“At 19:07 the helicopters flew over the Pont Neuf”
The Elysian Quartet performed Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet in Paris, for the 2013 ‘Nuit Blanche’
There’s a string quartet.There’s a helicopter and a pilot for each of the four musicians. (That makes four helicopters and four pilots.) Together with their instrument the musicians board the helicopters. They start playing as soon as the rotor blades begin to turn. Once all are well up in the air, the string players get to hear a click-track through the headphones that they are wearing. They then continue to play their parts along to that click-track, which is used to synchronize their playing. While playing, they will only hear themselves, the click track and their helicopter. They can not hear the others playing. A video image of their performance inside the flying helicopter is transmitted to some location on earth, together with the sound of their instrumental play mixed with that of the helicopter’s rotor blades. Down there a mix is made of the transmitted signals. The mix is what the audience gets to hear. The video images of the flying musicians is what the audience gets to see.
This, in short, is the set up of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Helikopter-Streichquartett, written in the early 1990's. Musically it may be not among his most…
