sothismedias

Silent! Listen! A complete audio course of ambient initiation in just under seven hours of music is now available for adventurous listeners. Listen! Silent!

This is a mix of the more ambient and electronic aspects of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s cycle of seven operas, LICHT. LICHT is, among many other things, a practical application of the principles of the Glass Bead Game. Herman Hesse was one of the great influences on the thinking and spirituality of Stockhausen, and he used the Glass Bead Game as a reference point for many of his compositions. As such, LICHT, being in many ways, a modular opera (with the scenes being able to broken down into stand alone compositions, or recombined in various ways to produce other settings for the music) it makes sense also that the individual parts of various versions from the whole opera can be mixed or played in a recombinative manner. The entire cycle lasts twenty nine hours and their are many different arrangements, so this is only one possibility among a multitude!

Listening to this mix of excerpts in one sitting is designed to produce an illuminating effect. Each of the days of the week is represented in turn, thus it is also a journey through the seven planets of classical astrology. This mix of LICHT selections goes from Sunday through Saturday, beginning with Sunday’s Farewell for Five Synthesizers and ending with Kathinka’s Gesang for Flote and Musick Electronische.

The complete track list is as follows:
Sonntags Abschied for Five Synthesizers
Montags Gruss
Oktophonie (Electronic Layer from 2nd Scene of Dienstag aus LICHT)
Mittwochs Gruss
Mittwochs Abschied
Donnerstags Abschied (for Five Trumpets)
Freitags Gruss & Freitags Abschied (WELTRAUM)
Kathinka's Gesang for Flote and Musick Electronische

Kathinka’s Gesang (also known as Lucifer’s Requiem) is a fitting end for the cycle and for the initiation as it is a series of musical exercises designed to help the soul reach the eternal light after departure in death. Stockhausen wrote this piece to be played for the departed for a consecutive 49 days after death.

“But being quiet and meditating on sound is something completely different and will be discovered very soon by a lot of people who feel that the visual world doesn’t reach their soul anymore.” -Stockhausen

“We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.”-Stockhausen