Last Sunday afternoon(10th May) the new Intuitive Music ensemble “Mars in Aquarius” made its debut performance in the Cosmos Centre, St Andrews, Fife in a programme of compositions by Stockhausen: several Intuitive Music pieces from “Aus den Sieben Tage” and ” Fur Kommende Zeiten” (Meeting Point, Unanimity, Halt and It) and another complete performance of Tierkreis, this time starting in Taurus as part of my yearlong project marking the 40th anniversary of this work. 2 other founder members of Mars in Aquarius joined me in the Intuitive Music: Haworth Hodgkinson on percussion,recorders and melodica; Mandy Macdonald -voice,recorders and Yamaha keyboard; I played melodica, Stylophone S1, Korg Monotron delay, and in “It” shortwave radio (in fact, SW reception was so poor that I also used other frequencies, as suggested in the explanatory text for Stockhausen’s “Spiral”). Tierkreis was in our now established antiphonal mode, alternating between Casio keyboards and Haworth’s improvised interludes on gongs. The whole event proceeded through set-up to performance with incredible smoothness: the enthusiastic and sustained applause from the attentive audience was an unambiguous vote of confidence and affirmation of what we are doing. We keenly anticipate our next scheduled performance in Aberdeen’ s Episcopal Cathedral at midday on 20th June.
Mark Spalding musicblog 