I have a funny story from this weekend's performances of Originale. After one of the shows, a young woman came over to the sound desk and asked, "What synthesizers were used in that tape?" My first reaction was to impishly cite a manifest of realistic-sounding, but entirely fake synthesizers.
Instead, I showed her the score and explained how Stockhausen had to work in the early days. Her eyes grew bigger and bigger as I prattled on. She was a music technology student at NYU, and to her teacher's credit, she had been assigned a tape project early on, which allowed her to recognize just how Herculean Stockhausen's efforts were.
There were a few Stockhausen devotees at the shows, but most of our audience was drawn from the art world. One of the Stockhausenites came up to me afterward and said that he "lives to hear certain moments in Kontakte", and he bemoaned the fact that he missed the 17'05" climax, to which I was sympathetic. On Friday, he would have heard it, but our Saturday night show got very raucous. In the sound booth, we were very busy putting out fires around the theater as everyone seemed to really warm to Stockhausen's free concept!
We were very fortunate to be able to do the entire, correct sound projection scheme for Kontakte. Everyone is always so skeptical of having to place all those mics, and the Kitchen is a small enough venue that there was no need to amplify the piano and some percussion instruments when it was empty. It's so small that the performers were hearing the main channels more than their monitors during rehearsals. But of course, once the space filled in with people, and the other performers started their work, all the microphones and monitors became indispensable!
Here, you can see the Action Musician (Rachel Mason) performing directly in front of the sound desk and Stuart Gerber performing onscreen in his version of the red leotard costume. The eagle-eyed will also see my solution to Robert Earl Brown's stinkbomb! :)