“Stimmung” (1968) is one of the most notable and fundamental works from Stockhausen, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Conceived for six solo voices, the work is now displaced in a response to its radicalism and its sense of religion to one of the temples of our contemporaneity, a nightclub (Lux Frágil), in the context of BoCA.

Answering a request for the Collegium Vocale of the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne, Stockhausen was inspired to create “Stimmung” by his then recent trip to Mexico. Throughout the course of a month, his interest and successive exploration of mayan and aztec ruins, as well as the rituals (“some of them very cruel”) which took place there, led him to imagine himself as being part of those folk, attending their ceremonies: “having become a mayan, a toltecan, a zapotecan or an aztecan – I have become a part of the people”.

As he returned, while settling with his family in Long Island, he would pass on to music his relationship with the temples’ architecture – arising in ascension to heaven and with faces inducing quietness or sudden changes. The work is based in harmonic series and is composed of 51 sections, with the evocation of “Magic Names” (of gods) and the reading of poems that define the meditative aspect and symbolism of the art piece.