Le Balcon

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Inori, Adoration for one or two soloists and orchestra (1976-77)

"With Inori, Stockhausen takes up all these threads and weaves them together in a continuous sequence of spellbinding beauty. On his way to Osaka for Expo 1970, he made a ten-day stopover in Australia. There, he met young dancer Philippa Cullen, who had already been experimenting with local ensembles in workshops combining music and movement, where each medium adopted the form of the other. She had commissioned a theremin-like biofeedback device, enabling dancers to produce sounds directly from their body movements: a new conceptual leap, this time from the world of ballet, and an autonomous example of “musical space travel”. Stockhausen was impressed and invited him to Germany in 1973, when a commission came in from a Japanese bank: “to make a contribution to Japanese culture of lasting value to posterity”. Cullen showed the composer gestures of prayer from various cultures around the world, and the form of Inori - the Japanese word for worship - began to take shape." 

Peter Quantrill