Stockhausen’s Klang Reviewed

Source: The New York Times.

Religion as art, art as religion: This is the dual ethos of the modern encyclopedic museum, preserving objects of devotion in a secular age. It could also be the motto of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the creator of grandiose spectacles of sublimity and kitsch, whose works fed his deeply idiosyncratic spiritual practice and vice versa.

So it was a perfect match of music and place on Saturday morning at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval outpost in Upper Manhattan, when the sound of the organ in Stockhausen’s “Himmelfahrt” (“Ascension”) filled an airy 12th-century chapel, punctuating periods of velvety richness with gusts of discordance and cleansing pings of a bell.