June 07 # The Sound of Obession: Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo par The Lost Orchestras + “Stimmung” de Stockhausen (under the direction of Will Eizlini)# Sala Rossa

BERNARD HERMANN’S VERTIGO BY THE LOST ORCHESTRAS

With Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Psycho, Taxi Driver) were at the height of their collaborative and creative powers. Herrmann’s masterpiece filmscore, with its obsessive ostinatos, Wagnerian motifs of idealized love, frightening tritones, misleading resolutions and nauseating dissonance takes us deep into the psyche of passion and delusion in a way that only he could.  Performing Vertigo will be The Lost Orchestras, a 21-piece Montreal all-star mini-orchestra (featuring members of GYBE!, Arcade Fire, Land of Kush, Bell Orchestre, The Besnard Lakes…) made of strings, woodwinds, brass, wurlitzer, guitar and drumset.

The Lost Orchestras is led by William Hesselink who transcribed and orchestrated the score.

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STIMMUNG BY STOCKHAUSEN under the direction of Will Eizlini

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung for 6 voices (no. 24 1/2)
first performed by the Collegium Vocale Köln in 1969.

        Stimmung (pronounced /Shtee’ moong/) in German means “mood” or “tuning”; also “atmosphere” or “vibe”. It is a vocal piece for 6 voices in  using an overtone singing technique based on vowels, and most of this piece is explores variations of a B-flat 7 chord in “just intonation”.

        Stimmung is like a 1960s modern exploration of incantation, drones, vocal intonation and timbre, It’s almost as though Stockhausen at the time (1968) was feeling the pulse of the ritualistic neo-pagan late 60s and pulling that into the classical world. He incorporates names of gods from polytheistic pantheons of the world and poems that he wrote to his wife in the summer of love (1967).
        Stimmung is a reflection on humans tuning into nature, globalization of culture, and the sexual revolution.  It is at times, serious, rarified, but also playful and un-apologetically erotic, filled with the composer’s cleverness and wit in exploring these themes.
        Stockhausen says about the compositional process:
        “What was important for the creation of Stimmung was the fact that I’d just come back from Mexico where I’d spent a month walking through the ruins, visiting Oaxaca, Merida, and Chichenitza, and becoming a Maya, a Toltec, a Zatopec, an Aztec, or a Spaniard- I became the people. The magic names of the Aztec gods are spoken in Stimmung…And then the space. I sat for hours on the same stone, watching the proportions of certain Mayan temples with their three wings, watching how they were slightly out of phase. I relived ceremonies, which were sometimes very cruel. The religious cruelty isn’t in Stimmung, only the sounds, the whole general feeling of the Mexican plains with their edifices going into the sky- the quietness, on the one side and the sudden changes on the other”