On today’s date in 1995, the four members of the Arditti String Quartet entered four helicopters warming up their engines at an airfield in Holland. Followed by video cameras, each player’s image and audio was relayed to huge video displays and loudspeakers on the ground for the mid-air premiere of a work titled — what else — Helicopter Quartet by avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Guided by click tracks, the Arditti Quartet coordinated their performance, which was mixed on the ground by the composer for an audience gathered in a concert auditorium during the 1995 Holland Festival.
This music, like all the music Stockhausen wrote in the last years of his life, fit into his cycle of seven operas, collectively titled Light. Like Wagner’s Ring operas from the 19th century, Stockhausen’s operas attempted to synthesize world mythology into a visionary program for world salvation.
Speaking of Wagner and helicopters automatically calls to mind the scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now, in which helicopters blare Wagner’s Ride of Valkyries from loudspeakers as they attack.
By a bizarre coincidence, Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre, also had its premiere performance on June 26, 1870!
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Helicoptor Quartet; Arditti Quartet; Discques Montaigne Arditti Edition CD-35