Stockhausen’s Adventures in Space and Time at the Armory

An elliptical halo of thin, concentrated light floated in the capacious drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory on a recent morning, above a circular space designed to dissolve your sense of space and time.

At the center was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his electronic music at a console. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, sat nearby, visibly delighted by the scene around him. To his right and left, idiosyncratically shaped video screens faced each other across a round expanse dotted with lights that moved and changed color as Urs Schönebaum, the designer, spoke into a headset while riding a scooter.

After a brief pause, Schönebaum cued various elements: Out of darkness and silence emerged eerie sounds that traveled freely through the space from unseen speakers; the videos throbbed with the music, their brightness, with the changing lights, creating an illusion of a void beyond the circle. It became difficult to track the passing minutes. The pleasant spring morning outside might as well have been another world.

Such is the effect of “Inside Light,” the Armory’s theatrical presentation of electronic music from “Licht,” or “Light,” Stockhausen’s monumental, impractical cycle of seven operas written from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Defying simple explanation and traditional form, these works, by turns comical and mystically sublime, deal with cosmic clashes of good and evil, with intimate dramas and global politics, with the nature of music itself.

At the Armory, listeners will hear five electronic pieces that make up just a sliver of the 29-hour cycle, but even that will be substantial. They will be performed over two nights, beginning on Wednesday, or as single-day marathons for those who want to get lost in the sounds of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 and influenced the likes of Kraftwerk and Björk.