site-specific performance

Bang on a Can has just released its program for the 2008 marathon, taking place 31 May-1 June at the World Financial Center Winter Garden, and, according to Daniel J. Waken, it will culminate with Karlheinz Stockhausen's hourlong Stimmung, for microtonal voices, at dawn.   The ethical question of performing Stockhausen at Ground Zero is fraught, given his post-9/11 comments about the terrorist act and its relation to art, but so is art's relation to the real; and while I cannot separate the composer's comments from his music, I also wouldn't wish for a censoring silence--which would not only be of Stockhausen's work, but also the necessary conversation about it. 

When questioned about their choice in program, founding composer David Lang (who just won the Pulitzer) noted that BOAC will also be performing Steve Reich's Daniel Variations, dedicated to journalist Daniel Pearl, but also specified that choices were based on music, not politics:

Just by choosing the music that we love, without making this a foreground issue, we did end up choosing music that’s on both sides of this really complicated issue. ... Maybe that’s the way it should be — the messy parts of human experience should get covered.

Or uncovered, as the case may be.  At one of the first 9/11 commemoration concerts in NYC, BOAC performed Brian Eno's Music for Airports.  I don't know if the elegiacal nature of that programming (or the significance of the piece's title and history) was any more intentional than this more controversial one, but the performance offered a moment of quiet, and pained, contemplation.  Nearly seven years later, I hope even a piece as intentionally contemplative as Stimmung might offer a louder moment, noisy with the fact of Stockhausen's words and the possibility of what music might bring to the conversation.

[Photo by Joe Cavaretta, AP]