Surrounded By Sound: Oktophonie At The Park Avenue Armory

Photo Stephanie Berger

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the late composer of electronic music, was celebrated in New York in March, when his composition Oktophonie made its New York premier at the Park Avenue Armory. Known for his extensive experiments with spatial music, Stockhausen worked to redefine the listening experience.

Oktophonie, a part of the composer’s larger opera Licht, is to be performed for an audience surrounded by eight groups of speakers so they are enveloped in the sonic environment. The piece has also been performed many times as a standalone in concert halls around the world but never in a venue as large as the Armory. The New York production was performed by Kathinka Pasveer, a longtime collaborator with Stockhausen, and Igor Kavulek, who was Stockhausen’s personal sound technician since 1998.

Photo Stephanie Berger

The audience was seated on a large white disk—a 220' diameter circular platform in the center of the Armory’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of the surface of the moon and to evoke the composer’s desire that listeners feel as if they are in outer space.

Visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija was commissioned to create this lunar-like seating unit that positioned listeners in the center of the octophonic presentation. Audiences were asked to don white robes and sit on the surface of the white disk with ground-level seat backs arranged in a circular manner around the audio console. Pasveer and Kavulek operated the console, and, as the musical journey progressed, the audience sat in mostly darkness with only hints of lights coming up to low levels and fading out during the 68-minute performance, finally building to a blinding white light at the end of the piece. Lighting designer Brian H Scott provided the ethereal illumination to match the aural experience for the 350 members of the audience at each performance.

Staging this production in the Thompson Drill Hall provided a layout very similar to what Stockhausen had originally intended, with the audience in the middle of the soundscape. “This piece has to be performed in halls with a flat floor,” explains Pasveer. “That is a must. Stockhausen has been performed in theatres or concert halls, never in a hall so large as this one. This was wonderful.” The arrangement of the speakers is the key to providing the true octophonic surround sound, notes Pasveer. “We created a square with four groups of loudspeakers at ear level and the same square of speakers at the ceiling about 16 meters [52.5'] higher. The upper speakers were directly over the lower square of speakers, so the listener sat in a cube filled with sound. That is the invention of Stockhausen to make vertical and diagonal movements possible. Normal eight-track is only surround, but this is really making vertical movements possible for the first time.”

Okto Sound

Kavulek specified Meyer Sound speakers—a total of 32 MSL-4s and 24 600-HP subwoofers—with four MSL speakers and three subs at each of the eight positions. “For this piece and for this hall, we needed loudspeakers that are very directional so that the sounds, which are projected, sound very natural without being changed too much in color by reflections,” says Kavulek. “For such a piece, all the loudspeakers must be of the same model. Otherwise, the color changes.” The audio supplier was Production Resource Group (PRG), who also provided the DiGiCo SD8 console that controlled the audio and was placed on the seating/stage platform.

Photo Stephanie Berger

Pasveer has worked with various DiGiCo consoles over the last several years on previous performances around the globe. “Igor always specifies DiGiCo consoles and Meyer loudspeakers on our technical rider because they sound fantastic together and translate the music the way the composer wanted it to be heard,” notes Pasveer. “Oktophonie encompasses 64 channels that were mixed down to eight tracks, which were totally spatialized and played back from a laptop into the console. This very simple but sophisticated sound system gave us huge sound but was not too loud. The sound was so beautiful in the Armory. I think everyone was impressed by the sound quality.”

Kavulek and Pasveer spent several days tuning the speakers and the room for the performance. “First Igor came to the hall a few months before the performance to see it, make the measurements, and make the technical rider,” Pasveer comments. “Then we had three days here for setup, and then I had two days of testing and adjusting the sound to the hall. We did a lot of fine adjustments, fine tuning of the whole system over those two days. Igor works with [Meyer’s] Galileo, and he does a lot of individual filtering of all the loudspeakers with special test material, so every loudspeaker is precisely tuned, and they are all in sync.”

The audio team made only minor adjustments throughout the piece to control the precise playback as the composer intended. “I know where there are some peaks, so in this environment, I take them down a little bit,” explains Pasveer. “The most important thing is to have balance between the lower square of loudspeakers and the upper square, because to make the sounds coming from the ceiling audible, there is a big difference from the lower speakers to the upper ones; there has to be. So I have to keep the distance between the lower and the upper square, and then sometimes, when I think it is too much stress on the ears, when sounds move on the lower square, I lower it a little bit. It is very subtle.”

