This is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1968 classic Stimmung. It isn’t often done. That’s partly because there are only a finite number of people around with the time or inclination to sit through a B flat chord lasting 75 minutes. But it’s also because there are even fewer with the vocal skills to sustain this avant-garde tour de force and to sing accurately the microtonal differences at the upper end of the harmonic series.
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All credit, then, to Paul Hillier’s Denmark-based Theatre of Voices — first for producing a mesmerising performance, and secondly for touring it around Britain. Hillier himself sang the work in the Seventies, and that experience was evident here in both the pacing of the piece and the poise of the performers.
The influence of Stimmung and its elongated chord has not been wholly beneficial on young composers. It inspired a school of fatally introspective composition called “spectral music” that has produced nothing except incomprehension in the general public. But Stimmung itself is beautiful and mysterious: a group therapy, a love-in, and a pioneering exploration of the interplay between vocal cords and vocal chords. Far out, man — as we used to murmur in those far-off days.