Alan Pierson, 1969
The Beatles and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen once arranged to meet in New York City to plan a joint concert. No such performance would ever take place. But its tantalizing promise is the departure point for 1969. Told through their own words, music, and images, 1969 is the story of great musicians—John Lennon, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Paul McCartney, Luciano Berio, Yoko Ono, and Leonard Bernstein—striving for a new music and a new world amidst the turmoil of the late 1960s.
Highlights
Each of the musical works presented in 1969 is intriguing and adventurous, and each aspired to push music in a new direction. And that's much of what 1969 is about: the aspirations, victories, and defeats of these fascinating artists at the close of the 1960s. In 1969, these composers’ works and words are used—like Berio did in Sinfonia—as material for creating something new, to tell the story of a remarkable moment in history. |
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From the Creator
While brainstorming an idea for a concert of music composed in 1969, I stumbled on a fascinating anecdote about a meeting set up to plan a joint concert between Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Beatles. The notion that the period's most famous rock group would come together with one of its most influential avant-garde composers was compelling. But there was little information to be found about the meeting. I contacted Stockhausen's assistant to see if I could ask the composer himself a few questions, but she wanted me to do my homework and emailed me a list of books I needed to read before talking directly with Stockhausen. He died before I finished them.
The more I learned about 1969, the more the Stockhausen-Beatles meeting seemed to resonate with the ideas and spirit of the time. The fact that it hadn’t happened made it only more tantalizing. And as I learned more about the connection between Stockhausen and The Beatles, other central musicians from the period became part of the expanding story: Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Berio, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono. All of these artists were grappling with what it meant to be an artist in the world in a challenging political moment, just as I and my colleagues were doing. And although the meeting between Stockhausen and The Beatles never happened, the work that these artists had done to reach across and break through traditional divisions of genre had clearly shaped the rich musical world that I occupied in the 21st century.
So this felt like an important story to tell. To tell it, I envisioned a unique multimedia piece that would juxtapose the artists' own words with fragments of music, images, and film from the period. This format was inspired by the music that these composers were writing: collage was current in 1969, and most of the pieces at the center of our story—Stockhausen’s Hymnen, Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music, Bernstein’s Mass, Berio’s Sinfonia, and The Beatles’s Revolution 9—all shocked their initial listeners by juxtaposing bits of disparate material in wholly original sorts of collages. Andrew Kupfer, Nigel Maister, and I worked over several years to turn these fragments into a coherent narrative. These texts came from many sources: letters, interviews, diaries, and phone conversations. Some had never been published. We stuck closely to the composers' own words: with the exception of two scenes that bookend the show, all of the lines were based on things they wrote or said. However, the juxtaposition of those lines into dialogue was our own invention, and many lines were rephrased in order to turn something that was, say, jotted down on a page of notes into a text that would make sense spoken on stage.
The more I learned about 1969, the more the Stockhausen-Beatles meeting seemed to resonate with the ideas and spirit of the time. The fact that it hadn’t happened made it only more tantalizing. And as I learned more about the connection between Stockhausen and The Beatles, other central musicians from the period became part of the expanding story: Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Berio, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono. All of these artists were grappling with what it meant to be an artist in the world in a challenging political moment, just as I and my colleagues were doing. And although the meeting between Stockhausen and The Beatles never happened, the work that these artists had done to reach across and break through traditional divisions of genre had clearly shaped the rich musical world that I occupied in the 21st century.
So this felt like an important story to tell. To tell it, I envisioned a unique multimedia piece that would juxtapose the artists' own words with fragments of music, images, and film from the period. This format was inspired by the music that these composers were writing: collage was current in 1969, and most of the pieces at the center of our story—Stockhausen’s Hymnen, Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music, Bernstein’s Mass, Berio’s Sinfonia, and The Beatles’s Revolution 9—all shocked their initial listeners by juxtaposing bits of disparate material in wholly original sorts of collages. Andrew Kupfer, Nigel Maister, and I worked over several years to turn these fragments into a coherent narrative. These texts came from many sources: letters, interviews, diaries, and phone conversations. Some had never been published. We stuck closely to the composers' own words: with the exception of two scenes that bookend the show, all of the lines were based on things they wrote or said. However, the juxtaposition of those lines into dialogue was our own invention, and many lines were rephrased in order to turn something that was, say, jotted down on a page of notes into a text that would make sense spoken on stage.