Musical – artistic – modernism is a godless pursuit. Or so the maxim runs – especially among those discomfited by dissonance, while modern composers of religious music such as John Tavener and Sir James MacMillan have recovered the tenets of tonality and consonance that were challenged and overthrown in the early years of the last century.
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht says otherwise. It says a flamboyant "no" to those musical conventions and many others besides, but it also says an exultant “yes” to the praise of God in music, like a cosmic setting of Psalm 150. Composed over 25 years and completed in 2003, Licht (Light) is a cycle of seven works that we might as well call operas, one for each day of the week; though orchestras and plots and much else in the way of operatic furniture are jettisoned in the slipstream of its creator’s imagination.