Phil Hampton, technical director for the Armory, helped to coordinate the suppliers for this sold-out NY premiere of Oktophonie. “The biggest challenge was getting the correct speaker in the correct quantities,” he says. “We worked with PRG, and they helped us pull this all together.” Showman Fabricators built the platform for the production. It was the first time Hampton had worked with the scenic shop. “It all went smoothly, and they rolled with the punches. This has been a terrific team all around on this show to work with; Rirkrit is so open to ideas about working in this space. Brian Scott, the LD is great as well; he’s very aware of the space. The Stockhausen folks—Igor and Kathinka—have been so excited about working in the space, which we take pride in here at the Armory. We work hard to take care of the artists that come in here.”

Okto Sights

Scott was brought onto the team only a month prior to the performances and had to hit the ground running in order to find a lighting solution that would give the seating platform the appearance of floating in the middle of the hall. “Having been brought in later in the process after the platform was done didn’t allow for the kind of conversation that would say, ‘If you build it this way, we can put this in there,’” explains Scott. “We ended up choosing the [Philips Color Kinetics] iColor Cove, partially because of size.” In conversations with artist Tiravanija about his concept of solar eclipses for the seating platform, Scott originally wanted to go with a tungsten-source under the platform, for the quality of light, and the ability to control the beam but selected the LED option for fit.

PRG also provided the lighting package and worked closely with Scott and his team, including associate designer Zak Al-Alami, production electrician Patrick Dugan, assistant production electrician Sean Linehan, and programmer Christine Cause. “PRG sent us some different units to test, and we went out to Showman Fabricators and spent one morning just looking at options, then we selected the one that fit, and PRG found a whole lot more of them,” says Scott.

Photo Stephanie Berger

The lighting package also included 23 5kW Arri Junior Fresnels, 12 Arri Junior 2kWs, ETC Source Four PARs and PARnels, along with 36° and 50° Source Four ellipsoidals. Scott selected the ETC Ion console for control, which was intentionally not linked to the audio console, took no triggers from the audio, and was not run with timecode. The team was going for a more organic feeling with the performance. “It’s all an hour and eight minutes of follow cues,” Scott explains. “It starts together, but then allows for the drift, which will happen. It’s slightly different every time; the intention is not to line up, and yet they always seem to find a way to completely line up with what Kathinka’s doing.”

Almost an hour of the performance takes place in the dark with subtle lighting cues around the hall until the light builds to full over the last 11 minutes of the performance. The hints of light that Scott introduces out of his darkness highlight the lighting truss, the hall’s wooden roof trusses, and the audience and seating platform. “It was about darkness,” he says. “When you listen, there are points that kind of pull out a memory or image or color, or somebody opened a door and suddenly you see this new light kind of through the toning of the blood vessels in your eyelids; there’s this beautiful warm thing that happens, and then it goes away. A lot of what I was trying to do is provide an opportunity to make those little synaptic leaps, and then they would just disappear.”

Scott notes that the best way to make the fixtures disappear was to put a circle of truss over the seating disk, “kind of a mirror image of the platform,” he says. “It was mostly about designing the bright part for the finale first—the build from absolute darkness to this big, beautiful warm light that reflects off the disk and lights up that whole room.” Scott finds the room inspiring itself, as he adds, “I love working in the Armory; it’s a room unlike any other in the city. The scale in the room is spectacular. It is 220' around the disk and still it feels like it is only 15' around when placed in that room. I think that is the kind of genius that Rirkrit brought into it; he found a size that is both big and small. When you walk into the room, you can’t wait to step onto the disk. It’s very inviting and has the beauty of the room around it.”

Pasveer was pleased to have so many performances at the Armory. “Live performances seldom took place in the US when Stockhausen was alive, and it is a pity because he was an amazing person, but now it seems that the time is right for people to listen to this music,” he says. “We are very grateful that the Armory made it possible. A lot of people had been waiting for this chance for so long. There is a big audience for Stockhausen’s music in the US, and that is wonderful.”

Michael S. Eddy is a freelance writer covering design and technology. He owns Eddy Marketing & Consulting and has 25 years experience in the entertainment technology industry. Email him at [email protected].